MIT Students Take Tetris To A Grand Scale

Careful, this hack might foster doubts about the level of fun you’re having at you own Computer Science department. Last weekend a group of students at MIT pulled off a hack of great scale by turning a building into a Tetris game board.

The structure in question is the Green Building on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Campus. It houses the Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences Departments, but was chose based on the size and regularity of the grid formed by the windows on one side. The group hasn’t provided much in the way of details yet, but the video after the break shows the game play and start-up screen. The middle portion of the building is used as a scrolling marquee to display the word “Tetris” before the game pieces start falling. We’re only guessing (and we hope you will add your conjecture in the comments section) but we’d bet they assembled a set of wireless RGB LED lamps and set one on the sill of each window. There does seem to be a number of ‘dead’ pixels, but it doesn’t diminish the fun of the overall effect.

If you don’t have your own building to play on, you should go small-scale and implement Tetris on a character display.

[Thanks via BostInno]

27 thoughts on “MIT Students Take Tetris To A Grand Scale

  1. Too bad they couldn’t hack it into something that’s a little less late-Brutalist monstrosity, but I guess we have to fellate Pei’s talentless corpse for another couple decades before anyone can admit in public that the man had all the aesthetic sense of a dead blowfly? OK, I guess.

    1. Okay, now tell us all about Frank Lloyd Wright being a anti-Semite again. I think it was the regular grid structure of the windows that drew them to the building. So I’m thinking it was more of a functional than aesthetic statement.

    1. @xszoéix: No, Schönherz did Tetris in 2003.

      Earliest instance of building-sized Tetris that I can find was one I saw in person; Brown University’s La Bastille project starting on April 14, 2000.

      At the bottom of their gameplay photos page you’ll find pictures of MIT students and Steve Wozniak himself enjoying gameplay to a live klezmer band!

  2. Yeah, MIT once again late to the party. That university is getting to be really slow at innovation. They used to be the place for new ideas, but since 2005/2006 they have been mediocre in any discovery at all with other Unis beating them to the punch more and more.

    I hope they get someone to shake things up and get them to become #1 again.

  3. i got to see this, a few friends were heading over to mit, and got a good long look at the game while walking across the bridge they were playing.
    great hack, poor tetris skills for mit students thought

  4. I wasn’t involved in this, but when I read about it, I went over to see for myself.

    On the southwest(ish) corner of McDermott Court, close to Building 14 / Hayden Memorial Library, they had a black console set up where anyone that walked up could take a turn playing it. The console was about the size of a washing machine or large podium, with the four standard Tetris ← ↑ ↓ → directional buttons, and that was about it.

    The game was very responsive. Aside from the fact that the “screen” was almost 300′ tall, the gameplay wasn’t all that different from playing it on an ordinary computer, video game console, smartphone, Game Boy, etc. The main problem was the pixel glitches — some windows were left on, and others weren’t lighting up, so you couldn’t always tell what shape the tiles were until they had moved a couple of levels.

    Notably, the console was on a concrete plaza, and there were no wires connected to it. So it had wireless access to the network (not so surprising), and a stable power supply (slightly more surprising). Chances are it was probably just a laptop that started out with a fully-charged battery, and ran until the battery expired.

    [That, or the console was over a manhole cover, and there was a Mechanical Turk under it controlling everything, but I think we can dismiss that explanation.]

    (And yes, other schools have done this before. So what? It’s still a fun idea — lighten up, sheesh. Bravo to all the schools that have people doing things like this.)

  5. Geez, the guys at MIT copied themselves! No one else realizes they made tetris on the green building last year? Granted it was in monochrome at the time, but even wikipedia knows about it.

    Cool project none the less, but not very inventive.

  6. Only two improvements I can think of, have it play the tetris theme (its catchy), and every time you complete a line have a floor of the building disapear. (Maybe we can get those guys who used the “nano-thermite” on 9-11 to help out. ;) )

  7. The glass front of the Green Building at MIT has been the subject of many hacks, often involving turning on or off lights in different rooms in the building- this is known as “greenspeak”.

Leave a Reply to BrianCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.