A strange little side quest
The next time Wheel of Fortune asks for one more try, remember that game ideas rarely appear from nowhere. Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris in 1984 after drawing inspiration from pentomino puzzles, then simplified the idea around shapes made from four squares. The same trail leads to another fact: 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.
