How Tetris broke out of the Soviet Union

IT WAS everyone’s favourite game when it took the world by storm, but first it had to break out of the Soviet Union.

There’s a lot more to Tetris that you probably think.

ON A cold February day in the 1970s, 15-year-old Alexey Pajitnov leapt over a pile of snow in Moscow. As he landed, his leg hit the pavement with “a sickening crack”.

Soviet doctors put him in a full leg cast, requiring two to three months of in-home convalescence. To help him cope with boredom, a friend brought him books of math puzzles.

It was the moment that would change his life, as detailed by Dan Ackerman’s new book The Tetris Effect.

Pajitnov became addicted to the puzzles and eventually sought out other brain teasers. He developed a special fondness for pentomino puzzles — geometric jigsaw challenges that required players to join pieces made up of five squares into a set area.

At 17, he became “spellbound” upon seeing his first computer. After graduating from the prestigious Moscow Institute of Aviation, Pajitnov took a research job in the computing department of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Eventually, he was supplied an Electronica 60, a computer that was a decade out of date and “incapable of displaying anything beyond the letters, numbers and symbols of his computer keyboard”.

At the time, Pajitnov was “vaguely aware of the growing phenomenon of video games, a major cultural force in the West and Japan.”

While Soviet censors tried to keep them out of citizens’ hands, games like Pac-Man and Q*bert slipped through. In the early 1980s, one of Pajitnov’s programmer friends became obsessed with Pac-Man and tried to reverse-engineer the game, “reprogramming it from scratch and writing a new, nearly identical version just to figure out the programmatic thinking behind it.”

This inspired Pajitnov to try to recreate the experience of pentomino puzzles on his computer.

Russian creator of the video game Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov.

Pajitnov produced the first version of the game in six days. He used four-segment pieces instead of five, calling the seven different shapes they could form tetrominoes.

This version laid out the basic concept, but lacked sizzle. With the help of several others, he made modifications — limiting game play to just a narrow sliver in the centre of the screen and making the bottom row disappear as it filled up. Music and colour were added as well.

With his figures called tetrominoes and the back and forth between game and player reminding Pajitnov of tennis, he named his invention Tetris.

Pajitnov couldn’t profit from Tetris, as the Russian Academy had signed him to a 10-year deal granting them ownership of the game. But the creator wanted the world to see his work.

He handed out free copies to other programmers and computer enthusiasts and anyone he could find who had access to a computer (which wasn’t many people in 1980s Russia), and the game went viral.

By 1986, nearly everyone in the USSR who had access to a personal computer had played Tetris.

Around this time, a Hungarian-born British computer salesman named Robert Stein was looking for new products to distribute.

During a visit to Hungary’s Institute of Computer Science, he noticed programmers huddling around a terminal — waiting, it turned out, for their chance to play Tetris.

Stein took a turn on the machine himself and got it immediately. He also learned that not only were programmers playing the game, but they were adapting it for other formats, including Apple and Commodore computers.

Clearly, this was a product with sales potential. Stein contacted Pajitnov, offering a generous 75 per cent sales royalty (after expenses). Pajitnov’s superiors, seeing the potential for a serious cash infusion into the Soviet Union, proceeded to take a greater role in the negotiations, edging Pajitnov toward the sidelines.

The Tetris effect.

The rights to Tetris were, by now, officially controlled by a Soviet government agency called ELORG (short for Electronorgtechnica) — “an arm of the Soviet Ministry of Trade charged with protecting and licensing rights for computer software and other technology created under the government’s umbrella” — and its vice-chairman, Nikolai Belikov.

The game was unveiled in the US in early 1988 to glowing reviews and instantly became the Soviet Union’s greatest commercial export. Over the course of the next few years, Stein and Belikov would be joined by many interested players in a convoluted quest for a piece of the valuable rights.

One of these players was Henk Rogers, a software designer and entrepreneur who’d had success with an original game called The Black Onyx. Rogers was one of the many who saw dollar signs in Tetris and hoped for a piece of the action. He eventually paired with Nintendo to represent their interests (with a piece for himself) in the negotiations.

In 1989, Rogers and Pajitov met at the Russian Academy, and the two computer geeks clicked over their love of programming and game creation. As they moved to Pajitov’s Moscow apartment for some vodka, “both men could sense they were now part of an unspoken alliance, although it was not yet clear against whom and for what purpose,” Ackerman writes.

By 1995, the Soviet Union had dissolved, and Russia was open for business. That same year, Pajitnov’s decade-long deal with ELORG expired, and Rogers offered to form a new company with him “to own and administer the rights to the game, finally giving Tetris’ creator a share of the game’s financial success”.

One of the most iconic games of all time.

It was an offer Pajitnov couldn’t refuse — and didn’t regret. To date, Tetris has sold more than 170 million physical copies and 425 million mobile phone and tablet downloads, generating nearly $1 billion in sales.

Today, the boy who broke his ankle on a snowbank is 60 and living with his wife and two sons in Bellevue, Washington.

After working for Microsoft on and off for years, Pajitnov now develops games independently as well as serving as Tetris’ brand ambassador.

Although the book doesn’t reveal what he is personally worth, it’s clear that all his time spent toiling away in obscurity was worth it.

“Alexey Pajitnov is perhaps the most famous game designer in the world, yet he’s always been good-natured and philosophical about being denied the profits from his game,” Rogers said in 1996. “After 10 years of being left out of Tetris licensing deals arranged by a government that no longer exists, modest Alexey is finally getting his due.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Post and was republished here with permission.