Talk:Tetris (Apple II)

Any evidence that this actually existed? Every version of the history I've read or watched states plainly that the version Stein saw was the first DOS/IBM-PC-compatible version that Alexi and company at the Academy of Science programmed. It also claims a C-64 version, but the only known C-64 version is the one MirrorSoft created after Stein sub-licensed it to them. Oknazevad (talk) 19:42, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

I have been wondering the same thing. Do you have sources on it being the DOS version they were playing? I don't recall any but it would be great to just sweep this one under the rug as a very old and inaccurate rumor. --simonlc (talk) 20:56, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

No specific source, just the general understanding that at the time Stein saw the game in Hungary the only versions that existed at all were the original Elektronika 60 and the first DOS versions, and no one was still using the E-60 outside the USSR by that point in time. Frankly, without any source to provide evidence for the existence of this supposed version, it should just be deleted, as it's the burden of the one making the claim to provide the evidence, not the one disputing it to prove the negative. Oknazevad (talk) 03:07, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

I completely agree. I'm all for deleting this page... but while writing this comment I remembered an interesting piece of timeline with the IBM version. In Jordan Mechner's journal he speaks about playing Tetris at the office, saying:

Everyone in the office has been playing a lot of Tetris -- a Russian submission for the IBM PC. It’s a classic, like Breakout. But I don’t think Broderbund is going to publish it.

I looked this up to find the date (October 23, 1986) to see how if were it fell next to Stein's discovery on the timeline. In the journal however there is a further entry that I had not seen before:

...a guy who will put his day job on hold for 72 hours and sit down and reverse-engineer an Apple II conversion of Tetris, just for the pleasure of it.

This is dated before any commercial release of Tetris, on January 29, 1987. That's about one year before Spectrum HoloByte and Mirrorsoft released their first versions. As I write this I still have no idea when Stein first saw Tetris. Well we know this source, how reliable is it? Who knows but it mentions the Apple II again. They also say Stein discovered Tetris in July 1986. This would make the discovery before Mechner even played Tetris for the first time. However I don't think it's an impossibility. Despite these sources, I don't think it's valid to have a page for this version as there is just zero information about the actual game itself. The story should live in a more complete section on Stein, Tetris in Hungary, and how Tetris spread west.

Let me know what you think. --simonlc (talk) 05:05, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

I agree that there isn't enough info for a page on the game. I do, however, have a citation for the existence of the Commodore 64 and Apple II versions: Game Over, the book by David Sheff. From page 302 of the 1999 edition:

In June 1986, Stein was at SZKI in Budapest to see Hungarian programs when, on a nearby computer, he noticed "Tetris." He sat down to try the game and couldn't stop playing. "I was not a game player," he said, "so if I liked it, it must be a very good game." He asked the director of the institute where the game had come from, and was told that it had been sent by a friend at the Computer Center of the Academy of Science in Moscow.

The same day, Stein claims, he was shown another "Tetris," this one on a Commodore 64 and Apple II. It was the same game, Stein says he was told, adapted by Hungarian programmers. Although they had obviously converted the Russian program to the other machines, Stein says he told the Hungarians he would license the original PC game from the Russians and the Commodore and Apple versions from the Hungarians.

There is also evidence that the Mirrorsoft Commodore 64 release was based on the Hungarian version, but again there's no info on that version itself. Arcorann (talk) 11:03, 13 May 2021 (UTC)