Nothing beats the classic. When video games were simple but tricky at the same time and best enjoyed with the whole family without having to worry about getting influenced by the violent imagery and portrayal on screen because there was almost none of it. Back then, it was just pure clean and fun.
Many games have evolved after, mostly games of bloodbath and execution. Nevertheless, go ask any old-timer, there's just something about maneuvering those joysticks for a classic game, possibly with the body moving along in a dance, loving every moment as if you were maneuvering life itself. Ah, talk about gaming, down the memory lane!
On Saturday, it was definitely back to memory lane when the Philly Tech Week kicked off the event with a free play of the classic video game Tetris, this time on a much bigger, wider and taller screen: Cira Center in downtown Philadelphia. Officially kicked off on Friday, Philly Tech event lasts for a week in celebration of technology and innovation.
The Cira Center, a 29-story mirrored-building that displays colorful patterns on a normal day was extra special one Saturday night. Supersized shapes slowly dropped on both sides of the building in a play of Tetris. Players used joysticks to control and arrange the shapes, with various colors brightening up the Philly night sky, providing a vision of how technology can change many things in the future.
The event also became a celebration of the upcoming 30th anniversary of Tetris, a game also regarded as the epitome of simplicity and elegance, said digital media associate professor Frank Lee of Drexel University.
"This project began as a personal love letter to the games that I loved when I was a child - Pong last year, Tetris this year. But it ended up as a way of uniting the city of Philadelphia," Lee said to the crowd gathered in the event.
As game designer, Lee supervised the creation of the giant game display. In fact, he also holds the Guinness World Record for the largest architectural video game display in the world, thanks to the game Pong played on single side of the same building in 2013. Recall that Pong is an electronic version of paddleball that has been developed in 1972 by Atari. Pong has also been described as the granddaddy of all video games.
Some research says Guinness has considered it the world's tallest video game, having a 100,000-square-foot screen. Others say it has yet to be confirmed.
Nonetheless, it wasn't the first time Tetris has been played on a building. In 2013, a group of students from MTI hacked a campus building to play Tetris, but they simply followed similar stunts of co-eds at Delft University at Netherlands and Brown University.
Alexey Pajitnov, a Russian computer programmer, created the block-puzzle game Tetris in 1984. In the late 80s, Henk Rogers made a move to acquire the rights and bring up a deal to place it in Nintendo's Game Boy, upon seeing Tetris at a trade show in Las Vegas. The game became a global hit thereafter. Rogers can't believe that the game lasted this long.
"If a game lasts a year, that's amazing. They usually go out of style very quickly," said Rogers, who was among the players that Saturday night and is currently the managing director of The Tetris Co. based in Hawaii.
Roger told that the game has been downloaded as a paid game over 425 million times on mobile devices, with people playing billions of matches yearly.
"It's humongous. I love it. I've been playing around with a giant Tetris at Burning Man for the last seven years. This is an order of magnitude bigger," he said.
Roger revealed there's more to look forward to as the company plans to release numerous new Tetris products and initiative sometime during its anniversary on June 6. He refused to provide further details, however.
