Gadgetory

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the 404 it is Friday September 16th and we've got still no Jeff Bakalar I am Russ rustic your hosts for one more week and then Jeff comes back and we will continue to share hosting duties thankfully we don't need Jeff today we don't we've got a much better guest and his name is Dan Ackerman welcome Dan hello Jeff hello good to be here you're so used to I used to see him here dan is the editor of C that is that still accurate like I'm a section title they made up for me dan is a very fancy person had seen that he's been here for I'm gonna say 11 and chain 11 and change and they're still only about halfway up the seniority list pretty amazing and has been a tech staple for as long as I certainly can remember and thankfully we've brought them on here we've got a bunch of stuff to talk about right off the top I do want to mention Dan has written a book very fancy called the tetris effect which is about the history of tetris which is very very cool real quick for the people what is the deal with this book what's what's the lowdown you know it really tells you the story about how in the 80s and the Soviet Union during the Cold War a Russian scientist created this little program called Tetris it was like a math experiment form to kind of figure out how to translate these ideas into a primitive computer it went viral in the Soviet Union back in the 80s that's hard nobody's got a computer you have to like physically make a copy of a disk and walk it over to people and then eventually it leaked out from behind the Iron Curtain all these Western companies saw it and said oh maybe we can make some money selling this nobody bothered to send the money back to the Russians and they decided to they said wait a minute Soviet Union was collapsing we need hard currency who's stealing our stuff we gonna put together an economic hit squad to get the money back and it's like an international spy story but it's all real life that's amazing that's a good tease we I'm gonna talk about a bit later in the show but that's a really awesome tease for people I love this like true crime like true crime true history stuff that heads like way more drama than you ever possibly imagined because most people I think just know Tetris from playing the game so like having that extra layer is super wicked and I was jealous when you told me the idea of the book which was like a couple years ago I was like yes that is an amazing idea for a book I wish I had thought of that it's like a real-life thriller yeah history is just so interesting fantastic I'm also really glad that we brought you on because it's been a very crazy week in technology one of the craziest that I can remember cuz it's not just like one event that happened it was like a few different events sort of coincided I feel like the biggest one I would have said Apple is still obviously the the iPhone 7 comes out today so that's obviously still top of mind but the one that's sort of spread beyond the normal tech realm is the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 I thought you were going to say the Pokemon go bracelets that went in Saturday that's sure that was one of the other ones that I was gonna bring up it really is the biggest story we're really we're running the gamut let's start with Samsung I've been calling it explode gate do you think that's an accurate description maybe just burn up gate for an up GAID they do not technically explode although I keep using the term explode also yeah I saw a video or some stills there was a story in Florida apparently a Jeep yes set on fire because the guy had his phone plugged into the charger and it just totally went up I don't know how I mean it must be a pretty significant fire to light a car on fire I mean look at these phones they're gigantic if you look at your big iPhone or your big Samsung phone inside they're essentially all batteries yeah and these batteries are actually very powerful and there's usually a very thin membrane separating the two cells of the battery and if there's a fault there sure it can generate a tremendous amount of energy in a very short period of time yeah and and that's sort of what we're seeing I I'm trying to remember like from a scale of a recall I've never seen anything like this quite this large is this I mean not on the phone and now for safety reasons like this we've seen problems like antenna gate on older iPhones and small but nothing but nothing of this scale and nothing so badly mishandled initially by the company they've only really sorted it out as of yesterday when we're recording this when they actually finally you know had an official recall from the Consumer Product Safety Commission which is the government agency that actually handles this yeah getting in my way stupid government trying to take my burning technology away from me well samsung wanted to do sort of an unofficial shall recall they didn't say the word of recall they said you should return the phone use an R word but not the word recall and they wanted to try to just handle it themselves let's handle it ourselves guys and you know with phones of burning cars up it's not the right way to go a buddy of mine I mentioned this on Facebook and a buddy of mine was like oh I have a note it's fine and I was like it might not be until it's not sure I don't think that's a risk you want to take I guess their officer they're offering you a new phone right you can get a replacement you can get a replacement you can get a refund the problem is they're they don't have two and a half million new right fixed note sevens ready to go and if they rush the original note 7 out how fast are they rushing these replacement ones out right exactly so so just so I can understand when exactly did the note 7 launch do you remember offhand it was like