The Wild History of Tetris

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Das Vidania and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry's here too, man, this is stuff you should know. Comrade.

Yeah, the Tetris edition. How much Tetris have you played? What's your background there?

I was a very casual Tetris player. I mean I didn't even realize there were as many levels as there are. I tend to flip out when things start to really go fast, So I wasn't very good at Tetris, but I did enjoy it when I played it.

And where'd you play it?

Like?

What system?

The classic nees? Okay, how about you, Chuck, what is your relationship to Tetris?

Well, the only way I ever played it was on a game Boy. I don't know if I had a game Boy. If it was Scott's.

I know he had one.

But at any rate, I played it on the game Boy only and really really loved it and got into that for a while. I wasn't like obsessed with it or anything, but I did have the Tetris streams. I did walk around seeing things as Tetris on the landscape, so it definitely invaded my consciousness for a while. But I never played it on anything but the game Boy, so I don't know how to play it with a regular controller or whatever.

Yeah, I couldn't. Like I tried playing it on computer. In it, I was like, I don't I can't get this. I'm just used to the NYS controller for it.

Yeah. I was gonna try and play it today, just like whatever.

I'm sure there's some free online version you can play on your desktop, but I was afraid I was a little behind.

Today.

I was like, I'm not going to do it because I'll be thirty minutes later I will still been playing Tetris because it's a very addictive game, and part of why it was successful is because it seems like every body that ever tried Tetris early on at least loved and became pretty addicted to Tetris.

Yeah. I was asking you and me. I was like, did you ever play Tetris? And she just kind of gave me this. She didn't even look over at me. She just looked at them at me out of the corner of her eyes and was like, I was pretty good at Tetra.

Yeah I could see that.

Yeah, come on, I never I didn't ask her if she had the dreams, but I could see her having the dreams. Apparently that's a really common phenomenon, right, I think it's actually called the Tetris effect.

Uh, yeah, for sure.

When it starts invading your dreams or you start you know, if you're walking around a city and you start looking at an alleyway that you could drop a long I beam into, then it's in your bones.

Yeah for sure. So yeah, we'll talk a little bit about why it's so addictive. People have come up with theories for it, like it's a video game that's so addictive. Psychologists have actually come up with theories to explain why Tetris in particular, not video games, Tetris in particular has that Tetris effect and it's so addictive, which kind of

Yeah, that is a stackering number of people, man, right.

And this video game hasn't been around since like the eighteen hundred. It's like it's from nineteen eighty four.

It's not Oregon Trail right right exactly.

You can't catch dysentery playing it.

No, and big thanks to Olivia for this one.

I had this idea when I recently remembered that I had not watched the Tetris Cold.

War thriller movie.

That is a very loose sort of story about how this game was developed, because it's a very interesting story set against the backdrop of the Cold War. They really it's a fictionalized version, so it sort of loosely follows some of it. But it looked like a really fun movie that I'd kind of forgot about. So I asked Lvia to put this together, and I'm gonna watch the movie sometime this week, I think.

So.

Is that huge chase scene where Alexi Pajetnov is chasing the CIA agents across rooftops in Istanbul and catches up with them and kills them with the garrot is made up?

I think it is. And he was throwing Tetris pieces at them and building Tetris walls. That's what the movie they should have done.

Yeah, for sure, that would have been pretty cool. He just like holds his hand out and instead of a web coming out, it's Tetris pieces right in your face.

All right.

So you mentioned a guy that's very key to this. In fact, he's the most key because he is the creator, Alexi Pagetnov. The year's nineteen eighty four, very big key year in American history in a lot of ways. And he was working at a place called the Jerrod Nitsen Computer Center CenTra, which is a part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and he came up with this game

I'm glad, yes you said it. It took me a little while and I was like, oh, like Domino, but with five.

Yeah, exactly. And it was like any other puzzle. It was a wooden box and you had these pieces, twelve wooden tiles, each represented a different shape that can be made with five squares, and it was just a physical thing. It was in a rectangular, horizontal box and you would just you know, it was one of those puzzles where you would put the things in there and it wouldn't make like an Elton John album cover. It would just fit and you would be like, hey, I won I fed all the pieces in here, right.

So yeah, he basically took that and adapted it into He's like, well, I'm going to totally evolutionized this. I'm going to change the shapes from five boxes to four. And so you can't call it pentomeno anymore because pent is what five in Greek or Latin something.

