Games

MIT students turn whole building into huge game of Tetris

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A mysterious group of MIT hackers has taken over the grid of windows on the front of the Institute's Building 54 to create a monster game of Tetris (Photo: Erik Nygren)
Close up of the ground-level control unit used to rotate and move blocks on the Building 54 Tetris display matrix (Photo: Erik Nygren)
An alumni plays supersized Tetris as students look on (Photo: Erik Nygren)
The Tetris control unit that hackers used to control gameplay (Photo: Erik Nygren)
Lines containing gaps remain onscreen until there's no more room for the blocks to fall and the game is lost, at which point all of the blocks tumble down and off the grid (Photo: Erik Nygren)
Level 2 with more pastel colors, with the Green Building behind the Great Sail (Photo: Erik Nygren)
Building 54 mid game, does the player fit that shape into the grid without leaving a gap? (Photo: Erik Nygren)
A mysterious group of MIT hackers has taken over the grid of windows on the front of the Institute's Building 54 to create a monster game of Tetris (Photo: Erik Nygren)
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The two-hundred and ninety-five feet (ninety meter) tall Building 54 on MIT's Cambridge campus has become the canvas for a number of carefully planned and daringly executed visual displays over the years, not strictly allowed by the administration but often looked upon with some appreciation. The building is home to the Institute's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Science (EAPS) and has a host of meteorological instruments and radio communications equipment on its roof - but its the grid-like windows to the front that have become the main attraction to hackers, as they are known. The latest hack is the successful realization of a long-standing challenge, a huge playable game of Tetris.

No doubt most readers are familiar with Tetris. First developed in Russia, the ubiquitous tile-matching video game has players rotate and move random geometrically-shaped blocks as they fall from the top of the screen to try and make gap-free horizontal lines at the bottom. When a full line is created, it disappears from the matrix playing area but lines containing gaps remain onscreen until there's no more room for the blocks to fall and the game is lost. I first discovered the strangely addictive game on an Amiga system, then later on a Nokia mobile phone but it's appeared on many platforms in a number of different variations.

Looking up at the windows to the front of the 21-story MIT building - which is also known as the Green Building (named after its principal donor, Cecil Howard Green, and not because of any environmental ticks in the plus column) - it's not too difficult to understand why a Tetris hack has become central to the IHTFP hacking community. The windows are arranged in an 18 x 9 grid, not quite the 20 cells high and 10 cells wide that's become a display standard for the game but close enough.

Building 54 mid game, does the player fit that shape into the grid without leaving a gap? (Photo: Erik Nygren)

As is common with MIT IHTFP hacks, those involved haven't given away how the game of Tetris was achieved but the visual evidence suggests the placement of multi-color LED lighting modules in each of the windows to form a 9 x 17 grid display, with gameplay wirelessly controlled from a console pad at ground level.

Ahead of gameplay, the word TETRIS was scrolled across the middle section of the display grid and the game itself consisted of three levels. The first featured block shapes of vivid coloring, the second threw in some paler hues and the last involved changing the block colors as they descended. When the luck of the player on the ground ran out and the game was lost, all of the blocks would tumble down the grid screen.

The source link has some links to videos taken of the hack, which do show a few dead "pixels" in the grid but this doesn't detract from a hugely impressive visual treat.

Other hacks of note include a huge VU meter on display during a concert in 1993, a huge illuminated Oscar to celebrate a double win for the film Good Will Hunting in 1998 and an American flag for the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

All photos courtesy of Erik Nygren.

Source: MIT IHTFP Hacks

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9 comments
flame_can
Impressive as it it, but the P.I.W.O project was first and did it better.
Mr Stiffy
Mmmm not sort of dumb but fun and interesting and a great time waster.....
Nice to watch on a dark night from a ways down the street.
Bonnie Dillabough
I can't believe they didn't make a video of this in action! How cool, quirky and geeky is this?
The Hoff
No video? Sorry, it must be lame.
Marcin Łukasik
This has been shown in Russia and Poland ages ago...
Dénes Sebestyén
In Hungary there is an annual event of a university, where it's a challenge to make a good "matrix display" from the dormitory building. Look. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLyEUFwnIrM&feature=related
freshmike
Poland - Technical University of Wroclaw - Project P.I.W.O First version was presented in 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGU8dlvOPUY http://www.piwo.pwr.wroc.pl/?lang=en
MasterG
Stop making bombs and hack a building to play tetris! Why dont you humans do more stuff like this? Life is not supposed to be about suffering - true intelligence spends its time in creating joy true ignorance is spending time creating fear.
fuqthegovt
*yawn* lemme know when they have a 1080-floor (preferably with 1920 window length) building set up like this so I can watch any action movie in hd from 10 miles away and I'll be impressed. This looks like an atari 2600 rigged to some leds spread over the rooms of a building, 16 colors and all.