From the issue dated May 12, 2000

Tetris, Anyone? By JOEL HARDI Call it a final cold-war victory for the United States. Students at Brown University last month finished turning one side of the university's 14-story Sciences Library into a working Tetris game. It was their tribute to the Soviet-designed video game, which has outlasted its Reagan-era rivals Pac-Man and Donkey Kong in popularity. In Tetris, a player attempts to direct continuously falling blocks to form a gapless wall. The project's inspiration came at a dormitory meeting a few years ago from a member of the university's Technology House, says Soren Spies, a senior who managed the effort. "He said that he'd been staring up at the building and hallucinating a little bit, and saw Tetris blocks," Mr. Spies says. "We thought about it, and said, 'Whoa, that would be so cool.'" As planning began last fall, the 30-odd residents of Tech House code-named the project "La Bastille" -- because sneaking into the building to install the Tetris system would be like "storming the Bastille." But they soon realized that the system would be too complicated to set up in a single night, and they didn't want to get expelled. Then Nik Lochmatow, a junior majoring in visual arts, had an idea. "If we could pass this off as an art project, then we could get it through the proper channels," he says. The idea worked. And the students won the consent of everyone from the university's risk and facilities managers to the head librarian. The students went to work, writing software, building circuit boards, and stringing up 10,000 Christmas lights. As the target completion date came and went, classes and sleep were forgotten. Mr. Lochmatow estimates that he and five others spent 8 to 12 hours a day on the project in its last four weeks. The result, Mr. Spies says, speaks for itself. The students ran the system every night for a week, and one night, more than 200 people showed up to play, one at a time, using a laptop connected to the university's network. Anyone can play a simulated version of the game at the Tech House's Web site (http://techhouse.org). The project has won Tech House some respect. "I've heard some people say, 'Usually Tech House is a bunch of nerds, but this -- this is amazing,'" Mr. Spies says. http://chronicle.com Section: Short Subjects Page: A12 Easy-to-print version E-mail this article