A champion is afraid of losing. Everyone else is afraid of winning.
It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.
Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
The player controls a dot, square, or object on a bordered plane. As it moves forward, it leaves a trail behind, resembling a moving snake. In some games, the end of the trail is in a fixed position, so the snake continually gets longer as it moves. In another common scheme, the snake has a specific length, so there is a moving tail a fixed number of units away from the head. The player loses when the snake runs into the screen border, a trail, other obstacle, or itself. The Snake concept comes in two major variants: In the first, which is most often a two-player game, there are multiple snakes on the playfield. Each player attempts to block the other so the opponent runs into an existing trail and loses. Surround for the Atari VCS is an example of this type. The Light Cycles segment of the Tron arcade game is a single-player version where the other "snakes" are AI controlled. In the second variant, a sole player attempts to eat items by running into them with the head of the snake. Each item eaten makes the snake longer, so avoiding collision with the snake becomes progressively more difficult. Examples: Nibbler, Snake Byte.
The Snake design dates back to the arcade game Blockade, developed and published by Gremlin in 1976.It was cloned as Bigfoot Bonkers the same year. In 1977, Atari released two Blockade-inspired titles: the arcade game Dominos and Atari VCS game Surround. Surround was one of the nine Atari VCS launch titles in the US. It was sold by Sears under the name Chase. That same year, a similar game was launched for the Bally Astrocade as Checkmate. The first known home computer version, titled Worm, was programmed in 1978 by Peter Trefonas of the US on the TRS-80, and published by CLOAD magazine in the same year. This was followed shortly afterwards with versions from the same author for the Commodore PET and Apple II. A clone of the Hustle arcade game, itself a clone of Blockade, was written by Peter Trefonas in 1979 and published by CLOAD. An authorized version of Hustle was published by Milton Bradley for the TI-99/4A in 1980. In 1982's Snake for the BBC Micro, by Dave Bresnen, the snake is controlled using the left and right arrow keys relative to the direction it is heading in. The snake increases in speed as it gets longer, and there's only one life. Nibbler (1982) is a single-player arcade game where the snake fits tightly into a maze, and the gameplay is faster than most snake designs. Another single-player version is part of the 1982 Tron arcade game, themed with light cycles. It reinvigorated the snake concept, and many subsequent games borrowed the light cycle theme. Starting in 1991, Nibbles was included with MS-DOS for a period of time as a QBasic sample program. In 1992, Rattler Race was released as part of the second Microsoft Entertainment Pack. It adds enemy snakes to the familiar apple-eating gameplay.
Tetris is primarily composed of a field of play in which pieces of different geometric forms, called "tetriminos", descend from the top of the field. During this descent, the player can move the pieces laterally and rotate them until they touch the bottom of the field or land on a piece that had been placed before it. The player can neither slow down the falling pieces nor stop them, but can accelerate them in most versions. The objective of the game is to use the pieces to create as many horizontal lines of blocks as possible. When a line is completed, it disappears, and the blocks placed above fall one rank. Completing lines grants points, and accumulating a certain number of points moves the player up a level, which increases the number of points granted per completed line. In most versions, the speed of the falling pieces increases with each level, leaving the player with less time to think about the placement. The player can clear multiple lines at once, which can earn bonus points in some versions. It is possible to complete up to four lines simultaneously with the use of the I-shaped tetrimino; this move is called a "Tetris", and is the basis of the game's title. If the player cannot make the blocks disappear quickly enough, the field will start to fill, and when the pieces reach the top of the field and prevent the arrival of additional pieces, the game ends. At the end of each game, the player receives a score based on the number of lines that have been completed. The game never ends with the player's victory; the player can only complete as many lines as possible before an inevitable loss. Since 1996, The Tetris Company has internally defined specifications and guidelines that publishers must adhere to in order to be granted a license to Tetris. The contents of these guidelines establish such elements as the correspondence of buttons and actions, the size of the field of play, the system of rotation, and others.
In 1979, Alexey Pajitnov joined the Computer Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences as a speech recognition researcher. While he was tasked with testing the capabilities of new hardware, his ambition was to use computers to make people happy. Pajitnov developed several puzzle games on the institute's computer, an Electronika 60, a scarce resource at the time. For Pajitnov, "games allow people to get to know each other better and act as revealers of things you might not normally notice, such as their way of thinking". In 1984, while trying to recreate a favorite puzzle game from his childhood featuring pentominoes, Pajitnov imagined a game consisting of a descent of random pieces that the player would turn to fill rows. Pajitnov felt that the game would be needlessly complicated with twelve different shape variations, so he scaled the concept down to tetrominoes, of which there are seven variants. Pajitnov titled the game Tetris, a word created from a combination of "tetra" (meaning "four") and his favorite sport, "tennis". Because the Electronika 60 had no graphical interface, Pajitnov modelled the field and pieces using spaces and brackets. Realizing that completed lines filled the screen quickly, Pajitnov decided to delete them, creating a key part of Tetris gameplay. This early version of Tetris had no scoring system and no levels, but its addictive quality distinguished it from the other puzzle games Pajitnov had created.
Falling Ball is a free android game in which you make a ball fall down through a series of holes by tilting your mobile device. As time goes by, the game will speed up making it more difficult to drop the ball through the holes. Also the moving platforms will make it harder to fall down.
The history of video games spans a period of time between the invention of the first electronic games and today, covering many inventions and developments. Video gaming reached mainstream popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, when arcade video games, gaming consoles and home computer games were introduced to the general public. Since then, video gaming has become a popular form of entertainment and a part of modern culture in most parts of the world. The early history of video games, therefore, covers the period of time between the first interactive electronic game with an electronic display in 1947, the first true video games in the early 1950s, and the rise of early arcade video games in the 1970s (Pong and the beginning of the first generation of video game consoles with the Magnavox Odyssey, both in 1972). During this time there was a wide range of devices and inventions corresponding with large advances in computing technology, and the actual first video game is dependent on the definition of "video game" used.