second week of August I'm gonna say ok so it's kind of interesting that like none of this really came up in any other review certainly there were no reviews that was like hey guys this car on fire oh it was fine I checked it out it's like great so got some tongs they've asked for all those review units back we'd had the messenger they're like we'll come over and pick it up very insistent on getting them out of people's hands they show up in like the yellow like nuclear suit right right right they have a big oven mitts on ready to get it I think there was something like 92 reported incident said Samsung was able to say this is probably a legit incident sure out of whatever 2 and a half million phones that sound like a lots a huge number then they do in a couple of weeks 92 out of millions it's kind of a lot all within the first couple of weeks there's you just reported incidents that we can say hey these are ones that have been officially recorded yeah that's a pretty big rate don't you for a catastrophic failure like this do you think they need to kill the note line at least the branding of the note line because of this I get it I I feel like they won't do that they have enough invested in it that people will sort of look past it's crazy these days you can say or do almost any crazy thing and it doesn't seem to hurt your brand it seems like you're going else right now I feel like you can get away with a lot the problem is these guys they're on this annual upgrade cycle check no apples doing the same thing and every year they have to have of a new product in their flagship at around the same time of the year whether they have a new design or new features or new anything so they're clearly just shoving these things out the door and this is the case where it wasn't ready right do we know exactly what went wrong here it seems like at least one of it because they probably have multiple any computer any device you buy they're usually multiple suppliers for the different components inside it seems to me the best evidence is that one of the component suppliers for the battery had a big batch of bad batteries or we're in the most basic sense the membrane between the two cells of the battery was weak and it let the chemicals Mayson kaboom bad perfet yeah it's been a it's been crazy for Samsung which again I think their reputation has been very good lately for phones like a lot of people are switching over from Apple to Galaxy phones stuff like that did the only guys really innovating when it comes to design even if that's just the curved edge around the side of the screens people were getting excited about that and they would say to me I'm not gonna get the new iPhone I'm gonna get this note seven it looks cooler and it did yeah which is why the timing for this could not have possibly been worse yeah well that you mention it so obviously the iPhone 7 comes out today you know we've talked about it a bit on the show the headphone thing really really bothers me like bothers me enough that I'm using the iPhone 6 right now I can't see myself upgrading because of that alone yeah obviously the other distinctive issues are this the 7 is not like that noticeable and I'm pretty it's it feels like a you know 6s s essentially right so that's obviously a big one but but headphones man yeah I use them everyday it's kind of the oldest of the longest-standing connection jack that we have that everybody still uses I got my six plus yeah and there's certainly no reason you can't extend the phone these days to three years they're well-built enough they're modern enough the the changes you're up to you're so incremental you could definitely get away with three years although I feel like Apple and maybe Android as well but certainly Apple has a bit of a reputation of aging their phones based on the OS so iOS 10 came out this week I haven't upgraded yet because that's my concern it's neither of I if I just keep upgrading it'll it'll just slow what sort of King phones immediately go don't get the upgrade right away give it six hours the first guy in line because you're gonna break your phone yeah they say get the dot upgrade the you know ten point one or whatever but yeah I don't think I'm going to all hold on for as long as I can without upgrading to ten because first of all nothing in ten again like the seven seems to really be that mandatory and secondly yeah I mean if your phone is four years old then you're running the latest OS it's not gonna run it oh no no it was wherever you yeah and it and the battery life will plummet and it's just a bad idea unfortunately Apple is crazy insistent on updating your OS so a point where they give you that message every single day there's no way to stop I've looked online you can like delete the OS but you cannot force the phone to not download it if it's connected to Wi-Fi it's a little bit like the Windows 10 upgrade that people didn't want to do exactly although there's really no good reason not to upgrade to Windows tariffs we have Windows 8 yeah yeah that was a direct improvement and with this obviously you know Windows 10 is not bad I'm sorry iOS 10 is not bad so many tens floating around here but for those again that have older phones that do not want to upgrade some option in the menu is to be like okay I'm just don't mostly anymore I'm good enough already that formed stability yeah exactly very important so yeah I mean generally you follow that same mentality about the seven that it's kind of just like they must be holding something good in their hand for next year which is gonna be the 10th anniversary of the iPhone yeah so if they're gonna have a big design change push the needle forward somehow like maybe no more home button just an all-glass screen on the front it's like a haptic thing or something yeah something cool curved edges it's got to