The Tetris Effect
The Game That Hypnotized the World
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Narrated by:
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Dan Ackerman
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By:
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Dan Ackerman
About this listen
Tetris is perhaps the most instantly recognizable, most popular video game ever made. But the fascinating story of its origins is lesser known. How did an obscure Soviet programmer working on frail, antiquated computers create a product that has earned nearly $1 billion in sales? How did an inspired makeshift game turn into a worldwide sensation that has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, inspired a Hollywood movie, and been played in outer space?
In this surprising trivia-filled audiobook, tech reporter Dan Ackerman describes how, as a teenager behind the Iron Curtain, Alexey Pajitnov was struck with inspiration, then meticulously worked for years to bring the game he had envisioned to life. Ackerman shows how Tetris worked its way first through Pajitnov's office and then out into the world, entrancing player after player with its hypnotic shapes. Then, tracing the stories of the British, American, and Japanese moguls who raced each other for the rights, Ackerman recounts the game's complex and improbable path to global success.
The Tetris Effect is an homage to both creator and creation and a perfect gift for anyone who's ever played the game - which is to say, everyone.
©2016 Dan Ackerman (P)2016 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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IDEO, the widely admired, award-winning design and development firm that brought the world the Apple mouse, Polaroid's I-Zone instant camera, the Palm V, and hundreds of other cutting-edge products and services, reveals its secrets for fostering a culture and process of continuous innovation.
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This is an old book!
- By EPR review on 01-05-17
By: Tom Kelley, and others
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Automate This
- How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
- By: Christopher Steiner
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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It used to be that to diagnose an illness, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article you needed a human being with specific skills - and maybe an advanced degree or two. These days, high-level tasks are increasingly being handled by algorithms that can do precise work not only with speed but also with nuance. These "bots" started with human programming and logic, but now their reach extends beyond what their creators ever expected.
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good start, book runs out of sustenace
- By RealTruth on 02-15-13
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Seven Games
- A Human History
- By: Oliver Roeder
- Narrated by: William Sarris
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Checkers, backgammon, chess, and Go. Poker, Scrabble, and bridge. These seven games, ancient and modern, fascinate millions of people worldwide. In Seven Games, Oliver Roeder charts their origins and historical importance, the arcana of their rules, and the ways their design makes them pleasurable.
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All about computers and games
- By Mark L on 01-03-23
By: Oliver Roeder
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Service Games
- The Rise and Fall of SEGA: Enhanced Edition
- By: Sam Pettus
- Narrated by: Tom Racine
- Length: 17 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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New Edition! More content, images, and corrected text and facts. Monochrome edition. Starting with its humble beginnings in the 1950s and ending with its swan-song, the Dreamcast, in the early 2000s, this is the complete history of Sega as a console maker. Before home computers and video game consoles, before the Internet and social networking, and before motion controls and smartphones, there was Sega.
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The Story of the Fall of Sega
- By Austin on 01-05-15
By: Sam Pettus
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Explore/Create
- My Life in Pursuit of New Frontiers, Hidden Worlds, and the Creative Spark
- By: Richard Garriott, David Fisher
- Narrated by: Christopher Grove
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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An inventor, adventurer, entrepreneur, collector, and entertainer, and son of legendary scientist-astronaut Owen Garriott, Richard Garriott de Cayeux has been behind some of the most exciting undertakings of our time. A legendary pioneer of the online gaming industry - and a member of every gaming Hall of Fame - Garriott invented the multi-player online game, and coined the term "Avatar" to describe an individual's online character. In this fascinating memoir, Garriott invites listeners on the great adventure that is his life.
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The Modern Day Explorer
- By Elijah on 04-17-17
By: Richard Garriott, and others
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Group Genius
- The Creative Power of Collaboration
- By: Keith Sawyer
- Narrated by: Jonathan Marosz
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In this authoritative and fascinating new audiobook, Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity and erects new principles in their place. He reveals that creativity is always collaborative: even when you're alone. Sawyer's audiobook is filled with compelling stories about the inventions that changed our world.
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Worth reading
- By Glenn on 12-29-10
By: Keith Sawyer
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You Only Have to Be Right Once
- The Unprecedented Rise of the Instant Tech Billionaires
- By: Randall Lane
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Over the last three years, Forbes has published in depth profiles of this new batch of billionaires, including the founders of Spotify, Dropbox, Tumblr, and Twitter. Now, in a compilation introduced and updated by Forbes editor Randall Lane, fans and critics alike will get a comprehensive look at who these super-entrepreneurs are and what they say about their own success and their plans for the future.
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Awesome book!
