A strange little side quest
Even a quick game like Blox Puzzle sits on top of decades — and sometimes centuries — of ideas. Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris in 1984 after drawing inspiration from pentomino puzzles, then simplified the idea around shapes made from four squares. The timeline takes another interesting turn: Spacewar! appeared on MIT's PDP-1 in 1962 and became one of the earliest influential computer games shared among programmers. The details change, but the appeal of learning a system and trying again is remarkably persistent.
