Google has “secretly” invested an undisclosed amount of money (estimated to be between $100 million and $200 million) in virtual Ville creator Zynga Games, TechCrunch claims. Why would one highly profitable company dump such a large amount of duckets into another successful company’s coffers? TechCrunch believes that it’s part of a strategy to partner with Zynga Games in the forthcoming launch of something called “Google Games.”

The service is said to use Google logins and will presumably run the Zynga titles popularized by Facebook, albeit with a different payment system (allegedly Google Checkout rather than PayPal). Though these claims are still unsubstantiated — neither Google nor Zynga have officially confirmed the report — a recent Google job listing for a “Project Management Leader, games” seems to lend the idea some credence.

East Carolina University’s Psychophysiology Lab recently published some promising findings from a study on the effect casual games can have on the cognitive abilities of older players. According to Gamasutra, the study, which has run for almost six months and counting, has measured certain mental functions of 40-some participants over the age of 50 as they’ve played various PopCap games in half-hour chunks over the duration of the study. Researchers have found that even this semi-regular play (like, really, who plays a PopCap game for just thirty minutes) has boosted participants’ cognitive response times by 87 percent, in addition to increasing their executive functioning by a whopping 215 percent.

So, what does that mean? The group conducting the study explained these findings could prove casual games (and, in all likelihood, “so-called ‘hardcore’ video games”) could constitute effective mental exercise for the elderly, or those who suffer from dementia and Alzheimer’s. That’s really great news, since our grandmother has probably played enough top casual games that she can now move things around with her mind.

InstantAction’s new streaming service has debuted, allowing select games to be played not only in a browser window, but in an embeddable applet if desired (for those of you running Windows, anyway). The selection of games is currently limited to just one, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. The service allows the game to be played for 20 minutes for free, with the option to buy it for $9.99.

Does it work? See above. You know. The Monkey Island game running directly above this text. Did you realize when you opened Joystiq this evening that you’d be clicking your way into the future?

Do you like Alexey Pajitnov’s timeless puzzler Tetris as much as you like succumbing to unrelenting waves of nausea? You’ll probably want to check out the new Flash-based sensation, First-Person Tetris. There’s not much of a learning curve, here — it operates pretty much exactly like the block-dropping puzzler you know and love, only with a small twist. We’ll let you figure it out for yourselves — why not give it a spin, provided you’ve got some free time (and a strong, strong stomach).

Miller, quoted in the “first printed issue of Gamesauce,” says “the next few years should see a strong resurgence in Duke.” Shacknews, which spotted the article, says Miller remains sanguine about the prospects of a franchise with one published title since the Clinton administration.

There are numerous other Duke games in various stages of development, several due out this year. We are definitely looking to bring Duke into casual gaming spaces, plus there are other major Duke games in production.

Miller says “almost all” of those projects are unannounced, but, Shacknews points out they likely include:

• Two Duke iPhone games Miller previously announced.

• A Duke Nukem Trilogy for DS and PSP, from Frontline Studios.

• The Xbox Live Arcade port of Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project.

• A scrapped project called Duke Begins, alluded to in Take-Two’s lawsuit against Miller and Broussard.

And, of course, Miller repeated the obligatory tease that Duke Nukem forever is not dead. “We’ve never said that Duke Nukem Forever has ceased development. … Yes, we released the internal team, but that doesn’t correlate to the demise of the project.”

Sorry, but at this point, games or GTFO.

3D Realms Teases ‘Numerous’ Duke Nukem Games, ‘Looking to Bring Duke into Casual Gaming’ [Shacknews]

When Alexey Pajitnov put the finishing touches on Tetris 25 years ago today, he had no way of knowing his modest videogame would become Russia’s most entertaining export.

Yet June 6, 1984, has become a landmark date in the history of videogames: That’s the day the then-29-year-old computer programmer completed his first playable version of the fiendishly addictive game that would launch a thousand clones.

What made Tetris different? The game was graphically elegant and easy to grok: To play, you arranged seven different kinds of falling blocks into a tower without letting them pile too high. The game was so straightforward and simple that anybody could pick it up, yet as play progressed Tetris became more and more challenging.

People still play it, says Pajitnov, not only because it’s an excellent game but because for many people, it was the first videogame they ever tried.

“It’s like your first love — you never forget it,” he says.

The game’s simplicity and appeal has made it the archetypal videogame: referenced in popular culture, studied by scientists and still wildly popular.

Tetris was unlike any other videogame, mostly because it was (and still is) played by as many women as men, as many adults as children. More than 125 million copies have been sold so far on more than 50 different gaming platforms, which Guinness World Records recognizes as the most versions of any single videogame.

Another differentiating factor: Tetris was owned by the Soviets.

Since Pajitnov was an employee of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, he had no rights to the game he had created. But the government was happy to license Tetris to companies like Nintendo, which coupled the game with its revolutionary Game Boy platform, turning both into breakout hits in 1989.

The Tetris Company, which manages the rights to the game now that they have reverted back to Pajitnov, says that Tetris represents fully 10 percent of all mobile games sold in the United States.

At the Academy, Pajitnov’s work involved computer science research like artificial intelligence and speech recognition. In his spare time, he loved to play with puzzles and math riddles. When his department got a new Elektronika 60 computer, a Russian clone of the PDP-11, he began to create computer game versions of several of his puzzles.

“Tetris was just one of my games at that time,” he says. “Most of them were just boring experiments.”

Image courtesy The Tetris Company

Since the Elektronika couldn’t display graphics, Tetris‘ tetromino pieces had to be created out of text brackets. But even in this primitive form, Pajitnov found that the game was already tons of fun.