Like that, right, yeah, five squares.

Yeah, So he called it Tetris, named after Tetra. Yeah, the Greek prefix meaning four, And apparently he also liked tennis and wanted to give tennis a little shout out. So that's what the iss is from Tetra Tennis Tetris.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In this initial version, like I said, it was called genetic engineering, and at first it was just a horizontal but he just basically did the exact same thing digitally that he had in his physical I guess sitting in his closet somewhere with pentomeno. It was a horizontal square with these pieces that you would you know, click, I don't know if you dragged at that point or not.

Did they even have the mouse at that point, I don't know.

Anyway you could get it over into that box and fit it that the pieces didn't fly down and they didn't disappear when you would complete a line like the classic Tetris. That would come later when he would make it a big And that was sort of the key basically was he found that that first version of genetic engineering was boring, and if he made it vertical, he made the piece of small, and if he made those lines disappear as you went, that created this addictive quality that made Tetris tetris.

That's it. Did you say that there weren't any graphics, that they were like characters and punctuation marks instead.

Of ground, So, yeah, that was the first version.

The whole thing was made up of brackets, Like each line was brackets, and like the pieces were like exclamation points or periods or greater than symbols. It was pretty primitive, rough first version, but yeah, it had had kind of the bones to it, but it wasn't until you start

Yeah, he was interested in doing puzzles in relation to his psychological experiments. Gerasimov and the other guy at Pavlovsky were poorting games over to ibmpcs, which a lot of people in the Soviet Union or not a lot of people, but that was sort of one of the main computers that they could have access to at the time, and they had this idea like, hey, we might be able to like profit from this one day, but that's going to be a tricky thing because you know, this is a Soviet.

Union and everything that we do belongs to state.

That was a great Yakov Smirnov, by the way, I appreciate that. Yeah, so as we'll see the developers. Pajetanov apparently was like, hey, you know, I think it'd be a great idea if the USSR owned the rights to this game that we developed for the first ten years. What do you think? He had said that it was basically an impossible choice, like if he didn't do that, they would cheat him out of it and he would probably be investigated by the KGB anyway, So he just

Yeah, that became kind of a common refrain in this as it goes along, as more and more people are like, why are all my employees crowded around the computer monitor and they would go in and find them playing Tetris. It spread to like I said, IBMPC users in the Soviet Union, was copied onto floppy disks, transported across borders, and eventually got named Robert Stein, who owned a UK based company called Andromeda Software Ltd. He saw this in Hungary.

He thought that meant, hey, sounds like we have a deal.

Right, So he actually started creating copies of it, right, and getting ready to sell it in the West. Is that correct?

Yeah.

Here's where it gets a little confusing, because this whole story about who has the rights gets really in the weeds. And what happened was Stein started he thought they had a deal, so he started developing the launch of this thing because he thought he had a deal when he did not even have these rights. Like they literally made a deal with a guy named Robert Maxwell. British newspaper mogul. There's a lot more to this guy than you know.

Yeah, So apparently they were out there selling units and then the Russians got word of this. Something called l ORG electron or Technica, which was the Soviet organization for developing things like games like Tetris and then owning the rights to it, got in touch with Stein and were like, hey, you can't do this anymore, like we own that this is even Cold war stuff says that this is wrong, you know.

Yeah, So in January twenty nine to eighty eight, spectrum Holobite released it in the US and he didn't get his deal signed with l ORG because they weren't like, hey, shut this down.

You can't do it. They said, hey, let's talk.

He didn't get his actual deal signed with them until the end of February, so he was selling these things for a month in the United States before he even had a deal with l Org l Org And at that point he got to think like a ten year licensing deal from them, so it was all that part of it was legit by this point.

Yeah, and at the time, it was almost one hundred dollars for a copy of Tetris for IBM and sixty eight dollars. These are in today's dollars, I should say, Yeah, for the Commodore sixty four that's not cheap, No, for sure not, but people were buying it because people liked it. And apparently also Mirosof made deals with Atari and Sega too to basically start producing Tetris cartridges for those consoles.

Yeah, he didn't have those rights, so you could have it gets a little confusing, but you can have like PC rights, but not rights to do it on like a handheld game or like a stand up console arcade game or something like that, or what would to come, which was, well, they already had Atari and stuff like that, and Sega like you mentioned, but you know, all these are different licenses, and this guy Stein was just kind of going full steam ahead without even owning these licenses,

So yeah, So at the time, there was another guy that we've got to introduce and then we'll take a break after well after that. His name was Hank Rogers h N. K. Rogers. He was Dutch born but grew up in America, and at the time he was working for a company called Bulletproof Software, a Japanese company, and his job was to find games to basically develop for

Was Tetris.

