[supercat]

The original Tetris did not have any sort of pictures or other such nonsense, as it ran in 40-column color text mode. Unfortunately, it was compiled with Turbo Pascal 3.0 whose delay routine does not work well on anything beyond an 80386; consequently, the game runs too fast on newer hardware.

[Clinging Bitterly]

I have, somewhere around here, an original package of an early PC version from Spectrum Holobyte that came out maybe 15 years ago. It is certainly not "the" original, which I think was coded for something else. The whole thing is on a single diskette. This does not run in text mode, if I recall, but the low resolution CGA graphics mode that will also display 40 column text. If I remember right (I had two different versions), the older one that I still have around had "copy protection". The booklet inside had stories of the hockey players and other bits of Russian trivia, and in the opening screen you had to answer a question from the booklet in order to play. I may be wrong, I'm approaching midlife. The question thing might have been in the later 16 bit Windows version.

I used to "type in" games of similar style, plus ripoffs of some of the old Atari games, on the old C-64. Some of them were as addictive as Tetris was to a lot of the early PC users, but I thought the C-64 had better graphics capabilities than the original CGA (at least it was easier to code, especially with a SuperExpander), and there's no question it had better sound.

Dave in Eugene