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	Click here to visit the Tower of Babel section on The Unofficial Gameboy Tetris Home Page

Tetris was created in June 1985 by a 33 year old Russian called Alexey Pajitnov at the Computer Center of the Moscow Academy of Sciences (also know as AcademySoft). Alexey was a mathematician who, as a result of his lifelong love for puzzles, played with puzzles in a far different context. While working as a programmer in the field of speech recognition and artificial intelligence, he often progammed games as simple tasks to test new equipment. On this particular occasion, he was using the game Pentomino (which required placement of 12 different-shaped pieces formed out of five squares to be arranged in a certain order in a box) to test such equipment.

When he wrote the program for rotation of pieces and saw how it worked, he thought it would work well in real time. Realising that the 12-5 pentomino combination was too much for real time (maybe because of the processing power of the computer with which he was using) he decided to reduce the program to seven shapes of four square blocks. This gave rise to Tetris - the name is derived from Tetra, greek for "four". It took him only two weeks to program the prototype.

During gameplay, the 'tetrads' attempt to reach 'heaven' by assembling themselves into tall, ominous towers. Brian Kobashikawa of The Unofficial Gameboy Tetris Home Page refers to this situation specifically as a "Tower of Babel" during his dicussion of Tetris gameplaying techniques.