DOS arcade game by Graham Cluley

I was studying at Bristol Polytechnic in 1990 when I first came across a game called Tetris. A friend had a version of the game for his PC, and I quickly recognised how addictive the game was, and that with so little movement on the screen it would be easy to write the game effectively in Pascal.

So I sat down at my computer and wrote a version of Tetris, which I called Blox. There were some differences from the regular version of Tetris - my quick play of Tetris hadn't made me familiar with the scoring system and the tray into which pieces fell was possibly (I'm still not sure) wider than in the original game.

Unusually for a PC game, Blox plays in 40 column text mode. This was chosen for bolder more arcade-like graphics on the screen, whilst still remaining in speedy text mode.

In 1990/91 Blox became a firm favourite in the computer rooms of Bristol Polytechnic, and it wasn't unusual to walk into a lab to find half a dozen people playing the game. This in itself posed a problem - students wanted to play Blox because it was so addictive, but tutors were keen that they should be working instead.

The obvious answer was to hide that they were playing Blox, rather than working on a project. The computers in Bristol Poly's computer labs came pre-installed with a spreadsheet program called VP-Planner. So I added a "boss key" to Blox which would instantly pop up a bogus screen which pretended to be VP-Planner whenever the player pressed the ESC key.

However, it wasn't enough to make the boss screen static, the disguise would be more convincing if students could enter fake data into the fake spreadsheet, move the cursor, all precisely replicating the basic behaviour of VP-Planner. And so it came to be that Blox had probably one of the most sophisticated boss screens of any game of the era!

Of course, unlike my text adventure games Jacaranda Jim and Humbug, there were no frustrating puzzles to vex players, and thus less incentive to register the games by sending me a cheque. Blox never generated as many registrations as Jim and Humbug, but it still had a fair number of loyal fans.