be next year right now there's no extra the 7 has no button as well right it's just a flat surface with haptic sand inside it it feels like the entire it's almost like the the touchpad on the new MacBook where there is there there is a little bit of a multi-point depression but it's not quite the same it's more like a shift its right a little nudge that feels like you're clicking but it feels like the entire bottom half of the phone is hinged yeah and clicks down I'm sure you can get used to it very quickly I found it very disconcerting well that's weird I'm sure you get used to it but yeah we don't even need that just just make it a touch button right presumably that helps somewhat with the water resistance it's gotta be water resistance those buttons get worn out very easily you always see them like it's sticky and stuff so to get rid of that I guess that's a plus yeah do we need it at all why can't we just have the the phone screen over the entire top surface exactly and just do like a finger just around there to get the home action going yeah that's the impression I get everyone seems to be thinking that 2017 is the year whether it's you know celebrating the anniversary or whether it's just Apple knows that people feel like they've kind of stagnated from the phone side that it's time for a big upgrade that seems like where it's going I'll tell you I watched on Amazon Prime yesterday Hot Tub Time Machine 2 and in the future it was nonsense nonsense they have a phone in the future where you just kind of click on your ear and it projects out a little hologram of who you're talking to in front of you sure that seems like the way to go do we really need the physical device to hold up to our face and talk into any more I don't know that sounds like Google glass I'm gonna call this the Hot Tub Time Machine 2 phone ok I just wanna say hot tub time machine - yeah you might be right yeah Apple devices I'm an Apple guy what can I say but it yeah I'm definitely gonna be holding off for the for the near term speaking of other more we're gonna just march down the line generally on this show as listeners know sometimes we struggle on tech news sometimes tech news isn't happening this week and all we've got is like no problem this week tangent but now we've got plenty this week so this morning at about 7 o'clock I left my comfortable borough of Queens and headed into New York City to visit the Nintendo World store to pick up this and I realized we're on a podcast with no video but I'm holding it the Pokemon go Plus which if you've been playing Pokemon go there might be some percentage of people on listening playing Pokemon go I know Dan son plays Pokemon go and all his little friends are all like five and six years old they're obsessed they'd never heard of Pokemon before and never seen the TV show but now they know every yeah they keep borrowing all their parents phones running around yeah you're gonna start getting offers like email offers to buy that like immediately I'm sure it seems availability seems very low very low you know it's hard to say cuz obviously so it's an Intendant endo does not seem to be in charge of the distribution they're obviously working through the Pokemon company and Niantic the makers of the actual game so this is this weird relationship they have there and so we've been very much in the dark regarding like whether we were gonna get a media one or whatever it is or which stores were getting them all the stores seem to be in the dark so we just went ahead and went to this they had them at the Nintendo stage I have a lot at the world store so I got there at around 9:00 when they open it they were open they I guess they opened I think at 8 o'clock Wow so we have one of our reporters there at 8 and there was a significantly large line probably about 50 to 100 people if it's longer than the iPhone 7 line at the Apple store cube that might be right I think at this point those have sort of died out but the so the line was there she got one I got there at 9:00 the line was maybe 15 people deep at that point I was very close to feel pretty big lines though so line but by the time I got it there was hardly anyone behind me and they still had more or less okay if you happen to be in New York City and you're listening to this they may still have them it seems like the Nintendo World store would be the most likely spot because otherwise I know pre-orders were very very limited normal game stores get very few of them now we're gonna clip that cuz like a clip-on right well so you have two options so it comes with like a wristband Richmond that's how I saw it originally yeah you can wear it as a wristband it seems like they realize just how awful the wristband looked and they stopped using that for promotional screens and stuff like that it does come with a clip on it so theoretically you could put it I'm putting it in my lapel right now and it's a belt little clip belt just like your blackberry you know I would say if you're interested in not looking like a total freak if you're above the age of say 30 you might want to just put it in a pocket it's got a button on it and it vibrates almost like a beeper and to do things in the game all you have to do is just probably poke a beeper so you will feel it through your pocket and you can just press the button and collective okay stop person like that it's actually as someone that has played since launch I will fully admit it it's actually pretty useful I used it for you know you can keep your phone locked the game doesn't have to be open which ordinarily it does or sucks a lot of battery life yeah yeah and it'll collect like pokey stops as you walk by them you could try to catch pokemon with it it actually it's pretty useful but $40 useful that's sort of a decision you have an Apple watch you'll be able to get the the go