Tetris

When I was a much younger man I wasn’t bad at video games. I grew up on a diet of 1st generation arcade games such as Space Invaders, Galaxians, Scramble and Tempest, but my favourite of all these shoot-em-up style games was Defender. It’s not an easy game to recreate on a modern console successfully because of the numerous levers and buttons involved in the game play and these I never did master. It was my favourite game but I was no better than average at it.

During my University years the game that appealed to my mathematical nature was one of the first arcade puzzle games – Tetris. I played it for hours and this time I was good at it. On the machine housed in the Cardiff University Union I traded high scores with a fellow Maths Undergrad by the name of T.O.M. Those who remember the painstaking way that you were allowed to enter three initials against the high score will understand the use of the periods.

So today I found again a use for my skill in the aforementioned machine and took great delight in it. Far too much delight my wife will tell you. Having found the perfect wine box for DVDs a couple of days earlier I discovered those wine boxes left too small to perfectly hold a DVD sideways. The solution I found can be seen in the picture below in this hybrid of Blu-Ray and DVD in one box. Tetris at its best!