Creation of Tetris
Falling blocks from Moscow conquer the world
In June 1984 Alexey Pajitnov, a programmer at the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Computing Centre, wrote a game of falling blocks on an Elektronika 60 computer. Tetris became one of the most popular video games ever made.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Did you know
Tetris was invented in Moscow in 1984, five years before Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web at CERN.
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 4 years earlier
- 2008 Global financial crisis — 24 years later
Europe
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 5 years later
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 5 years later
- 1990 German reunification — 6 years later
- 1991–2001 Yugoslav Wars — 7 years later
- 1992 Maastricht Treaty — 8 years later
Middle East
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 5 years earlier
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 4 years earlier
- 1990–1991 Gulf War — 6 years later
Africa
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 17 years earlier
- 1967–1970 Nigerian Civil War and Biafra — 17 years earlier
- 1974 Lucy is discovered — 10 years earlier
- 1983–1985 The Ethiopian famine — 1 year earlier
- 1994 End of apartheid in South Africa — 10 years later
Asia
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 9 years earlier
- 1978 Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening-up — 6 years earlier
- 1984 Bhopal disaster — same year
- 1989 Tiananmen Square protests — 5 years later
- 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami — 20 years later
Americas
- 1969 Moon landing — 15 years earlier
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 14 years earlier
- 1980 Eruption of Mount St. Helens — 4 years earlier
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 1 year earlier
- 2001 September 11 attacks — 17 years later
Oceania
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 25 years earlier
- 1992 The Mabo decision — 8 years later
Alive at the time
- Nelson Mandela (aged 66)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 54)
- Jorge Luis Borges (aged 85)
- Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa) (aged 83)
- Mother Teresa (aged 74)
- Ronald Reagan (aged 73)
- Richard Nixon (aged 71)
- Indira Gandhi (aged 67)
- Edmund Hillary (aged 65)
- Jimmy Carter (aged 60)