Since its invention in 1984, Tetris has been released on nearly every electronic device that can possibly play a game. It was created by a Russian guy named Pajitnov, who was working for the Academy of Science of the USSR. I thought the way he created the name was funny: it's a combination of tetronimoes, which makes sense, and tennis, just because he liked the sport. Anyway, Tetris' history has been full of legal battles and re-invention. After the game became popular in Russia and Hungary, people began to really take notice, and everyone wanted a piece of the action. Pajitnov sold the rights to Spectrum HoloByte, a company that existed in Britain and the US. Another British company, Andromeda, had plans to first buy the game, then to steal it and claim it their invention, both of which failed - sort of. They managed rights to make a computer game, but couldn't release the game for any other system.
The companies and rights and selling and buying and releasing games gets pretty convoluted and boring, but however it happened, in 1988 the game was released for Nintendo (tag line: From Russia, With Fun). The next year it was released for Game Boy, and that's when it really took off. Nowadays, the game is available for everything - computers, video game consoles, cellphones, iPods - you name it. There's probably a million play online for free versions, too, and plenty of downloadable ones for computers and handheld electronics. Apparently Google now has a thing called Android Market, which I think is like the App store for Androids. Anyway, there was a lawsuit that concluded this year that forced Google to remove about 35 "Tetris- clones" from the market (homemade versions of the game that can't legally call themselves "Tetris").
Interesting fact, courtesy of Wikipedia (which we all know is an extremely reliable website for information about anything): "In January 2010, it was announced that Tetris has sold more than 100 million copies for cell phones alone since 2005"
Other video game stuff, i.e. why are movie studios making video games to go with their movies? Seems pretty obvious to me: money. Video games have become so hugely popular that perhaps the movie studios fear that people will spend more time playing video games than watching movies. I read that in the past, and still today, movie studios would pay a third party to make the video game based on their movie, but now more and more studios are making their own video games so they don't have to share the profit. Which could be bad news for gamers, since movie studios aren't necessarily specialists in that field, so the games may not be as cool as they could be. But people will buy the movie based video games because they know the movie, not just for the merit of the game.
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