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MIT staff blogger Matt McGann '00

MIT DDR Tetris on 6-foot LED Matrix by Matt McGann '00

"We did this because we were bored." -- Russell Cohen '13

Like Tetris? Like Dance Dance Revolution (DDR)?

Now you can play both, on a 6-foot tall LED display, thanks to three bored MIT students.

Burton-Conner Tetris Battle (Burton Conner is the MIT dorm that is home to the creators) is now all over the web, having been covered, among other places, at Engadget, CNET, and BostInnovation. Check it out:

Burton-Conner Tetris Battle is the creation of two Course 6 juniors, Russell Cohen ’13 and Leah Alpert ’13, with hardware design from their Course 2 floormate Andrew Carlson ’12. In the comments on Engadget, Russell said, “We did this because we were bored.”

Want to try it yourself? Burton-Conner Tetris Battle is free software and can be downloaded from GitHub.

14 responses to “MIT DDR Tetris on 6-foot LED Matrix”

  1. This is so awesome!! Really amazing and innovative!

  2. Cristy says:

    Is there an “extreme mode” on this thing? xD
    If yes, when you go out after a round your friends we’ll be asking you what have you done to sweat so much? “Tetris” ‘s gonna be a great answer…

  3. OMG! This is the limit of what one can do just being ‘bored’!! A classic turned into a modern-day boredom killer. Reminds me of the childhood days I spend on my hand-held game console playing Tetris!

  4. Jose ('17?) says:

    I want to get bored at MIT.
    This is AWESOME.

  5. Fun fact: Russell is my stand partner! What a neat-o kid.

  6. Suyash says:

    YES. I saw this on Engadget, and thought it was pretty awesome. Tetris implementations for the win.
    Also, of course, Github FTW (wouldn’t forget to pay dues to opensource [project hosting])!
    Yay for collaboration!

  7. kevin says:

    This is what you guys do when you’re bored? Man, I’ve been wasting my life watching way too much TV shows. LOL. But dude, seriously, awesome stuff

  8. Anthony L. '15 says:

    Duuuuuuude.

  9. Kshitij says:

    Hahahaha! A good way to pass your time! smile

  10. WASIM AKRAM says:

    awesome dost
    i can do it too

  11. Erin says:

    This makes me want to go to MIT even more! I REALLY want to be a part of awesome things like this that happen there. Thanks for posting this, it’s so cool!

  12. Kshitij says:

    I definitely agree with Erin. The desire to come to MIT has grown even more stronger than usual after watching this great video! smile

  13. Brandon J. says:

    The funny part is I can see a good chunk of how to do it. The hardest part might be fooling whatever you’re running the game on into taking the input from the pads… I don’t think displaying it on the LCD screens would be that difficult.

    More simply: Awesome, but not as hard to do as it may seen as first. At least, not from what I can think of. Which means I’m probably doing it wrong.