Happy 25th, Falling Shapes

Tetris turned 25 years old a couple of months ago. I should have thrown a party for it. I only played the Nintendo version, but I played it obsessively for a few years. (Ages 17 to 23? Something like that...) I've written this before, but I remember having trouble falling asleep because the blocks were rapidly dropping against my closed eyelids. I was damn good, if I do say so myself.

I remember feeling really bad because my younger sister liked to play it, too, but sometime while she was in college, I impulsively tossed the Nintendo machine out of some naive belief that its absence would allow me to focus on more productive projects. She was upset with me. I don't blame her. It shouldn't have been a unilateral decision. Plus, I still wish I had it, just for Tetris.

I was struck by this in the article:

In her book Hamlet on the Holodeck, Georgia Tech professor Janet Murray called Tetris the "perfect enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans."

I kind of see the point, but I played as much as I did because at the time I was -- most decidedly -- undertasked.