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What are the "cultural or historical referents" of Tetris, Angry Birds, and Snake?
by jonathanstrange 4y ago
What are the "cultural or historical referents" of Tetris, Angry Birds, and Snake?
- defrost 4y agoPyramid building, The Emu War, and Pentecostal snake handling ... clearly.
- krapp 4y agoTetris: the author's childhood playing pentominoes[0] Angry Birds: "a sketch of stylized wingless birds[1]", apparently, and games using that basic physics go back ages, and are inspired by cannon warfare[2] Snake: all Snake games are based on Blockade, published by Gremlin industries, where I found this[3] on an interesting site HN might like "[Lane Hauck] While we were designing wall games, I was tinkering in the back room with a video circuit that became our Blockade game board. I kept showing my work to Frank Fogleman and Jerry, pestering them with the “can we get into video now?” question. I made a 32x24 cell frame buffer with graphical characters. I was intrigued by the random walk in Physics…which said a drunk taking steps in random directions around a lamppost would gravitate to the lamppost. I decided to program an arrow to be the drunk, and watched it flit around the screen for about a minute before getting bored. Then I thought, what if the drunk can’t visit the same square twice? I made that adjustment, and watched the arrow move a bit and then get trapped. The step from there to Blockade was a small one. (Hauck 2012)" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#Conception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#Conception [1] https://www.cleverism.com/why-angry-birds-got-successful/ https://www.cleverism.com/why-angry-birds-got-successful/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game [3] http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-ultimate-so-far-history-of-gremlin_25.html http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-ultima...