What a pro.

We'll be right back, Okay.

So when we last saw Hank Rogers, he was wandering around Cees with a pennant that said Bulletproof's number one, eating some popcorn, and he had just stopped in front of this booth that was playing Tetris. And he dropped his popcorn and his pennant at the same time as mouth agog and he was like, I have to own

Yeah, pretty much.

I mean at this point he did make a deal with Spectrum Hollabite for the Nintendo Famicom console, right, and you know this is all early days, so the game Boy had not quite debuted. That launched in eighty nine, So it was the timing of it was really really key because as we'll see the game Boys where it really really took off. But he made a deal, sort of a handshake deal with the president of Nintendo of America to put Tetris in game boys. And he was like, hey, listen,

Yeah, it was essentially the same thing. When Apple loaded that YouTube album onto their iPhones, it was one of the greatest commercial successes of all time. This is basically the predecessor of that.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you said he was sort of bumbling.

You can't leave that that was a joke, Like that was a huge fo oh. Everybody hated that just being like loaded on their phone and apparently you couldn't get it off either.

Oh no, no, no, I remember that. I think I was one of the few people it was like, oh nice, I like you too, Thanks for the.

Song, Thanks suckers for the free album that I paid one thousand dollars for.

Goodness me.

So, you mentioned that he was sort of bumbling around Moscow and they were like, hey, no, thanks spy. He eventually did get that meeting with l ORG because he's still trying to secure all these different you know, license rights, and he they weren't too pleased with him. But luckily for him, Pagetnoff was in that meeting and he liked Rogers and they became buddies, and that helped them secure the rights on the Game Boy.

Yeah, because at the time, all of a sudden, there was a huge competition in Moscow forgetting these rights because it became clear Stein didn't known the rights. Therefore Maxwell didn't known all of the rights, Nintendo didn't known all the rights yet. So Stott Rogers was there like making these deals and it is questionable whether he would have come out on top had paget nonof not taken a sign shine to him, but he did, and like you said, he talked the head of Nintendo America in installing the

Yeah for sure. And by the way, I did go to eBay.

I haven't picked the one out yet, but are there are plenty of game Boys with the Tetris cartridges. They're supposedly in good shape, so that's awesome. I'm definitely looking forward to that, although Emily says I still have mine somewhere.

It's like, all right, I'll just get it on eBay.

Like how hard can you look for that?

Yeah?

And they range in price, I think, you know, some of the more dubious ones are like thirty to forty bucks, and I just wonder about the stickiness of buttons and pads and things. But the one that's like one hundred and ten, I feel like it's probably a safer bet, but who knows.

Yeah, you got to look out for that forty year old caramel sauce.

Oh god, yeah, and cotton candy and stuff like that. But the Game Boy when though, The reason I bring that up again is because that's the one with that classic type a theme songh yeah from sound engineer hiro Kozu Tanaka, which is hard to believe, but it's an actually a Russian folk song called koro b a niki which means pedlars, and you can hear like a symphony doing that in a Russian symphony and you're like, oh, wait a.

Minute, I know that song, that's the Tetris song.

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

It is, and it's if you haven't heard it in a while ago, just look up Tetris type a theme on utube and it'll take you back for sure.

Yeah.

So there was one more challenge for the rights to Tetris, and that ended up being between Nintendo and Atari. Like I said, Nintendo was like, we're the platform for Tetris, just try it, and Natari was like, We're going to try you so much. We're so confident that we're going to produce hundreds of thousands of copies of this game, and a judge was like, nope, it's Nintendo's and Natari had to eat the cost of all those.

Yeah.

The judge was like, don't you have a burial site for the game?

Exactly right? Can you repurpose that?

So they've sold a lot of these. But marketing of the game initially was a challenge. It didn't have like cutting edge graphics or anything. You really had to play it really to kind of understand how addictive it was. So just looking at the game and selling the game was tough. So they sort of, weirdly at the time, really leaned into the Cold War and the Soviet stuff. They re skinned it to have Saint Basil's Adril and Moscow on the title screen. They had all sorts of

Right?

