Tetris (A. Пажитнов, 1984)
In June 1984, Alexey Pajitnov was working at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (1925-1991) in Moscow, researching artificial intelligence using a primitive, text-only Soviet computer called the “Electronika 60”.
To test the hardware, he decided to program a game inspired by a childhood puzzle called Pentominoes.
Because the Electronika 60 could not display graphics, Pajitnov made the falling blocks out of Latin brackets and punctuation symbols
The game was so addictive that Pajitnov and his colleagues spent hours playing it instead of working. He realized he had created something special.
Pajitnov wanted to share the game, but he needed it ported to the more popular IBM PC. He recruited a brilliant 16-year-old high school student, Vadim Gerasimov. Gerasimov added color, high scores, and optimized the code.
They copied the game onto floppy disks, and it spread virally like a digital wildfire across Moscow and the Eastern Bloc.
By 1986, a copy landed in Budapest, Hungary, where a Western businessman named Robert Stein saw it. Stein immediately realized its commercial potential and tried to buy the rights.
Because the USSR was a communist state, individual citizens could not own businesses or sell intellectual property. The Soviet government took control of Tetris through a state agency called Elektronorgtechnica (ELORG).
Robert Stein sold rights he didn’t fully own yet to Mirrorsoft (not Microsoft) and Atari. Meanwhile, a Dutch-American game publisher named Henk Rogers discovered the game and wanted to secure the handheld rights for the Nintendo’s Game Boy.
In 1989, Henk Rogers traveled to Moscow on a tourist visa, risking arrest by the KGB, to negotiate directly with ELORG. Robert Stein and Mirrorsoft representatives were in the exact same building at the same time, trying to secure the same rights.
Henk Rogers won the favor of ELORG and Alexey Pajitnov because he was honest, genuinely loved the game, and offered fair royalties to the Soviet state.
Nintendo secured the global handheld rights, bundled Tetris with every single original Game Boy, and sold over 35 million copies of that version alone, turning Tetris into a global multi-billion-dollar franchise.
Atari, which had mistakenly believed it owned the home console rights, produced a NES version of Tetris but was forced by a court order to withdraw and destroy hundreds of thousands of cartridges.
For the first 12 years, Alexey Pajitnov did not make a single ruble from his own invention; all the profits went straight to the Soviet government.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Henk Rogers helped Pajitnov move to the United States. In 1996, the original Soviet contracts expired, and the rights finally reverted back to Pajitnov. Together, Rogers and Pajitnov founded The Tetris Company, ensuring that the original creator would finally receive the financial credit and royalties for the most popular video game in human history.
Коробейники (Korobeiniki) (1861)
Every year, players gather globally to compete on the original 1989 NES version of the game, on the Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC)
In December 2023, a 13-year-old American player named Willis Gibson (Blue Scuti) made gaming history by becoming the first human ever to trigger the game’s functional “True Kill Screen,” causing the code to freeze on Level 157.