The never-ending appeal of Tetris

I can remember exactly where I was when I first fell in love with Tetris. It was the student bar of Oriel College, Oxford, in the very early 1990s. I’d gone to visit my friend Ed, and we bunged a few 10ps into the sticky arcade cabinet in the corner of the bar while we chatted and drank our beer. The first game was moreish. By halfway through the second my goose was cooked. That summer I visited the Oriel Bar a lot. I wasn’t visiting Ed. I was visiting the Tetris machine. 

Against modern video games – with their complex narratives, orchestral music, photorealistic 3D graphics and vast worlds to explore – Tetris looks like a pushbike racing a Lamborghini. It’s garishly coloured (though it doesn’t need to be coloured at all), bleepy and two-dimensional. It does one thing, and it keeps doing it until the game is over.   

That thing, in case there can be anyone reading this who doesn’t know, is this. Coloured blocks