From Russia with Love: Tetris at Harvard

David C. Rennard ’03, whose personal best Tetris score is 570,000, finds the video game so fascinating that he started the Harvard Tetris Society as a way to bring together enthusiasts. To these aficionados, Tetris is not just a game invented in Soviet Russia with catchy music and falling blocks. The Society’s constitution describes Tetris as a game that “presents a challenge in precision, timing, advanced planning, strategy and abstract spatial reasoning.” It may sound geeky and a bit too math-oriented, but that’s exactly how the society likes it. Rennard admits, “Tetris is pretty dorky, I won’t say it isn’t. But there’s something mesmerizing about the mathematical structure of the game.”

Over the summer, he stayed at Harvard as a summer-school proctor and set up a laptop with a Tetris emulator near the Chessmaster in front of Au Bon Pain. Challenging people to a dollar a game, Rennard managed to rack up $25 in five hours without losing a single match. Unfortunately, he soon had to close shop when the Assistant Dean for Harvard Summer School warned him that he could get in trouble because he didn’t have a street license. No matter. Rennard remembers proudly that “people were talking about the Tetris Master later—it caused quite a stir.”

But while playing fellow society members, it’s all fun and games. Member Adam M. Grant ’03 says “Tetris is an inherently social activity and the Harvard Tetris Society will help make up for the lackluster social scene during the week.” Asked about the male-female ratio, Grant says, “it’s pretty well-mixed at this point; a lot of people play Tetris.” The two members also note that playing Tetris is very relaxing, and they hope the society will provide a place for members to wind down from problem sets and papers.

Dana Brooke Harrar, Dunster House’s resident tutor in Biology, is a member who sees Tetris as “a ton of fun. It also reminds me of when I was younger, hanging out with the neighborhood kids,” she says, and enthuses that “if there’s a Super Mario Club, I’ll totally sign up for that too!”

When Erving Professor of Chemistry William Klemperer was first asked to be a faculty advisor for the Harvard Tetris Society, he didn’t realize the myriad benefits of the game. Klemperer, who says he dislikes video games because he is bad at them, says, “On reflection, the Society is just like a chess club—which everyone would be fine with. Tetris is analogous to the game of Go, which is also very interesting.” He also noted that “very few students here want to waste their time, so they must be really interested in Tetris.”

Interested is an understatement, at least as it describes Rennard. He once left his Nintendo on for two months straight so that he could preserve the memory of a particularly high score, but “my roommate accidentally turned it off to watch football. I never forgave him for it.” The offending roommate, Ari B. E. Shwayder ’03 says, “The Nintendo was so hot that you could cook an egg on it.”