About the Tetris Applet

This applet is a Tetris clone. It is not entirely unlike the game that everyone knows as Tetris, but I have no idea what the current copyright / trademark status of Tetris actually is. Consequently, the game is categorically not Tetris, and you'd have to be as wierd as Wierd Al to think it was. Wierder even.

I wrote the applet in late September 1999, after spending much time considering how cool it would be to write my own Tetris game. I'm not really much of a Tetris freak, but somebody very special to me spends many hours making physics tutes more interesting by playing the game on her graphical calculator. I'm not particularly good at the game either, but I brew some mean Java, so it just had to be done.

Initial coding took me about an hour. By that time, I had a finished tetris game that cleared rows, spun blocks, etc... I then spent the next week tweaking it and adding cool stuff (that pause button was a real pain). My adding and tweaking messed up my neatly laid out code in a way that only truly adept programmers can appreciate. However, thanks to my continuing good fortune, I didn't stuff it up too much, and the final product is quite nice and extremely addictive.

Here's a screen shot from the development process (I never understood why people whack these things in, but the page needs some eye-candy):

The game will be continually updated as needed to fix bugs, and future versions may contain additional cool stuff.

The applet can be run from a home computer without being logged on to the Internet. If you're interested in getting a copy, then send some email to jmerritt@warpax.com and I'll start up a Tetris mail list (I've always wanted to do that). Don't try pirating the game though: If you access it from a domain other than www.warpax.com, you'll just get a message telling you to visit us here at Warpax. This is not a nasty tactic; I'm just trying to keep a single version active so that I can keep track of bugs. If you'd like to mirror it elsewhere, then send me an email.

Jonathan Merritt, September 1999.