version which gives you a lot of that same functionality on the watch you're just even dorkier you're finally getting some mask you use you have a Pokemon buddy yet to walk along with you and collect candy with the update my wife okay oh you mean the actual bag in the game not a real-life person yes I walk around with Bulbasaur okay okay because I'm trying to get that vs or unlocked I believe me I I hear this yeah I know Libby played your wife play but she mostly plays for dinner for - who's our son he face on me the other day hey do you know what PO what Pikachu evolves into I do I did actually I said I I know that's right yes um I guess we had a great FaceTime moment I think what is fascinating is that these kids are getting hooked into what I got hooked into which was the first generation of Pokemon you know all these kids in the last six years have been like oh I got X&Y or whatever the newest version was and they know all these Pokemon but I have no idea who they are there's like weird ghost Pokemon and stuff like that but he's 151 or in Grant you know you're a little bit older than me I was I think Pokemon the original came out when I was like in like sixth grade or so so it was like right in the sweet spot of it and so I know them really so it is it's like a cyclical it's not starting over again a new generation it is obsessed we have a I have a pokémon like encyclopedia book at home we got a farms and olive oil and get look through each one and I have to read the names out yeah it's a whole thing well yeah that's Pokemon if you're not playing it and chances are you probably you're probably listening to this you probably playing it's possible and so you mentioned as before you walked in or as you're walking in we have one more tech centric story for us and it's the Playstations slim which you just got this morning yes that's right did you arrived in a box did you take it out of the box I have not taken it out of the box yet one of our colleagues in I think Singapore got one like yesterday or the day before so he went in shot some photos of the old version good noon we went to the event here in New York it's slimmer I'll give it that yeah does what it says on the box doesn't actually say some other body so it is the hardware any different from the normal PlayStation 4 right now I think it's missing the optical audio out which is a you know if they go on they take the remember the ps4 used to have like a compact flash card reader and eventually they they took all that stuff out the other big difference is it has software support for HDR content yeah but I don't think there's any HDR content yet that will work on it right and obviously you would need an HDR TV to take advantage of that correct but a lot of new TVs are just gonna come with HDR built in we're gonna use it or not just like for years most TVs were 3d TVs even if you never use that function yeah I know they also updated the controller a little bit there's a little tweak we yeah it's always a little flatter on the front and you can see light through it yeah I think it's a strip on the top rather than those smaller not a major improvement I believe it's 250 is that I think it's 299 but I'll check it could be might be 250 I'm trying to remember whatever the current price of the piece okay so though I thought they dropped the price but you're right it is 299 still and then waiting the wings in November PlayStation 4 Pro which they also talked about in that event so you were at the event yes what's the general consensus about the white station for Pro is that no one seems to know for sure who it's for if you don't have a ps4 and you're gonna get one your mind as well spend the extra 100 bucks on it I guess or if you have one you're kind of replace they promise that it's sort of the picea fication of consoles we have these incremental upgrades but the same platform yeah if you went from ps3 to ps4 you took your whole library of games and boxes and you threw right in the trash yeah just like if you're updating you know oh I want update my macbook let's just throw it away and buy a new one so so with this one there's a faster graphics chip in there I think there's a faster processor in there also the graphics come AMD so when you make a game now you basically have to make two versions you have to make the the pro version or the regular version it's probably just different textures and different graphics features that turn off and on like better shadows and lighting it sounds like that but use the same game code just like if you have a five hundred dollar gaming PC or you have a five thousand dollar gaming PC you get the same game from Steam it'll just render differently all right two of you can crank up the resolution and you could maybe get some better framerate do 4k go all do HDR but 4k is actually getting pretty big right now the 4k is kind of BS right they're not doing to true 4k you're not rooted and should render at 4k on the pro as I understand it it's an upscaled from hey that's interesting because if you think about it so so if the PlayStation were Pro is $400 running a game right now at 4k on a PC would not run on a 400 or PC it's getting a lot easier though I mean the graphics on PCs have become so much more powerful 4k gaming is it's not for everything right now but it's actually a lot more achievable and Nvidia and AMD of both make great strides and last year of making smaller versions of their chips that are less expensive just like AMD is like a two hundred dollar GPU that'll run VR now yeah and that's two fairly high resolution screens at 90 frames per second simultaneously sure yeah it is a little bit funny the whole 4k thing because obviously you know we saw 3d being like the big thing and then that died you know I think 4k has more legs to it and so far as it's a new resolution and things