What do you think?
There are games that some people play–badminton, Parcheesi and EVE Online, for example. And then there are games that everyone plays, like solitaire, chess or rock/ paper/scissors.
It’s hard to make the latter, a game that hooks the most casual observer with its immediately accessible logic, but Alexey Pajitnov managed to do exactly that in 1984.
The building-block puzzle game sold millions of copies in hundreds of variations, becoming so popular that it even led to a field of cognitive study. Not only did Tetris captivate folks who already had a daily diet of gaming, it converted others into button-mashing maniacs. Tetris was a gateway drug like no other, singlehandedly making Nintendo’s Game Boy a success and ushering in a new era of handheld gaming.