Tetris turns 30

That's right, everyone - Tetris turns 30 years old today. Thirty years! Where did the time go? In fact, here's a better question: is the groundbreaking video game a cultural necessity? No. But is it art? Definitely. It ushered in a new age of mobile gaming, and gave us an escape during an era of unusual pressures. Tetris was the greatest and most influential time suck of its era. The game was invented in 1984 by Soviet scientist Alexey Pajitnov. It was introduced on the IBM and Commodore 64 a year later, then ported to handheld devices in 1989, when it exploded in popularity. It was notorious for its capacity for work stoppage from the beginning. Days after Pajitnov invented it, his boss at the Soviet Academy of Science in Moscow outlawed the game at all computer workstations, and for good reason because if the collective time and mental energy the world has spent on Tetris was instead used to cure disease, our life expectancy would have jumped to 126. But what were we going to do with those twilight years anyway? That's right, play Tetris.