Last night while I was bacheloretting it up (there were poles involved; I’m not proud), my husband headed over to Eakins Oval, just beyond the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to witness the Guinness Book of World Records largest game of Tetris ever on the side of the 29-story Cira Centre.
The game was broadcast using LED lights embedded in the Cira Centre’s facade — normally just displaying colorful patterns — which was transformed for the night into a game of Tetris that players who registered in advance controlled with joysticks from a half mile away at the Oval. From MSN:
The spectacle kicked off a citywide series of events called Philly Tech Week. It also celebrated the upcoming 30th anniversary of a game revered as the epitome of elegance and simplicity, said Frank Lee, an associate professor of digital media at Drexel University.
Lee, a game designer who oversaw creation of the giant display, said putting it on an office building was like making a huge virtual campfire.
“This project began as a personal love letter to the games that I loved when I was a child – Pong last year, Tetris this year. But it ended up as a way of uniting the city of Philadelphia,” Lee told the crowd.
The husband was kind enough to record some footage of the event and I’m not gonna lie, while I normally will kick some serious ass in Tetris, playing Tetris on the side of a skyscraper looks freaking hard.
No thank you. Gotta love the super enthusiastic spectators who get really into it about 45 seconds in:
(Update: Here’s Drexel University’s footage of someone scoring a Tetris:)
(Via MSN)