I've heard several people say that Alexey Pajitnov was a fan of tennis, and that he created the word "tetris" from "tetra" and "tennis." I've never seen this docmented in any reliable source. Does anyone have any further info regarding this "tennis" claim?
Someone has recently added it to the tetris wikipedia article: Pajitnov has cited pentominoes as a source of inspiration for the game. Its name is derived from the Greek numerical prefix "tetra-" meaning four, as all of the blocks are made up of four segments and the "is" comes from the game tennis, which was the only other game Alexey Pazhitnov enjoyed.
from wikipedia's discussion, "That was stated in an episode of Icons on G4 if anyone cares to add a reference for it." --Pagrashtak i also remember someone saying that on the episode, someone only speculated about this being alexey's favorite sport and the thereafter wordplay. i haven't seen the episode myself.
Yes they do. Look down the interlanguage links in Wikipedia:Tennis and see the Russian article ?????????:??????. In fact, except for Greek and Gaelic, all of the languages that 1. use a Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, or Japanese alphabet and 2. have a Wikipedia article on lawn tennis borrow some form of the word "tennis", possibly mutilating it into something like "tenis" (Spanish), "teniso" (Esperanto), or "???" (tenisu) (Japanese). In standard 2-player, if you get really easy garbage, as was the case in Tetris (G or Tetris & Dr. Mario (Super NES), and you keep sending 4 lines back and forth whenever you get an I tetromino, isn't that like tennis?
