How Tetris got out of the Soviet Union
Tetris was written in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, a researcher at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Within five years it was on sale across Europe, America and Japan. Pajitnov worked for a state institution, so the game belonged to the Soviet state, and getting it out meant a series of deals in which several Western companies each believed they held rights that, as it turned out, nobody had actually granted them.
A puzzle written on a Soviet computer
Pajitnov wrote the first version on an Electronika 60, a Soviet computer with a text display, so the falling pieces were drawn with characters rather than graphics. The pieces are tetrominoes, shapes made of four squares, and the name joins that word to tennis, a game Pajitnov liked. The rule that made it work was that a completed horizontal row disappears, so the player can keep going for as long as they can keep the stack down.
The game spread between computers at the centre and beyond. Vadim Gerasimov, a young programmer working with Pajitnov, ported it to the IBM PC, and that version travelled on copied disks to other countries in the Eastern Bloc.
The first Western licences
Robert Stein, who ran a British software firm called Andromeda, saw a version of the game running in Hungary and set about licensing it. Before Stein had a signed agreement from Moscow, Andromeda sold the rights on, to Mirrorsoft in Britain and to Spectrum HoloByte in the United States. Both companies were connected to the publisher Robert Maxwell. Spectrum HoloByte released the game in America in 1988 and marketed it with Soviet imagery.
On the Soviet side, the rights were handled by Elorg, a state organisation responsible for exporting computer technology. The agreement Elorg eventually made with Andromeda covered home computers. It did not cover arcade machines, games consoles or handheld devices, and those were exactly the markets that were about to matter.
The race for the Game Boy
Nintendo was preparing the Game Boy and wanted a game to sell it with. Henk Rogers, who ran a company called Bullet-Proof Software and had already published Tetris in Japan through the Western licences, travelled to Moscow in early 1989 to deal with Elorg directly. Stein and Kevin Maxwell of Mirrorsoft were in Moscow for talks with Elorg at around the same time.
Rogers came away with the handheld rights for Nintendo, and Nintendo went on to secure the console rights as well. Atari, through its Tengen label, had already released its own version of Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System, relying on a licence that traced back through Mirrorsoft. A court in the United States found that this chain of licences did not include consoles, and the Tengen cartridge was withdrawn from sale.
When the Game Boy reached North America in 1989, it came with Tetris included. The pairing suited both sides: a short, simple puzzle that could be played in a few minutes was an ideal fit for a portable machine with a small monochrome screen, and it became one of the best-known releases of the console.
What Pajitnov got out of it
For years Pajitnov received nothing from the game’s sales, because the rights belonged to the Soviet state and were licensed through Elorg. Pajitnov later moved to the United States. In 1996, after the rights returned to Pajitnov, Pajitnov and Rogers founded The Tetris Company, which has licensed the game ever since.
With the rights under a single owner, the game has been licensed to many publishers on almost every kind of device, while the basic rules have stayed close to the ones written in Moscow in 1984: seven shapes, falling one at a time, and full rows that clear.