Yeah, that was funny. There was a New York Times article on it from oh, I don't know, I think the like eighty six maybe, and they were they threw a little bit of shade. They're like, it's kind of impressive. This is the first software from the Soviet Union being sold in the US, which indicates that their computers are finally catching up to American.

These ibmbcs.

Right, So Tetris indisputably ended the Cold War, brought down the Soviet Union single handedly. There were no other factors involved whatsoever. And like we said, the rights for the game stayed with the US are for the first ten years, and then finally when they came back around to or

Yeah, I mean, he didn't try to fight this early on, Like you know, if it was in the United States, somebody would have taken him to court, probably over the fact that like, yeah, I was your employee at the time, but blah blah.

Blah, Like he knew that was a lost cause.

So he never even tried to fight back, and I think wanted to get in line as a good Russian state employer and was like, okay, ten years, you've got it. And you know, it turns out patience is a virtues because he made you know, he did pretty well on the thing in the long run.

Right, So these guys started drifting over to the United States. And there's a really sad like kind of appendix to this whole thing. In nineteen ninety eight, Pokyoko, who was psychologist who is involved in developing it, found that he had he was being looped out now that the rights were coming to Paget and off Anne Rogers, who made

Yeah, there's a documentary or docuseries rather called The Tetris Murderers about this, and I did not watch it, but I looked more into this, and I'm not conspiracy minded at all, but this seems very very pinky. There were three murder weapons to kill his wife and kid and himself. There were two different hammers and a hunting knife. Multiple murder weapons is just strange. There were documents burned on

So I'm not really sure what the deal is.

No, for sure. I think the one criticism is that the docu series doesn't actually say why anybody would have wanted to kill him and his family.

But yes, everything I say, Russian mobs, that's all you need to say.

Yeah, yeah, it does kind of explain a lot. So, like you said, there's a movie I think it's on Apple TV that came out last year about this that you can see. I can't remember what it's called, Tetris something, right, I think it's just Tetris.

Oh, okay, what's his name? The Kingsman, Tarin Jaron Edgerton.

Yet I think of a more resultant John.

I do too. I like that guy. I think he's a very talented actor.

Oh god, I hope he's not a monstrous scumbag.

I do too.

We walked that fine line of like saying something nice about someone, are they a monstrous scumbag? Or say something bad about someone and we'll just get back to them, right.

Yeah, you have a good track record of calling it though.

Well I got one. I got Jared back in the day.

That's about it, because that was a mega one. That was a huge way to nobody was thinking that about that guy.

Speaking of that guy, should we take another break or should we talk about gameplay first?

We'll take another break.

It feels like, all right, let's break and we'll talk about how you actually play this thing right after this. Okay, So if you want to play, if you've never played Tetris, you know, a lot of this kind of assumes with that many hundreds of millions of games sold, plus many more people that played that didn't actually buy it, that

That was the best, basic, most succinct explanation of Tetras I have ever heard.

Really.

Was it good though?

For sure? Yeah, okay, that's what I'm saying.

It was the best.

I just thought you meant that was short and that'll suffice.

No, No, I thought it was great. Okay, thanks, because you could have gone on longer. But why you said it all just precisely so. It was very economical and efficient, and I appreciate that.

Thank you, friend.

There's also multiplayer versions with which means that there's a lot of competitive Tetris championships. There's one in particular, and the Classic Tetris World Championship, I believe is the biggest of them all, but some of the things that they've come up with. So Tetris was just basically the same for a very long time, and then when the rights reverted to paget Nov, they started experimenting with it making it a little different some of what you included in there.

Yeah, and I think did you mention that a true Tetris is when you get what is it, I guess four levels at once.

Yeah, when you throw down that coveted eye piece and you're satisfying and yeah, exactly, that is a Tetris.

Oh boy, that's satisfying. I remember that feeling. I can't wait to get that game boy. Should we talk about the pieces because you found some kind of cool stuff, as did Libya. That I never knew is that these pieces have names.

Yeah, there's a bunch of slang names. There's a Tetris wiki that has a bunch of slang names. But somebody posted on Reddit a few years ago and the original Nintendo manual for it, and it has like the official Nintendo name. So we'll give you all of them or some of them.

All right, the J and the shape also refers to or the letter refers to sort of the shape of the piece, right, yes, okay, So the J is the blue one. I never knew that there were colors because on Game Boy obviously it was not colored. The initial ones, but the blue one can also be called the gamma or the the gee or ge or I think the is official, the blue Ricky, the blue Ricky.