- By Jamal Love on 06-17-15
By: Randall Lane
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Thinking Machines
- The Quest for Artificial Intelligence - and Where It's Taking Us Next
- By: Luke Dormehl
- Narrated by: Gus Brown
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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When most of us think about artificial intelligence, our minds go straight to cyborgs, robots, and sci-fi thrillers where machines take over the world. But the truth is that artificial intelligence is already among us. It exists in our smartphones, fitness trackers, and refrigerators that tell us when the milk will expire. In some ways the future people dreamed of at the World's Fair in the 1960s is already here. We're teaching our machines how to think like humans, and they're learning at an incredible rate.
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Mostly platitudes with no depth
- By Gary on 03-24-17
By: Luke Dormehl
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All the Rave
- The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster
- By: Joseph Menn
- Narrated by: John Rubinstein
- Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The definitive inside account of the file-sharing revolution that overthrew the music industry, All the Rave reveals the family betrayal, greed, and mismanagement that hijacked one the most fundamental innovations of the Internet era. Named one of the three best books of 2003 by Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc., All the Rave has been out of print until now and unavailable in most formats. Author and veteran technology journalist Joseph Menn also wrote 2010's Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords who are Bringing Down the Internet.
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The Far-reaching Karma of Napster
- By Susie on 04-29-13
By: Joseph Menn
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The Starfish and the Spider
- The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
- By: Ori Brafman, Rod Beckstrom
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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If you cut off a spider's leg, it's crippled; if you cut off its head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish's leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: "spiders", which have a rigid hierarchy, and "starfish", which rely on the power of peer relationships.
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Centralized and decentralized models
- By Chan Meng on 12-07-07
By: Ori Brafman, and others
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The Network
- The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age
- By: Scott Woolley
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the origin story of the airwaves - the foundational technology of the communications age - as told through the 40-year friendship of an entrepreneurial industrialist and a brilliant inventor. David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and equal parts Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, and William Randolph Hearst, was the greatest supporter of his friend, Edwin Armstrong, developer of the first amplifier, the modern radio transmitter, and FM radio.
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The Classic Struggle
- By Jean on 06-01-16
By: Scott Woolley
What listeners say about The Tetris Effect
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- John C. Bland II
- 09-19-16
Well worth my time
I absolutely loved this book! I recommend it to anyone who is interested in business, gaming, or programming.
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- Cain Pedersen
- 07-08-19
TETRIS
HANK ROGERS IS THE REAL HERO OF TETRIS. GOD BLESS THAT MAN. HE IS THE MOST GENEROUS AND KIND AND BRILLIANT BUSINESS MAN EVER HOLY SHIT WHAT A COOL GUY I HOPE HE'S DOING AND I HOPE HE KNOWS HE'S A GOD
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- Noah Lugeons
- 01-08-21
Fun Read
Fascinating story and get well written. There are some jarring audio patches where we suddenly change narrators for a sentence or two and they're really bad, but other than that, it was solid.
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-29-23
Interesting Content, bad structure
Feels more like a series of tech blogs with a word count they needed to hit instead of a cohesive story. Bits of info are repeated often, and awkward tangents abound. The content itself is interesting, just maybe needed another edit.
And on a technical level the audio quality varies wildly. A lot of jarring edits.
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- bobby shovel
- 09-12-16
TETRIS FOREVER!
If you play, read please. I'm glad I did. I played several games while reading(audible style) I'm going to play a few more today. As usual. I love TETRIS. never played other games much. Didn't have the need.
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- Amos
- 01-20-17
Good story, bad delivery
the audio was way to fast so i had to turn down the narration speed. Also the barrater would throw in these weird tetris facts and often then were not relative to the current chapter.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Andrew
- 01-22-17
Great to relive my Tetris experience
Dan's reading of his book was fine except he reads way too fast. Thankfully Audible let's vary the playback speed. 0.85 was perfect.
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- mer
- 05-02-22
A Historical Account of a Beloved Video Game by Someone with No Love for Games or History
If you enjoy the irony of someone who seems to have 0 understanding of the impact of capitalism and corruption on USSR stability talking about a multi-million dollar deal in Soviet Moscow, this is the book for you.
If you like reading a book about a video game by someone who refers collectively to all previous video games as mindless entertainment for pre-teens, then you’ll love The Tetris Effect.
DNF, could not get past the author’s disrespect for Pajitnov (whose game he claims would be lost to the eighties as a dusty curio without the benevolent tech moguls of the West) and his disdain for breakthroughs in programming and play from Pong to Mario Brothers.
You can celebrate something without dismissing the marvels that came before it, and you can be critical of a time and place without ignoring all context. Was deeply looking forward to this read and just as deeply disappointed.
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- Rog
- 09-26-16
Never quite fits together
What starts as a promising deeper look at the tangled Tetris history is ultimately marred by uneven audio, the narrator's distractingly (and unfortunately) slurred speech, bits of trivia that are inserted in the middle of the story with no audio cues, and a padded story with too many boring details. Read the book instead, but know that about half of it should have been edited out. At that point, of course, it would instead become an incredibly long magazine feature.
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2 people found this helpful