are going that way but I think most people maybe not in New York City where TVs are very close to the characters because of space concerns but I think most people where they have their couch in their TV visually cannot see the difference there's a there's a ratio of about I think it's 8 feet filling 8 to 10 feet and you will just not it looks like the same exact ISM we said the same thing about blu-ray if you had a good upscaling for you know 480 DVD player yeah it really couldn't tell the difference between that and blu-ray for 110 feet away it's true but the TVs are coming with 4k screens built-in which is good for other stuff if you want to have like other apps and things on there yeah I get it and they're coming with HDR they're just gonna be features that are there but your cable signal is not gonna start coming in 4k right time soon yeah and you know I know Netflix does program some of their shows in 4k and in HDR and Amazon also but right now those are only available through the TV based apps I say they will eventually come to the more PC and other device based apps soon but we're not quite there yet okay and that's what the ps4 regular slim one and pro are waiting for these apps to support HD are through through the apps and obviously for game makers to make games that support both the 4k upscaled and the regular version and that's assuming that your Comcast of the world are actually letting you stream at that sort of speed that's usually fine if you go through the TV app I'm not blocking you from that but if you just plug like your if you have a laptop of the 4k screen or I can't go to the Netflix website and start screaming 4k or HDR or anything like that yet yet the dream is still alive you'll probably never noticed you know it's like oh though it's brighter and darker at the same time you know what I think makes a much bigger difference having an OLED screen yeah love those I just tested the first couple of laptops with OLED screen okay one of which was a yoga from Lenovo a 40-inch and the other one was an alien 13 inch Alienware gaming laptop okay with an OLED screen amazing so where are you seeing that most in the blacks are you seeing it it's like it's like you have a junky old TV here and a super fancy nice-looking TVs for you next to it you just go wow it's a clarity thing it's like right it's contrast the blacks are the biggest the the tests you can do is you look at the bezel around the screen or in a black scene and if you can't really see the difference between the black part of the screen and the black bezel right that's the OLED difference right there okay but it's one of those things you really do have to see in person yeah are you paying a significant premium for an 11 you know a hundred fifty bucks maybe on one of these laptops might be a little bit more eventually we'll see more laptops with them right now they're not really making them in screen sizes bigger than like 13 or 14 inches I think just three you can get right now the Alienware the lenovo and samsung actually makes a tablet with an AMOLED screen which is essentially the same thing do you know what the what's the Alienware called it's just the Alienware 13 you know and it's it's one option that has an OLED screen for I think $1600 I was talking to a friend of mine about gaming hardware PC Harvick and the common occurrence of gaming PC hardware being named the lamest possible name of course it'll be like predator or extreme 3000 yeah and things look like tanks they look like yeah they look like space tanks and giant treads on them and the marketing comments on there they're the marketing quotes on their website for dominate it's a game with our mega chill cooling channel B's it's horrible I just want like I guess make anywhere I'm glad that they're naming it like kind of team but it's still you've got like the glowing alien eyes long I just want like a gaming hardware machine that is just like a plain box yeah and it plays video games yeah who does that well Velocity Micro does that well they make just plain boxes that look pretty good Falcon Northwest makes like little things like a frank box they're just normal nondescript looking things so I feel like a frag box that is true you got a good point there okay well I think that's it for tech stuff right cuz I do want to talk more about the book alright you know for people that have not gone through the process of writing their own book and actually getting it published but just baseline it like you came up with the idea how did this sort of come about how did it actually happen yeah we were casting around for an interesting sort of nonfiction story to tell there okay shall we so hey my agent did okay so you've got a book agent yes okay and have you worked with him for a while yeah so we worked through a couple of ideas she and I and she said you know what you should do a a non nonfiction book that relates to your experience and somehow I wanted to find something that had some historical context not to current events II sure cuz I work in news I don't want to be like current events and we kind of workshopped a few ideas about interesting things in history they had some sort of tech connection and I remembered this story for back when Libya and I and a bunch of other people you probably know did this show called play value which was a web show about video game history it was like MTV talking heads like best whatever spouse yeah one of the episodes was on the history of Tetris I was like that's kind of an interesting story so I did some research what I realized was it's not really a hit game history story that's all in there it's really it startup story except for instead of the Silicon Valley startups we talked about today it's a startup from you know Cold War Soviet Union Russia right where a guy improbably created this huge technological