Marc Kerger wearing his Tetris shirt
June 6 marked the 30th anniversary of Tetris. One fan decided to celebrate this monumental day by placing Tetris where no man has ever placed it before – on his very own shirt – to honor the day.
Tetris is a classic. The video game has been wildly successful and despite Bungie’s best efforts, it continues to win the favor of each new generation of gamers; Luxembourg student Marc Kerger is no exception. The tinkerer wanted to show Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov just now much his invention of boxy battles was appreciated – so he put it on his shirt.
The shirt is based on the Pumpktris Instructables project. Using a plain white tee, 128 LEDs, an Arduino Uno microcontroller, two Adafruit Matrix Controllers, a 3D printer and four rechargeable AA batteries, Kerger successfully made the game come to life. The finishing touches included screen-printing the tee to make it look like a gaming interface and releasing a wicked video on YouTube.
Kerger’s shirt displays a fully functional Tetris game. The tee houses buttons for repositioning the Tetris blocks and the MCU is programmed with a full Tetris game, which features multiple levels that get faster as the user advances and, of course, a score.
In the YouTube video, Kerger is playing the game in real-time on his abdomen. He showcased how the shirt performs when the user blasts lines of blocks, advances to the next level and loses. It’s all very impressive; it’s just like the real thing. Adafruit found the video and posted it to its site (a great marketing strategy) and it went viral.
Kerger has kept his lips sealed regarding how he got the programmed the MCU to display a fully functional Tetris game. Our best guess is he’s planning to take this puppy to market. If you aren’t too handy with Arduino, stay tuned. With any hope, this shirt will come to a gaming convention near you.
While this has surely given Kerger the start of that 15 minutes of fame, there is no word as to whether or not it’s helping his dating game. (Talk about a conversation starter!) Keep hope alive Kerger.
Perhaps I should take the same project and put it into some pants!!!
C
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