Yeah, that's the official one. There's an orange Ricky. That's the L piece, which is basically the mirror of the J It's also called jed or right elbow orange Ricky. You don't really, you can't improve on that. It sounds like a disgusting drink. Yeah, you know, like a creamsicle cruise ship drink gin Ricky.

Yeah, oh boy, you might be onto something.

What is a gin Ricky?

It's gin lime and I think a little sweetener. Maybe it's really simple, and I think club soda. It's a pretty old drink, so.

Kind of like a Gin and Tonic without but with soda instead of tonic and a little sweet.

Yeah, yes, I believe so. I think that's a pretty good disc. Man, you're just killing it with the descriptions today.

How about this the yellow cube. It's a square, Oh my god, genius. That's known. You can call it square or the zero or the smash Boy.

Yeah, that's the official name of smash Boy. Can't improve on that one either. The S is the green piece. It's the right facing zigzag piece.

Huh.

Some people call it the right zigzag er right squiggly. But the official Nintendo name was the Rhode island Z.

That sounds like a sex position.

It does for sure. Wow, that's great. Z.

There is a Z is the mirror, the red mirror of the Z, and that is you can call a lightning bolt or the left dog or the left snake or the Cleveland Z also, but I said.

Before, yeah, it's just more disappointing than the road. Oh there's the T, the T piece that actually is used in the Tetris logo. And the tea is called the te wei.

The tee wee.

Okay.

And then that god that I called it the I beam, But that's the Cyan four line clearer. That's also the one that if you if you put it in the wrong place, it can really screw you.

But that can produce that full Tetris. You call it the stick, the line, the slim gym, the long skinny one.

The hero is the official name for it though.

Oh okay, that makes sense.

Mm hmm. That's where that song, that Enrique Iglesias song comes from. It's about Tetris. A little known fact.

So did you mention the championship?

No, yes, I did. The classic Tetris World Championship. That's the big one. And they still use the original n Ees version, the one that I played, and you and me played, and everybody but you played.

Apparently that's right, which is a key distinction when it comes to competing. I guess because that would have been I would have been pretty lost, although there's no way I could. I wasn't like competition level. I was just okay at it.

But dude, competition level is inc when it comes to Tetris.

No, when you watch like real time speeds of what these people are doing, it's crazy. Like that's when I'm like, I mean, I'm way done by that by the time they start going that fast.

Yeah. Because the Nintendo controller, the original one, the rectangle with two buttons like two red buttons, and then a dpad the directional pad like it's it works for certain kinds of games and certain kind of movements, usually with two thumbs. But with Tetris, the big part is to move the piece around, and you want to move a lot of pieces really fast and move on to the next one.

Which you're sending them.

Yes, which means that you have to you have to press the d pad really fast, and the deep pad was not made for being pressed fast. So, like you said, people have come up with some amazing techniques for competitive play.

Yeah, if you're trying to get something going down that's coming down very very fast all the way over and fitted one on the left side of the screen, it's dropped on the right. You got to hit that deep aad like go go, go, go go, And you can only do that, like you know, there's humans can only go so fast until they invented hyper tapping, which is about twenty eleven. According to Libya's research, which I found that to be pretty much true for early twenty tens.

It checks out. That means you're like.

You're sort of vibrating your thumb actually instead of pressing it, you're sort of vibrating your you're like flexing your bicep, so you're not fully releasing and pressing.

It's just like a hyper press, a hypertap.

Right, So if you if you're trying that right now, and you're like, I don't see how that works. Apparently a very very few gifted individuals can actually yah hyper tap, which means that hyper tapers dominated competition for a good ten or so years. About ten years there was a kid named Joe Seeley or Saley I'm sorry, Joseph, and he was sixteen at the time. Back in twenty eighteen, he reached level thirty one. I don't think we said just using like normal movements on the Nees controller, no

Yeah.

So then in twenty twenty comes along a guy named Christopher Martinez, also known as Cheese capital Z capital Z.

Yeah, I think the capital Z makes it cheese Z.

Oh that you're probably right, that's my take on it. No, I think you're totally right.

Okay, well we should say Christopher Martinez aka Cheese aka Cheesez, and we'll get it in there somewhere.

