Talk in English - US at Longhorn PHP 2026
Track Name:
Main Ballroom
Short URL: https://joind.in/talk/ba22b
(QR-Code (opens in new window))
You think you know Tetris. Falling blocks, line clears, gets faster — every developer alive has played it. But Tetris has a published 60-page specification called the Tetris Guideline that defines an eight-phase state machine, a 7-bag randomizer, a Super Rotation System with wall-kick offsets, T-spin detection, and three different placement-time rules. There's a 40-year competitive community, a licensing saga that became an Apple TV movie, and a teenager who in late 2023 became the first human to play far enough into NES Tetris to crash it. I built my own Tetris in PHP from the spec. This talk is what falling blocks taught me about specifications, state machines, bitmask encodings, and the strange power of communities that outlive the products that birthed them.
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That was actually pretty fascinating
This was a really fascinating look into the history and mechanics of Tetris, but the actual implementation and code parts were definitely compressed for time. I can't wait to see how this talk evolves at future conferences!
I had no idea there was such drama behind the history, and how in-depth the mechanics actually are. The book of guidelines was wild. A super interesting talk with a lot of content, and I learned a lot. I'm not sure what I expected this talk to be about but it definitely was not this. Really enjoyed it!