Tetris is a classic and popular game among many people. But today, many variations of Tetris exist, including a version called Quinn from programmer Simon Haertel, a 26 year old computer science student at Ilmenau university in Germany. Simon went out and designed a beautiful version of Tetris for the Mac that he calls ‘Quinn‘. I interviewed Simon on Quinn and why he created it.

Alec: So what got you into Tetris?

Simon: The first time I played Tetris was on my old Mac LC, where I had the original black & white version by Spectrum Holobyte. What I like about the game is that it has an extremely simple, intuitive concept, which nevertheless leads to very entertaining and addictive games.

Alec: What inspired you to make Quinn?

Simon: Quinn begun as a little programming exercise — when I started learning Cocoa in 2002, I looked for something simple to begin with and get some practice. But things worked so well that I had put a mature little app together after only a short time, so I decided to make it public and put up a little website.

Alec: Why Tetris for OS X? Has anyone else attempted to create Tetris for OS X?

Simon: When you do a quick search on MacUpdate/VersionTracker, you’ll see that there are quite a lot of Tetris implementations around today. But at least when I started with Quinn, I didn’t find anything that really satisfied me. My impression was that many programmers put a lot of effort in fancy variations of the rules, but neglected the basics. So when I made the first version of Quinn, I thought about what features are most important to the player — configurable keys, clean graphics, a simple highscore list, for example — and tried to concentrate my work on these things and make them as good as possible.

Alec: When did you start programming? When did you make the move to OS X?

Simon: I started programming under Mac OS 9, using Metrowerks CodeWarrior and PowerPlant, around the year 2000. But just when I had learned enough to release my first freeware app (a tool to compare text files; you can still download it from my website), a fellow student drew my attention to Apple’s new Cocoa environment. Although switching to Cocoa meant learning many things a second time, I was quickly convinced by the elegance and simplicity of Cocoa, Objective-C and Apple’s developer tools, and the integration of the three.

Alec: Did you code this single handedly? Is there a team or friends that help?

Simon: Yes, Chris Wells from the U.S. is responsible for the webserver, especially the online server list and the highscores database. I do the programming for the Quinn app.

Alec: Why couldn’t users download Quinn for a while?

Simon: Earlier this year, a legal threat was posed against us by the Tetris Company, accusing us of trademark violation and copyright infringement and demanding to stop development and distribution of Quinn. We decided to take Quinn off the server while exploring our legal situation, which took, unfortunately, much longer than expected. During that time, however, we received an overwhelming support from the Mac community, and also legal support from the EFF. And after discussing the matter thoroughly with a EFF lawyers, we fortunately were able to put Quinn online again in late August.

Alec: Is Quinn your favourite project you’ve worked on?

Simon: Well, I haven’t worked on that many projects so far, but what motivates me to invest so much time into Quinn is its great popularity and, of course, the tremendous amount of feedback I get from the users. Again and again I receive enthusiastic emails from players who are pleased with some little detail — be it the design of the “keyboard settings” dialog, little animations during the game, or the fact that the game auto-pauses when switching windows.

Alec: Quinn’s UI is amazing. How long did it take you to just do the UI?

Simon: I can’t tell — if you look at earlier versions, you will see that Quinn has been evolving a lot over the past five years, and the UI has improved with it. Plus, I never counted the days or hours working on Quinn anyway.

Alec: Well thank you for your time and for making such a great app!