I've never done anything spectacularly fancy with CLI terminals. I could rig up a UI with c++ and qt, or python and tkinter.. but it's been a while. Longer ago, I used to do objc but that was forever ago!
So yea, I'd die on this one hahaha.
I should try it sometime. I love tetris!
Re: ridiculous C++isms and embedded C, I’ve been in the same spot for my entire career. After learning C++ in college, I joined a CG film company that had banned C++ (dumb story) so I learned how to write object oriented C. Working in console games after that, we weren’t allowed to use any built-in memory management or exceptions or a current compiler, so very restricted C++. (And the worst bug I ever fixed was when someone tried to get clever with their C++ copy constructor.) These days I use CUDA, which is also technically C++ but basically C.
It wasn’t that much or that bad, really. The setup was pretty simple, and quite doable for junior devs IMO (though full disclosure I had just left a position as a lead game programmer, so for me specifically it would have looked a little bad if I didn’t smash this particular interview question). It also helped that the problem was open-ended with extra credit features. I learned later when giving the interview myself that most people never finished the basic game, the majority never tried to write an AI player, and the interviewers were quite forgiving with their ranking & scoring - it was adaptive to the candidates. The coding part of the interview was just trying to be a bit fun and not just be pure dumb LeetCode problems. IMO it worked, I totally enjoyed the interview. The rest of the 4 hour interview included some whiteboard questions (on DB schemas, which I flubbed pretty hard) and also a lot of just talking about experiences and goals.