We used to take Tetris everywhere with us on our Gameboys, but this is the 21st century and we’re all about constant, unfettered access to fun. Never mind all of the other portable consoles, smartphone games and everything else we use to amuse ourselves – Marc Kerger has invented a wearable game of Tetris.

The Tetris T-shirt features a screen with 128 LEDs; behind the scenes are two Adafruit Matrix controllers and four 3D printed soft button controllers. An Arduino controller and the battery compartment are housed in 3D printed covers to keep them protected from your sweat. The battery compartment is removable and presumably (hopefully) the T-shirt is washable.

Although the shirt doesn’t play the iconic Tetris music, the gameplay is surprisingly fun and easy looking…but you’ll have to learn to play upside down. Offering to let someone else play the game on your shirt  might just be a great way to make a new friend, though. Kerger’s shirt is a one-off personal creation that he doesn’t plan on selling because of its high cost, but you can get the programming instructions from his own info source: the Pumpktris on Instructables.

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People do some pretty impressive things for Halloween, but this playable Tetris jack o’lantern is arguably the most impressive thing ever made out of an orange gourd. Nathan of HahaBird took his pumpkin from typical to totally rad with the use of some LEDs, an Arduino and some good old fashioned drilling and soldering.

Of course, programming a working video game into a pumpkin isn’t as easy as cutting out a few triangles and calling it a face. The programmer had to do some serious planning, then relied on trial and error to get the project just how he wanted it.

And it paid off – the finished product is called “Pumpktris” and it’s a real, playable game. The stem of the pumpkin is actually a joystick that controls the game – a pretty novel addition, really. All told, the pumpkin’s creator spent about 12 hours working on this project, which we think is very reasonable given the level of awesome contained in this pumpkin.

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The original Tetris is made of awesome, but we have to admire this real-life version using plastic blocks and an angled table. Tetris Analogico, or Analog Tetris, is of course based on the classic video game with a few big differences. First, the goal of this physical Tetris game isn’t to clear rows by filling them up with tetrominoes; it is to build as solid a structure as possible up to the yellow line on the game board. Maybe even stranger is the fact that a dealer – wearing a cute little visor, no less – slides the blocks down the playing surface to the player.

The players in this video look way too nervous for people who are just playing Tetris, but they are preparing to play in the first Analog Tetris world championship, which would give anyone reason to sweat. The game is both an analog version of the Tetris video game and a nod to the meatspace origin of the video game: a slight more complicated game known as pentominoes.

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We have to admit a very soft spot for Tetris – it’s a classic game that we grew up playing for hours and hours on end. We’re still playing it today, in fact. But just in case you ever get tired of staring at a screen, a company called Techno Source is taking the colorful shapes and bringing them into the physical world.

Tetris Link is a soon-to-be-released game that reworks everyone’s favorite block-arranging game into a Connect Four-type game complete with vertical plastic game board.

Rather than filling up entire lines to get rid of blocks, the goal of this game is to connect as many of your specific color (red, blue, yellow or green) while blocking other players’ color connections. Every player rolls the dice to determine which piece they can play on their turn.

Apparently Tetris has been remade in every possible way in the digital realm and is now set to take over the physical game world as well. With so many of our classic childhood favorite games making their way into digital formats, maybe it only makes sense that this perennial favorite of the video game world is now being remade as a tabletop game. Can’t wait to play? The game will be available for around $20 starting in the Spring of 2011.

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(image via: The Given)

Tetris, like Duck Hunt, is one of those classic games that we never seem to grow out of. The catchy music, colorful blocks, and instant gratification you get when a line disappears keep us coming back for more. Tetris lends itself particularly well to real-life depictions or enactments in a way that most other games simply can’t match. Seeing those blocks in real-life settings is irresistible.

Believe it or not, this is an actual ad for Freebord skateboards. The real-life Tetris game was played on the nighttime streets of San Francisco, with the “blocks” being lighted wire shapes attached over the skateboarders’ heads. It no doubt took a lot of skill along with a few outtakes to get this smooth, awesome video.

(images via: Justin Sachtleben)

If you were walking along Abercrombie lane in Sydney, Australia in late 2008, and happened to look up, you might think you’d gotten stuck in one of these real-life Tetris games. The three lighted blocks were actually an art exhibit called One More Go One More Go which celebrated the classic game.

(images via: StaneStane)

Tampere, Finland is home to the Mikontalo Building, which is the largest student dormitory in the Nordic countries. When a portion of the building was being worked on, a group of geeks (and geek sympathizers) from the Finnish Student Union and Universimmo Gaming Company decided to have fun with the lights. Using a complicated system of remote controls, they played a huge game of Tetris with colored lights in the building’s windows.

Fancy remote controls and corporate sponsorship are great, but for true geek props you’ve got to do life-size Tetris the low-tech way. These (presumably quite bored) students did just that in their Russian dorm. The video was made by taking photographs of each arrangement of lights, then piecing them together.

Berlin Block Tetris from Sergej Hein on Vimeo.

When Sergej Hein looked out of his window at the Berlin “block” across the street, he saw what he figured the inventor of Tetris must have seen back in 1984. The impersonal, unoriginal residences were built quickly and inexpensively to house workers. In Hein’s mind, they were built with a cool background song and fun sound effects.

Though it’s not technically a real-life reenactment of a Tetris game, this ad campaign for online gaming portal Hangame is too cool to ignore. By combining Tetris with Batman-esque images, these ads manage to appeal to several levels of geekiness.

The almost painfully wonderful Swiss Human Tetris game takes a group of 88 people, a camera and a vocal interpretation of the famous theme song and makes it all into one of the best real-life Tetris games ever. It was accomplished in Lausanne, Switzerland in December 2007 by artist Guillaume Reymond and his many helpers.

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