So he introduced a technique called rolling. It's also called fly hecking HCCI after a guy named Hector Fly Rodriguez who developed this technique on arcade game consoles, not even for Tetris, just on arcade game console. Like, you know how to press the buttons faster, and I'm gonna do a little audio, Josh, if you'll allow, because did you see how this was done? Did you see Hector's fingers?

I did.

It's amazing. This guy has like they look like break dancing fingers. They're just so fluid. But it's if you imagine like a stand up arcade game and those big round buttons. If you want to press that really fast, you can go tap tap tap tap tap tap with one finger, or you can do this with your fore fingers.

Very nice.

Did that come through you? So that's what he's doing.

He's using all four fingers to you know, kind of like the on board thing when you do that on a table. He did that on a button and found like, boy, that's even faster than the fastest hyper tapping and cheesy geez uh No, I don't know stole that, but he got that from him. So what you do in the case of a Nintendo, because they have tiny little buttons,

Right to the back of the controller.

Right to the back of the controller, making the back of the controller essentially one large button.

Yeah, and it's just kind of jumping up and hitting your thumb. That was another great explanation, Chuck Man.

That's a tough one because you really got to see it in action.

But you still you did it great hyper tapping. The best hyper tappers can hit the button about seven times a second, boggling. What about roller with rolling People like Cheesy can hit it twenty times a second? What times a second? And Cheesy obviously was starting to reach new heights as well a least I believe, still one of the premier Tetris players in the world, and it started to get people like between Joseph Saley and Christopher or Cheesy like they were like, okay, people can get past

Who, oh man beat the game.

A human, not a bot.

A kid.

I've seen him with my own eyes on the TV and he was not a bot.

How old was he? What's his name? Give this kid his due?

He was thirteen years old at the time. This was December of twenty twenty three, so about a year ago. He was in Oklahoma. His name was Willis Gibson. Blue Scootie was his player name.

Yeah, are you going to drop the level? I think you should, all right. This guy, after playing for thirty eight minutes, hit level one fifty seven and crashed five times as much as the best players in the world and crashed the system and every that's a system.

That's how excited you are.

That's very weird.

I was, and everybody was going crazy over this kid, except for paget no Nov who said, yeah, well, you know you beat the forty year old version of game.

Nice accomplishment, right, Yeah, he said, the Tetris itself, the pure like the theoretical version of the game, you could never beat it.

Yeah, I get it, I guess, But come on, man.

I know I thought that too, Like it's a thirteen year old you're talking to buddy.

All right, So we talked a little we'll finish with Tetris on the brain, because we started the show talking about Tetris getting into your dreams, getting into your when you're packing your car. I still call that tetrising, as do a lot of people when you're packing stuff, packing moving trucks. It's kind of the vernacular now, but it does have very distinct impacts on your brain, right, and usually in a good way.

Yeah, again, we said it was called the Tetris effect. There's a guy named Jeffrey Goldsmith who's a writer who is known for coining I don't know if he coined a term or it just was the first to apply it to Tetris, but he called Tetris a pharmatronic, which is like an addictive drug but in software form. Yeah, I'm peasant and off. Ever, the contrarian said, like, no, it's more like an earworm.

Right, is it with this guy?

I don't know. He likes to be right, I think, but so yeah, So people have taken wide note of the fact that Tetris seems to be way more addictive on way more people than just about any other game, and so people have kind of investigated what the what the deal is behind that. I know at least one writer chalked it up to what's called the zigger Nick effect, that.

Is super cool that was coined by a psychologist in Russia. Bluma, well, biggerin I'm sorry, Ziggernick.

What a great first name.

I think it's Zigernick.

Okay, well, you know me and eis and European pronunciations. I know.

This is in the nineteen thirties, and she noticed that at restaurants, when a server had a large table of like, let's say, twelve people, they could remember their orders, which was remarkable, but then when it came time to deliver

Over, and then after you complete one, you have another task to do, so your brain is activated again, like you said, moment by moment, over and over and over again.

Pretty cool.

It is super cool. There is another guy named Richard Higher or I'm sure in your pronunciation, Heyer, who in nineteen ninety one back in yeah, in ninety one, at uc Irvine, he actually the brains of Tetris players and he found that the brain is much more engaged when you're new to Tetris, which is probably a reason why

Yeah.

Yeah, there have been other studies, of course. There was one that found that tetris may reduce the strength of cravings. This is in twenty fifteen by the British and Australian psychologists.

