The First Person in the US to have Tetris?

[Ed Oscuro]

Been swapping topics/information between places today, and I stumbled across a post in This Thread @ GameSpy Forums (http://www.forumplanet.com/gamespy/topic.asp?fid=1422&tid=1289927):


We didn't have piracy until a mere 10 years a go? HAHAHAHAHA

Avast ye scurvy dog! I was part of the original crop of pirates, back in the days when games were being leaked by devs "zero day warez" before they hit the store shelves. I was the first person in the US to have tetris, a couple of years before it was even known to exist (it was a Russian game).

ARGH!!!

After a "Communist!" accusation, he replies:


In Reply To #13

I'm not Russian. The story goes like this. I was a phone phreaker in the day, could dial up long distance around the country.

Before school I would setup a war dialer to dial numbers around the country (modems dialed very quickly back then) all successful connections were dumped into a data base, when I got home I would dial these numbers, then weed out the fax machines and presto...bbs numbers.

One day I found a BBS out of Mass. this guy was bragging about how he would be getting the first game from Russia sent to him, he actually put down the date and time, so I highjacked the transfer and took it. The game ended up being Tetris.

I thought it was pretty boring game and didn't really like it much myself, just used it as a bragging right "first Russian zero day ware". Then they released it for Nintendo about 2 years or more later (I had it for commodore 64).

And that's...the rest of the story. :>

[Darth Sensei]

Hmm.... what's that smell? I think it's bullshit on the wind. :roll:

D

[link1110]

Either that or a member of the FBI's 10 most wanted list LOL

[Mayhem]

I had a copy of Tetris for C64 in my hands by Xmas 1987, so make of that as you wish ;)

[Oobgarm]

And that's...the rest of the story. :>


Holy Shit, Ed is really Paul Harvey!! LOL ;)

[kevincure]

As far as I know, Pajitnov's original was programmed on a computer which was never sold in the West, so whether or not you owned it, you certainly weren't playing "the Russian original" on a C-64.

[Ed Oscuro]

Haha, Oobgarm gets the reference :D

Yeah, that C64 version came out later. I'm not sure what the original was written for...maybe some Spectrum clone? He's not referring to that. If you take note, his mention that he had it on the C64 after the mention of the NES version(s) is probably meant to indicate a chronological difference.

I'll ask him what system this Tetris played on.

[Flack]

I wardialed a few times back in the day. Modems did not dial quickly back then. In fact, compared to now, they dialed pretty slowly. I remember having to set a time out limit which was around 60 seconds I believe. So that's 60 numbers an hour -- I wouldn't call that fast.

Second of all, people who use terms like "hijack the transfer" are morons anyway. Nobody ever "hijacked a transfer".

Third of all, when Tetris came out I'm sure 1200 baud was the norm. If anyone had "hijacked the transfer" I'm sure someone else would have figured it out in the 30-45 minutes it would have taken to download.

Take it from someone who was there, while 0 day warez are prevalent now, even the most elite BBSs were 0-30 day, or more commonly, 0-90 day. First of all, games didn't even come OUT every day! Second of all, especially early in the game, you're talking about BBSs with one phone line, and either 1200 or god forbid 300 baud connections. I downloaded California Games from a BBS in California one time (The Purple Dragon) and it took me about 2 1/2 hours. My phone bill was about the same as the price of the game would have been. But anyway, my point is there was really no way to get 0 day games just because hell, maybe only 10 people could get a game a day. I remember downloading games in high school from a BBS that was still running 300 baud, and I remember one time I started downloading side 1 of a disk before I went to school, then at lunch I came home right when it was ending and I flipped the disk over and started downloading disk 2. Keep in mind that C64 diskettes hold 180k per side.

I've got a million old stories about boxing and war dialing and whatnot, and for those of us who were there, it's pretty easy to spot the ones who weren't.

About the best thing we ever found was the Pizza Hut corporate service, which apparently Pizza Huts used to use to dial in their nightly sales. We also found the Long John Silvers one as well.

And to think, I went on to work for the government as a senior network engineer. :evil:

[Mayhem]

Tetris was written on the propriatory computer system Pajitnov had available as part of his work. It was ported over to the PC infrastructure I believe in early 87 and then Hungarian programming team Andromeda was commissioned to convert it to Western home computer formats (Spectrum, C64 etc) in time for Xmas 87 under the auspices of Mirrorsoft (who at the time, believed they owned the rights to the game).

Go read "Game Over", the chapter on Tetris is incredibly detailed and should explain most questions. Any other version, such as NES, came way after proceedings were almost tied up to Bulletproof and Nintendo...

[Ed Oscuro]

I'm not sure what original system it was created for in Russia, what I grabbed was for Commodore 64. It had the coolest splash screen, then when I saw it was a block game I was disapointed. I'm still shocked over how much success the game had for NES. My brother still has the original 5 1/4" disk with him. The lucky sob grabbed the c64 and all my equipment from our parents house before I could get it.

Somewhere along the line, somebody got confused, looks like LOL

Maybe it was the owner of that BBS trying to convince people he'd gotten 0 day warez...lol

Thanks for that info, Flack :)

[Ed Oscuro]

Update:


The person that reffers to older modems dialing slower on that thread couldn't be more wrong. On the Commodore 64 you could set the speed at which your modem dialed, since I had to dial a phone number, connect to another line, dial the code for the phone company for free long distance, then dial the number trying to reach...the dialer had to be set to dial rather quickly so I could get more numbers into the data base, as you can imagine, the percentage of bbs lines compared to voice lines was rather small. I had to dial 21 digits per try. It would dial these digits in about a second. In the term program you could set the speed at which you dialed.

I'm sure with todays modems you can probably set the dial speed, but I'm not sure how.

Will Flack rise to this challenge? Or will he not care? As the world turns...

MadMonk's been quite accomodating in terms of giving me more information, which is nice. Interesting stuff any way you look at it.