Think back to the first time someone told you about the game Tetris. Was it a friend? An older sibling or a parent? Maybe you saw someone playing it at an arcade.

How long did it take you to get what Tetris is — what you had to accomplish in the game and how to play it?

2024 boasts the 40th anniversary of the classic game of falling blocks, known as tetrominoes.

More than 520 million copies of Tetris have been sold since its worldwide release in the 1980s.

For our series "Game Mode", we're setting up to stack — looking at the game's history and why it became and has stayed popular.

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