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Alexey Pajitnov and Tetris

Abstract

Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris in 1984 on a Soviet Elektronika 60 with no graphics, as a side project at a Moscow academy computing center. The game copied itself across the Eastern Bloc on floppy disks, was licensed to the West by a middleman who did not actually hold the rights, and ended up at the center of a 1989 Moscow showdown between three competing Western bidders, with the Soviet foreign-trade apparatus on the other side of the table. Nintendo won, bundled Tetris with the Game Boy, and sold 35 million copies. Pajitnov earned nothing for a decade: he had signed his rights over to the state. He got them back in 1996, co-founded The Tetris Company, and now collects royalties on the best-selling video game in history, at 520 million copies and counting.

Alexey Pajitnov
Alexey Pajitnov at the Game Developers Conference, 2024. Image: Official GDC, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Puzzle Researcher in Moscow

Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov was born on 16 April 1955 in Moscow, studied applied mathematics at the Moscow Aviation Institute, and in 1979 joined the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. His official work was speech recognition and artificial intelligence; his unofficial passion was puzzles. Writing small games, he reasoned, was a legitimate way to test new hardware, and it kept the machines and their operators honest.

The puzzle he kept returning to was pentominoes, the twelve shapes made of five squares, sold in the USSR as a boxed game he had loved as a child. Twelve pieces were too many for the computers he had; five squares made the combinatorics unwieldy. He cut the pieces to four squares. Four squares yield exactly seven pieces.

Seven Pieces on a Dead Terminal

The machine available was an Elektronika 60, a Soviet clone of DEC’s PDP-11, connected to a terminal that could display only text. Pajitnov drew the falling pieces from bracket characters and wrote the game in Pascal. Two design decisions made it addictive: completed rows vanish, so the screen never fills with your successes, only your mistakes; and the game never ends, it only gets faster. He named it Tetris, from tetra (four) and tennis, his favorite sport. The traditional date of completion is 6 June 1984, the day the franchise still celebrates as its birthday; some accounts place the finished version in 1985.

The first victims were his colleagues, who stopped working. With fellow researcher Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov, a 16-year-old prodigy doing an internship at the center, Pajitnov ported the game to the IBM PC in Turbo Pascal, now with color. The PC version spread on floppy disks through Moscow, then through the Eastern Bloc, copied hand to hand like samizdat. Nobody sold it; nobody could. In the Soviet Union the concept of privately owning and licensing software barely existed.

A License Built on an Unanswered Telex

In 1986 a copy reached the SZKI institute in Budapest, where Robert Stein, a Hungarian-born London software broker, saw it and smelled money. Stein telexed Moscow asking for the rights and, treating the vague reply as a yes, sold what he did not own: PC rights to Mirrorsoft in the UK (owned by Robert Maxwell) and its US sister Spectrum HoloByte. Both released Tetris in January 1988, wrapped in kitsch Cold War marketing, red packaging, Cyrillic lettering, the slogan “From Russia with Love.” Only after the product was on shelves did Stein finalize an actual contract, in May 1988, with Elorg (Elektronorgtechnica), the Soviet agency holding the state monopoly on software exports. The contract covered home computers. Everything else, arcade, console, handheld, remained unsold, a detail on which the whole story turned.

Pajitnov saw none of the money. As an employee of the Academy of Sciences he had built the game on state time and state hardware, and he formally assigned his rights to the Computing Centre for ten years. He later insisted this was no tragedy: the deal protected him from the rights circus that followed, and in the Soviet Union of 1988 there was nothing to spend royalties on anyway.

February 1989: Three Bidders in Moscow

The mess surfaced when the sublicensing chains reached Japan. Henk Rogers, a Dutch-American game publisher operating in Tokyo, had licensed Tetris for the Famicom through the Stein/Mirrorsoft chain and sold about 130,000 cartridges. Then Nintendo showed him the unannounced Game Boy and asked whether he could get handheld rights. Rogers traced the paper trail, found it rotten, and in February 1989 flew to Moscow on a tourist visa and walked into Elorg’s offices uninvited.

The same week, Stein and Kevin Maxwell (son of Robert) arrived separately, each to shore up his own claims. Elorg’s negotiator Belikov discovered in the space of days that the game had been sold around the world on rights he had never granted. Rogers took the opposite tack from his competitors: he laid out the sublicense chain, admitted his Famicom cartridges stood on dubious ground, and offered to pay for them. The honesty bought him the deal of the industry’s lifetime: handheld rights, and then console rights, for Nintendo, cutting Mirrorsoft out entirely.

The fallout was immediate. Atari Games, which had derived console rights through the Mirrorsoft chain, had already manufactured its NES version under its Tengen label. Nintendo sued; on 22 June 1989 a federal judge enjoined Tengen’s version, and hundreds of thousands of finished cartridges went back into the warehouse, one of the more expensive pieces of collateral damage in licensing history.

The Game Boy Bundle

Nintendo’s American chief Minoru Arakawa planned to bundle the new handheld with Super Mario. Rogers talked him out of it with an argument he has retold ever since: pack Mario and little boys will buy the Game Boy; pack Tetris and everyone will. The Game Boy shipped in 1989 with Tetris in the box, and the pairing was perfect: a monochrome puzzle needed no color screen, and sessions fit into bus rides (see Nintendo: A Century of Play and the Game Boy’s missing backlight). The Game Boy version alone sold 35 million copies, and the video game industry absorbed the lesson that matching game to hardware beats technical specifications.

Rights Regained

Pajitnov emigrated to the United States in 1991 with his friend and collaborator Vladimir Pokhilko, a psychologist who had studied why Tetris grips the mind. When the Computing Centre’s ten-year rights expired at the end of 1995, the rights reverted to Pajitnov, and in 1996 he and Rogers founded The Tetris Company to manage the license. Only then, twelve years after writing the game, did its author start earning from it. Pokhilko did not share the calm ending: he died in 1998 in a murder-suicide that took his family, a tragedy that still shadows the community of Tetris’s earliest circle. Pajitnov worked at Microsoft from 1996 to 2005 designing puzzle games, and has spent the decades since as the game’s traveling elder statesman.

Tetris itself kept compounding. It has been released on virtually every platform with a screen, holds the Guinness record for most ported video game, and passed 520 million copies sold, the best-selling video game of all time. Psychologists study the Tetris effect, the phenomenon of players seeing falling blocks in their dreams and in the tiles of their bathrooms; researchers have used the game to probe visual memory and even trauma processing. The 1989 Moscow negotiation became a 2023 feature film. The seven pieces have outlived the state that owned them.

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