Culture September 30, 2016

Before you’re allowed to play Acid Tetris, the screen touts a warning: “This game has been known to cause severe keyboard damage.” Below the message, a deranged face gnaws on a PC keyboard and stares admonishingly at the user with the vacant intensity of a meth addict. I developed a vacation-ruining addiction to this freeware Tetris clone during high school, but it wasn’t my first encounter with the game: I had played the original Tetris obsessively as a seven-year-old on Nintendo’s Game Boy. And because I vaguely understood Acid Tetris’s predecessor as a rare instance of USSR-imported software that was