hit that's probably the most important technology to come out of the Soviet Union since Sputnik sure I was like wow that really got some relevance and we have all this tension with Russia now again and this is the Cold War so lots of Western versus Russia tension back then I'm like there's another great parallel and it's just a story about a bunch of interesting characters guys like Alexey Pajitnov the guy created ten trous Hank Rogers who's the guy who sort of brought it to the Gameboy and and like travelled the world to make it work guys like Howard Lincoln who was the famous Nintendo lawyer who everyone has great stories about menara Arakawa the guy who started Nintendo of America and and made Miyamoto you know the figure he is today and basically got the NES into people's hands in the US so I said this is a great startup story about great characters and that's why I knew it really it would really work what was Alexey doing like before like was he made trying to make other games and this just happened there was a computer researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences and he was actually working on this is like nineteen you know eighty three eighty four some very high-end stuff he was working on artificial intelligence he was working on voice recognition things that we don't have mastered today and he was doing it on these computers that were so primitive they were like Soviet knockoffs of American computers for like ten years before that's like the 70 yeah and that's like you know they had punch cards and stuff you know so he figured out how to recreate in his spare time one of these little puzzle games people used to play where you fit the blocks into a box called pentominoes yeah on his computer his his it was called the electronica 60 and had no graphics you couldn't even make blocky Tetris graphics on it he had used to bracket shapes I was asking like ASCII art basically sir the original Tetris is basically ASCII art black and white and he said hey check this out and his friends all liked it then they even had someone some programs that they had made they're like maybe we could like sell these and then like oh wait a minute we live in a communist country and there's no owning anything much less intellectual property software rights also making this in a spare time might not we've approved of doing it work stuff where computers when they found out when the Russian government the Soviet government found out that this was something they could possibly sell that's the first thing you did was say thanks for alexei by the way communism we own this all see you later right exactly and they went and tried to get some money for it did that was that so that was before it became a worldwide phenomenon was Russia knew hey we could actually sell this some some some very clever Western software publishers and salespeople ran across it one guy found it in Hungary at a school there hungry was behind the Iron Curtain but it was a more open society you could go and do trade there Rubik's Cube also came from Hungary another another Iron Curtain a game that kind of made spread people would actually make a copy there's like ten people in Moscow with computer back in 1984 and they go oh here I made a copy of this game for you check it out like sneakernet it over to something you have to walk it over and eventually somebody sent a copy to this computer school and hungry and a guy named Robert Stein who is a Hungarian immigrant to the UK you came back to find cheap software to buy in Hungary and resell in the West said oh this looks awesome I wonder if I can license this and he's like hey Russia know about this game and nobody really get back to him it's like I'm just gonna start selling right yeah cuz who's gonna stop it and then he sublicense it and there was sublicense all around the world and there's a Russian so he took over like full licensing rights just cuz yeah he sent some they used to call them telex it's a very early form of fax for the Russians saying hey let's do a deal and they were like we could talk about this and he took that as a as a thumbs-up to start doing business it's like a dory I got this taken care of I'll send you the money back eventually and then before you know it mirrorsoft which was a big company at the time in spectrum holobyte which was another big company at the time did licenses for pc stuff and then atari got into it and sega and all these other companies bought sub licenses for either pc or console or arcade versions around the world or the washington's didn't know any of this was going on you eventually end up with a very complicated situation where three three different rupes of people are racing to moscow at the same time to finally actually get a real signed deal yeah for this stuff and who would they even get it from if effectively you know he didn't own it they eventually figured out that they needed some would he look after these rights and try to get the money right so the Russians gave it to an obscure trade group named elorg which is like the initial to have four electro trans Morcha cars there's something Russian but if you spelled all that elorg it's like a James Bond doing organization and they were very mysterious partially because they didn't know what they were doing the rest of the time they were selling knock-off soviet scientific calculators that didn't work right which was the purpose of a scientific calculator so our buddy Hank Rogers who was the japanese-american dutch publisher who nintendo sent behind the iron curtain on a secret mission to get the rights for their top-secret project the gameboy that nobody knew about yet he had to go to moscow on a tourist visa and then literally search moscow to try to find these allure guys and get an audience with him and he pulled it off he just walks in the door