The guy graduated from the same high-school a few years ahead of me (Moscow School 91). Me and my classmates had our ears full on how great he was from our homeroom teacher (yes, we had them in high-school). We were the bunch of pre-selected math wiz kids, but whatever we did, we often heard from the our homeroom lady "You are not Lesha Pazhitnov", or "Lesha did this...". We didn't quite know who he was, but hated him nonetheless :). This was way before he made Tetris.
Having met Alexey Pajitnov, I'm excited to read this piece. He's a great developer, but also a very friendly and charming fellow too.
The thing that I think makes Tetris so great is its simplicity. I often measure the greatness of a game's design by postulating whether or not it could have existed on much earlier hardware.
Thus, Tetris could have run on an Atari 2600 because it's not a graphically intense game, and yet it is gameplay intense. Similar phenomenon can be seen with Dance Dance Revolution (Foot pads and music existed before the CD console era), Dwarf Fortress (ok, well, maybe not. It can choke a modern CPU), Angry Birds, Minecraft, Peggle, and all the MOBA's (which evolved from 10 years of older games that evolved this modern style). The soul of good game design is constrained resources.
Your criteria would rule out Minecraft, DayZ, etc.
We're living in the golden age of game design. It seems like the reason is because of an abundance of resources. Kids won't know the lengths older devs had to go through in order to get the most basic game ideas prototyped, and that's a great thing. It's never been easier to try out a new idea.
In the actual implementation of Minecraft yes, regarding the concept i disagree. I'm no game designer, but I imagine that having a block based game with similar mechanics could be implemented a lot more "down to the metal". Procedural terrain generation has been around for a while, the crafting system is simple (maximum of 9 items => 1 item), and vanilla minecraft only uses less than 700 ids for blocks and items. Tool effects on blocks are relatively simple, and a lot of the other complexity can be done without (say rendering arrow flight paths or items dropped onto the floor). Which doesn't mean the current implemenation isn't somewhat cludged together, much to the chagrin of the modding community who don't allways appreciate coding decisions made within the vanilla game. We'll need to see how long the game lasts, since along with the development company Mojang being purchased by Microsoft, they don't always handle interactions with supporting projects such as Buckit, Forge or Cauldron too gracefully. Since they often rewrite and restructure portions of the game without providing the long promised modding API devs and modders have to completely rewrite their code between versions, which leads to high developer churn. There's lots of drama in the community, and Mojang is invariably connected to it due to several of the senior devs stemming from the community.
DayZ? Probably not. Minecraft? Almost certainly. It seems hard to imagine a future where most of our children's children won't someday play something similar to Minecraft.
I understand and agree with the general thrust of your 2nd paragraph there, though I wanted to chime in to say that I can attest first-hand it was pretty easy to prototype game ideas as far back as 1983, at least. I personally was doing it back then, in BASIC and 6502 ASM on the Apple II. There were even tiny indie shops back then making and selling their own games to the public. You usually found out about them from friends, or printed catalogs of distributors, or on BBS forums. In some ways, game dev has gotten "easier" since then, though in other ways arguably harder -- expectations are higher, there's vastly more competition both within games and across other media and other sources of entertainment on the web, and also the hurdles imposed by the App Store type middlemen.
Everything old is new again.
I second this with: fashion. If your understand clothes, you understand how fashion designers make old designs look new again.
I was kind of confused when the article mentioned Tetris getting its first big break outside of the Soviet Union in 1990 at CES. That can't possibly be accurate. I mean, it came out in 1989 for both NES and Game Boy.
Tetris first came out as an indy-esque game in the Soviet Academy of Science, then spread from office to office, and was then picked up by a Hungarian company and then spread to the West.
Nintendo wanted then an exclusivity deal for consoles and sent Henk Rogers to discuss the matter with the soviet (other people wanted to same thing at the same time).
This is described the documentary "Tetris - From Russia with Love" linked somewhere else in this comment thread.
The rest is history: Tetris became bundled with the Gameboy and that was hugely successful. That huge boom in popularity is certainly why many people erroneously refer to "The Original Tetris" as either the Gameboy or NES version instead of the Electronica60 one (here's some footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0gAgQQHFcQ )
I loved reading about guys like that because I had a somewhat similar background of making entire computer games, coming up with the idea, doing all the gameplay and technical design, coding, art and sound, though in my case also the publication and marketing in some cases. There's a lot of personal educational value in Doing Everything yourself.
