12/1/2023 0 Comments Original tetris![]() ![]() Pajitnov has personally worked on over 100 variants of the game. To date, Tetris has been released on over 65 platforms, a world record, with more than half a billion downloads on mobile devices, according to the Tetris Company. Ryugyong Hotel: The story of North Korea's 'Hotel of Doom' And when his deal over the rights expired in 1995, he finally started receiving royalties for the game. Pajitnov left Moscow for Seattle in 1991, with the help of his friend Henk Rogers. A judge ruled in Nintendo’s favor in late 1989, dealing a lethal blow to Atari, which had already produced hundreds of thousands of now useless copies of its version of the game, under the tagline “Tetris: The Soviet Mind Game.” Nintendo took a different approach, opting for the slogan “From Russia with fun.” The legal trouble culminated in a skirmish between Nintendo and Atari over the home console rights for Tetris. “There was a lot of legal trouble, and when the question of ownership and the original source of the game came up, I decided that I wanted everything to go smoothly and I granted the rights to the Computer Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences for 10 years,” he said. It is still considered by many – Pajitnov included – to be the best version of Tetris, and it created an unprecedented synergy between hardware and software, epitomizing the gaming mantra “easy to learn, hard to master.”ĭespite the game’s success, Pajitnov was still not making any money from it. The Game Boy version of Tetris sold 35 million units and helped the console become one of the most successful of all time. Henk Rogers and Alexey Pajitnov in Moscow's Red Square. But the misunderstanding between Pajitnov and Stein showed how tricky it would be to export a video game from Soviet Russia to the West for the first time – an issue that led to years of confusion and legal battles, and is even rumored to have landed on the desk of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The game played up its Soviet origins through Kremlin-themed illustrations and Cyrillic characters. It said that the rights had not been officially granted and that his launch was illegal.Įventually, Stein cleared the rights, and Tetris was released as a commercial PC title in the UK and the US in 1988. But as he was preparing to launch, he received another telex from Elorg – short for Electronorgtechnica, the Soviet organization that oversaw software and hardware exports. Stein, however, interpreted his response as a green light and immediately started producing the game. He knew that doing business directly with a Western firm could have landed him in jail, even before making any money, so he started investigating how he could sell the rights to Tetris through the state. “My English was really bad at that time, so I put together some kind of positive answer, saying we were very glad to receive the proposal and that some agreement could be made,” said Pajitnov. Illusion of control: Why the world is full of buttons that don't work Stein, who had seen Tetris in Hungary, wanted to secure the rights to sell it as a computer game in the West. ![]() In 1986, he got a message via telex – a forerunner of the fax machine – from Robert Stein, a salesman for a Hungary-based software company called Andromeda. ![]() Then, Pajitnov heard rumors that the game might have crossed borders and was being played in other Eastern bloc countries. People were just sharing Tetris through word of mouth and by copying it onto floppy disks. Ideas were owned by the state and the very concept of selling software as a product was unfamiliar to him. Pajitnov wasn’t making any money off the game, nor did he intend to. Everyone in the Soviet Union who had a PC had Tetris on it,” said Pajitnov. Pressed with requests to create a version of the game for the IBM PC, a more widespread computer with better graphics, Pajitnov assigned the job to Vadim Gerasimov, a 16-year-old student on a summer job at his office (today an engineer at Google). It was only through the sheer brilliance of its design that Tetris was transformed from a quirky test program into a worldwide phenomenon.Īlthough Tetris became immediately popular among programmers with access to an Electronika 60, the machine had no graphical capabilities – and less memory than today’s calculators. Shutterstockīut creating a video game in Soviet Russia at the height of the Cold War was far from easy. Tetris was inspired by pentomino, a classic board game.
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