“There was something new and simple and sublime in Tetris,” says Georgia Tech media studies professor Ian Bogost, who attributes much of the game’s success to its first-mover advantage. “There weren’t a lot of original ‘casual’ videogames in the mid-1980s, and Tetris has managed to become the ur-casual game. It persists, in part, because it was first.”

Pajitnov, along with some programmer friends, soon began work porting the game to the MS-DOS platform. This version of Tetris spread like wildfire around the world on copied floppy disks, catching the attention of many game publishers.

Nintendo pegged Tetris as a perfect launch game for its portable game machine, Game Boy.

“We had popular games already at that time, like Super Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong,” says Minoru Arakawa, former president of Nintendo of America and current president of The Tetris Company. “But they weren’t a great fit for Game Boy.”

Nintendo’s engineers in Japan thought Tetris was perfect — a simple game suited for playing on the go, but also suited for the Game Boy’s small, monochrome display.

After a convoluted series of legal machinations (recounted in depth in the book Game Over Press Start To Continue), Nintendo successfully negotiated with the Soviets and emerged with the worldwide rights to create handheld and console versions of the game. The Game Boy version alone sold 35 million copies.

Everyone’s mom swiped their Game Boy to play Tetris. It was so appealing to women, says Pajitnov, because it was a creative, constructive game developed when every other game was about destruction.

“You take the chaos of these random pieces and try to build something reasonable out of it,” he says. “Most of the videogames, shooting games, are about destroying something. And they don’t appreciate violence as much as we boys do, you know?”

Henk Rogers (left) and Alexey Pajitnov.
Image courtesy The Tetris Company

Once the Soviet Union collapsed and the rights to Tetris reverted back to Pajitnov, he formed The Tetris Company with his friend Henk Rogers, a game industry entrepreneur who had helped Nintendo acquire the Tetris license.

Rogers’ business acumen kept the Tetris name so bankable. The company’s latest venture is Tetris Online, which it says is played 1 million times a day.

“It’s not a fad,” Rogers says. “Tetris today is bigger than it’s ever been. It earned more money last year than in any year in its history. It’s outlasted every other game in the computer industry. It shows no sign of abating.”

Rogers has been making Tetris more marketable since almost the very beginning. Giving the player points for clearing multiple lines of blocks in a row, he says, was his idea. So was calling the ultimate move — clearing four lines at once — a “Tetris.”

“I wanted ‘Tetris’ in there so that people would repeat the word,” just as when players yell out “blackjack” or “Yahtzee” when they score the best hand in those popular games, he says. “And it actually worked.”

As the game became more and more popular, it attracted all sorts of attention. A study this year at University of Oxford found that playing Tetris could reduce symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. And a 1991 University of California study (.pdf) found major differences in players’ brain activity at various stages of Tetris mastery.

“The good players have almost a calm brain, but the beginners have very excited brains,” says Pajitnov.

Tetris‘ success caused a flood of copycats, launching the puzzle-game genre. But nothing has ever been as appealing as the original, which causes Pajitnov, lover of games and riddles, a good deal of consternation.

“I am desperate to see the new Tetris somewhere,” he says with a heavy sigh. “I am waiting every day for something like that.”

Not even the semi-retired Pajitnov has been able to create another game that captured the appeal of his big hit. But he has learned not to underestimate the casual audience. “People don’t realize that ’simple’ doesn’t mean primitive,” he says. “People still need to have a challenge all the time.”

Then again, maybe designing the perfect videogame is all about luck.

“I tried to put some science into game design, but later I understood that it is just a magic art,” Pajitnov says with a chuckle.

Version 1.4 of Johan Peitz’s popular jumping game Icy Tower was released today, and features a number of improvements, including new graphics and options for stat-tracking and customizing your experience. The last version of the game came out at least 3 years ago, but Icy Tower has maintained its large and loyal fanbase since its release in 2001. And it’s perfect timing for Classics Week… did you plan this, Johan?

TIGdb: Entry for Icy Tower

The player population of Free Realms continues to grow at a ridiculous rate, hitting the two million player milestone within a month of the game’s official launch. According to SOE, the game is a big hit with its target audience, with 75% of its registrants under age 17 and 46% under 13. Female gamers are particularly taken with the title, representing a third of the population. Once again, SOE president John Smedley is beside himself with excitement.

“In less than a month, Free Realms has captivated a core player base of tween and teen gamers, while also strongly resonating with MMO gamers. We wanted to create a game to play with our families and are excited to have hit the mark with our intended audience.”

SOE will be distributing a “party pack” of items so players can help the company celebrate this latest achievement. Hopefully it includes a little more Station Cash, as I could really use a ghost kitten to accompany me while I mine for silver. *sigh*

Breakout Panic is an arcade game that plays like all other Breakout clones, but in GameDesign’s version you are pressured to destroy all blocks as quickly as you can. Blocks are pushed downwards continuously, and the game ends immediately if you run out of balls to use or allow any block to cross the dashed line.

Left clicking releases all balls in your possession, and any balls still in play after you’ve completed a level will be carried forward to the next round. Bonus rounds appear every fifth stage as well, with the first type conferring bonus balls while the second reduces your spare ball count.

Power-ups include those that increases or reduces the size of the circle you are in control of, barriers, extra balls, and stars that boosts the travel speed of all balls.

It has fallen on Asami to carry on her family`s tradition and become a master at making sushi! Follow Asami`s grandfather`s recipes to keep your diverse clientele happy and full of delicious sushi. Use your Match 3 and Time Management skills to earn tips and enough money to improve Asami`s Sushi Shop. Buy powerful upgrades to keep your customers happy, and improve the atmosphere of the restaurant.