Oh the British Indus is that a band?

I thought that was the name of me. Yeah, it's like a British seapower. One of my favorite bits, right.

Yeah, so just by psychologists in Britain and all Tralia, I think basically where they used iPods to check in with undergraduates seven times a day to see if they are craving drugs, food, sex and other things.

They just said, yeah, that you might create.

Yeah, They're like, we're undergrads, duh h and playing Tetris for three minutes lessen the cravings. I am curious if that's just because they're preoccupied with it. They argued that it was effective because it involved because cravings involve working memory and visualizing the object of desire.

So maybe that is it.

You're occupied with another cognitive task so much that you're not thinking about the heroin you want to do, and you're destroyer.

Right, And one of the great things about cravings is if you can write it out or distract yourself or something like that, when you come back from that task, your brain very rarely goes right back to the craving. Yeah, that's amazing. They also figured out, for probably the exact same reasons or similar reasons, they believe that it can prevent pts from forming, which is a little weird. It's like, you just had a traumatic experience. Quick play tetris, right,

Yeah, for sure, I'd be a way into that. They also found that potentially your brain might physically change, and then if you play Tetris enough, you might have a thicker cerebral cortices and more flexible cortical corticoll matter. So

Yeah, I think it still helps with visio spatial arrangement, like you said, packing a car. Oh okay, but it doesn't. You can't see something and be like, how what's right side up? For this shape that I'm showing you a picture of. You can't just immediately say like, oh, it should be to the left or something like that, like just that specific thing. I think it still does help, although I didn't see any studies. It's just how could it not? You know?

I agree?

Studies?

Be damned you got anything else on tetris?

I have nothing else. I can't wait for that game boy.

I'll report back with pictures at Chuck the podcast or Instagram.

Oh nice, I gotta put this Kutsu pictures up. Hadn't done it?

Oh yeah, you need to, man, Yeah, yeah, you got to. You put it on the podcast. You got to deliver, Chuck.

I have to deliver, Josh.

Well, since Chuck says he has to deliver, and that was an agreement to me saying he has to deliver, obviously, we've unlocked listener mail.

This is a timely one because our bet date has passed and we got a few of these from people. Hey guys, I'm from Brazil and I started listening to your show during the pandemic. But I love those older episodes and I was recently listening to one from November twenty nineteen, Augmented Reality Coming Soon. At the beginning of the episode, Josh and Clark, we get that a lot.

That's okay.

I'm sure my tombstone's a Charles w Chuck Clark Bryant.

I will see to it that it does.

If I outlook you, well, I'm gonna be between you and you me so you can constantly just be talking over.

Me, Okay, kid, that's what we should do.

It should do you me, me, you Emily.

Okay, and then we're not going to talk about pets or children, because that's too sad.

What if we just did like a mass burial together and save some money?

Oh yeah, just or skybarell plow us all up in the mountain and then let the crozyatus or whatever vultures.

Yeah, but I'm sure shipping our cadavers would be kind of expensive.

That's true. All right, Well, we'll work this out anyway.

Josh and Clark made a bet that in five years, augmented reality glasses would be all the rage, because Josh said that he thought they would be commonplace by Halloween twenty twenty four.

Here we are, Josh, what do you.

Think that doesn't sound like something I'd say in retrospect?

Well, Elisa says, I think Chuck won this one. It is funny though. Recently, as someone I know saw me had my camera because it was an event. I was taking pictures and I said, can I take your picture? And he said sure, and I took his picture. Then he went, now can I take yours? And he touched his glasses and looked at me and walked away. And I was like, that dude's wearing photography glasses.

No, I knew the guy.

Those meta ray bands that you can like whatever, interact online through your glasses basically what there's Yeah, that's what you would be commonplace.

I think you didn't chase after him and say like, hey, I never said yes.

No I didn't. Well, I just thought i'd expose it. Here.

There you go. Now we know you want to say his name in street address, I do not. All right, Well, since Chuck told an anecdote about an anonymous friend using Google glasses and I lost a bet, then we have to sign off by thanking whoever wrote this email? Who was it again?

Alisa from Brazil.

Oh that's right, Thanks a lot, Alisa from Brazil. We appreciate it big time. Thank you for pointing out that I lost to Betsy Chuck. Hopefully there was no money on it, was there?

Do you know?

No money as far as I'm concerned.

And if you want to be like Alsa from Brazil, you can email us as well at stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.