and said hey i want to talk to you guys about tetris after like literally like hiring local fixers to help him find the offices and stuff and knowing that robert stein the guy from Hungary and Kevin Maxwell the son of Robert Mack so who's a big UK media Baron like the Rupert Murdoch of his day we're both coming to Moscow the same week to try to sign the same deal and he's like I don't even know what the address is I gotta find these guys yeah so so Nintendo essentially got the rights and that's how the gameboy phenomenon there there were a lot of places where could have gone horribly off the rails during those couple of weeks of Moscow but eventually they said okay you you can put this on this on this new device called the Gameboy and that's that killer app that perfect marriage of hardware and software I mean you can't think of any better pairing than that super primitive Gameboy right which was sort of Apple like in its in its minimalism yeah they do could be always a primitive when it came out you could have made a much more advanced handheld at the time the atari lynx came out right around the same time and that had a color screen a higher resolution what nintendo did in their R&D lab was they stripped it down to the bare minimum monochromatic screen low resolution just the two buttons and the little d-pad and make it run on double-a batteries and those were the the tenants that made it successful what game is gonna work like that turns out tetris did right and very very little and they sold like 43 million you know combo packages of Game Boy and Tetris it was the Pokemon go it's time the parallels are so interesting between Pokemon go and Tetris because they're both games that work internationally without any real translation needed you don't need to know anything about them they don't really have a storyline Pokemon go I guess has kind of a storyline but you can just ignore all that or but you learn them just by picking up and playing right and anybody can just pick up pokemons go and you'll figure it out in a few minutes but they don't come and tell you what it is you just have to figure it out with Tetris you just pick it up and you figure it out what would the subreddit for Tetris look like back in the day like blocks let's see right see where a vert piece that is why you cannot have mathematically an infinite game of Tetris mathematicians that mathematicians have figured out there's a chapter on the math Tetris in the world that you they a game with modal most likely end at around 69 thousand pieces no matter what because you would eventually statistically get enough Z blocks in a row that you could never get rid of them every top out of the game I assume that they've had like it must be a pretty easy it's actually pretty tough because there are so many different shapes and you could put all these different variations in on how fast they fall and whether you can do the little cheat swivel move when people under something so there's a there's a ton of variations on it I assume I don't know if you went into it in the book but I assume that there's some sort of tournament like right here or king of colonies there is I just got an email from the guy who runs the tensions World Championship yesterday that's super interesting too that there's less of that in the book yeah it's really more like this Cold War spy thriller thing with some timeouts to talk about the science all the different scientists who have used Tetris and it's addictive qualities and how much used to treat PTSD and stuff sure but but there are tournaments that go on today it's like very king of Kong like yes yeah a lot of personality a lot of character that sounds awesome this is totally up my alley as a book I'm sure some people listening or like yes this is the book I would totally read where can people get it Amazon Barnes Noble anywhere you get books there's even an audiobook version there's hardcover after you know I went into the shed offices in New York and read the audio book it's like taking a seven-hour road trip with me I'll just be in your ear was that tough to record for that it was where I have so much respect for people who do audiobooks out it was incredibly physically taxing to sit up straight and not move and project your voice out for like we did like three full days of recording I was passed out at the end of the first day it's rich it's really tough yeah well done sir thank you thank you one of my favorite things was getting people to write a little blurb on the back of the book you have the Arabs and I had my kind of wish list the people I really wanted to get and I got most of those guys Ernest Cline who wrote ready player wise yeah he said it's a page turning block stacking globe-trotting thriller history books I'm so happy that he wrote me this nice blur yeah I got Steve Wozniak that's my favorite quote he's a huge fan yeah it turns out that he's like a legendary Tetris fan so he did it Doug rushkoff is another great author who wrote me a blow-up so I'm super happy that's awesome well again congratulations very super awesome thank you thank you and if you're gonna go to New York comic-con yeah I'm gonna be there on Thursday October 6 doing a panel cool it's very crowded there it's almost like they have to fit the people in like Tetris blocks oh my God look at that carryover well well thank you again Dan that's gonna do it for us here at the 404 I always forget how Jeff ends the show but there's something about high-tech and lowbrow probably somewhere in there sounds about right um we will be back next week Jeff will be back from vacation so it'll be me and him and maybe another special guest but in the meantime thank you so much Dan thank you for letting me come here and plug my book respect my pleasure and thank you so much at home for listening we'll be back next week