At E3 2009, Jonathan Metts and I sat down and chatted with Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers, President and CEO of Tetris licenser Blue Planet Software. The reason for the interview was to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Tetris on June 6, 2009.

"[It] is a momentous occasion," said Rogers of the celebration.

As for why the game has such a great longevity, he said, "the gameplay is just rock solid…We expected someone to come up with a better game, but they haven't."

When asked about the future of the game, Rogers and Pajitnov see the video game developing as a sport.

"Competitive one-on-one, team Tetris, all of the above," Rogers said of the possibilities for Tetris as a sport.

The key to this, according to Rogers, is to make the game even.

"If you have a game where you're winning more than half or losing more than half, then you lose interest," he said. "The only drawback to Tetris is that you have to find somebody of your own [skill] level."

In an effort to keep the "sport" fair, there will be a handicap system integrated into Tetris that will function similarly to the handicap system in golf.

As for how the actual sport will function, Rogers presented one idea that ties in with how Tetris requires so much focus that you can't look at your opponent's screen. In a form of team Tetris, two teams could play each other while there is "a coach or a navigator" managing them and watching their opponent's actions. In a setup similar to rugby, one player on each team would have the focus on them at one time. So basically, it is a one-on-one game where player's screens can be switched on a whim.

Pajitnov originally envisioned Tetris as a competitive game, if only because of the fact that it had a running score. He said that single player is what hooks people, but multiplayer keeps them around.

Rogers sees a bigger distinction between single player and multiplayer Tetris.

"There is a difference between a game and solitaire," he said. "A game really requires two people and most of the experiences, like the original Mario, those are obstacle courses. It's not really a game. It's only a game if two of you are doing the same thing and you're competing to get across the obstacle course. Tetris easily crossed that bridge from being a single player to being a multiplayer game."

As far as what Tetris has become in his home country of Russia, Pajitnov revealed that Russians use the word Tetris without capital letters so it is just a regular word in Russia that means "small casual game."

The two also commented on the way that Tetris keeps "people mentally healthy." Rogers cited a study where they discovered that Tetris changes the shape of the brain and increases the grey matter where intelligence comes from.

There was also another study that delved into Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In this study, people were subjected to a traumatic video, and after a break, one group played Tetris and the other group didn't. The people who played Tetris had fewer flashbacks than the ones who didn't.

When asked about what genre Tetris fits into, Pajitnov spoke of his own definition of a puzzle game, which is "some configuration that you need to figure out." He learned over time that this definition was not the standard.

"It's the first casual game of its own genre," Pajitnov added.