Sometime in 1984, Alexey Pajitnov decided to make a puzzle move. He was a programmer in his late twenties, working on pattern-recognition problems at the Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He had bought himself a set of pentominoes — the flat plastic shapes made of five squares each — and he kept arranging and rearranging them on his desk, trying to pack them into a box. The idea was to do it on a screen, the falling shapes settling into place by themselves.
Two clocks started running that day, though only one of them was visible. One was the game, which Pajitnov would build, give away, and watch travel further than anything he had ever touched. The other was the question of who owned it — a question he had no reason to ask, because in the Soviet Union a government employee did not own the things he made. For twelve years the two clocks ran on different tracks: the game spreading, selling, becoming one of the most-played objects on Earth, and its author getting none of it. The story is the distance between those two tracks.
A game with no graphics
The machine Pajitnov had to work with was an Elektronika 60, a Soviet clone of an aging American minicomputer. It could not draw a picture. It had no color, no sound, nothing but a screen of text. So he built his falling shapes out of brackets and spaces — little clusters of characters drifting down a well of text, where the player rotated and slid them to fit.
He simplified the pentominoes from five squares to four, which gave him seven shapes: the square, the line, the L and its mirror, the S and its mirror, and the T. Four squares is tetra in Greek. Pajitnov’s favorite sport was tennis. He spliced the two words together and called it Tetris.
The early version was a mess of pieces piling up until the screen filled and the game ended. Then he made one change that turned a tidy little exercise into something else entirely: when a horizontal row filled completely, it vanished, and everything above dropped down. Now the player wasn’t just stacking. They were clearing, racing, holding off the rising tide for one more line.
He couldn’t stop playing it. Neither, it turned out, could anyone else.
The institute stops working
Pajitnov showed it to colleagues, and within days the Computing Centre had a problem. People were playing Tetris instead of working. Pajitnov himself would pretend to be busy when he was actually deep in a game. “The Computer Centre was a pretty serious kind of institute,” he later said. “Very solid and very serious. Nobody ever thought about creating a computer game.” The place ran on speech recognition, artificial intelligence, the kind of research the state paid for. The game, by his own account, was “basically just an excuse for having fun” among the programmers — and now the fun was eating the institute alive.
It needed to run on the IBM PCs down the hall, machines that could actually show color and keep score. That job fell to Vadim Gerasimov, a sixteen-year-old high-school student a teacher had brought into the Computing Centre to work alongside the programmers. Working with a colleague, Dmitry Pavlovsky, they ported the game within days of the original: Gerasimov added color to the shapes, Pavlovsky built a scoreboard. That version could travel.
How it traveled, and who got paid
And travel it did, in the only way software moved in the Soviet Union: copied onto floppy disks and passed hand to hand, office to office, city to city. There was no store to buy it from and no company selling it. Within a couple of years, more or less everyone with a PC in Moscow had played Tetris. The disks crossed borders into Eastern Europe the same way, anonymous and unstoppable.
That is where the second clock becomes audible. In 1986 a copy surfaced in Budapest, at a computer institute, where it caught the eye of a London-based software dealer named Robert Stein. Stein saw money. He sent a telex to Moscow offering to license the game, got a reply that read to him like a yes, and proceeded to sell rights he did not actually own — to publishers in Britain, then onward to companies across the West. Tetris began appearing on home computers in Europe and America, generating real revenue, none of which reached the man who made it.
The legal owner, as far as the Soviet state was concerned, was the state itself, acting through an agency called ELORG, the body that handled the export of Soviet software. Pajitnov, as a government employee, had no claim to the profits. When ELORG’s officials realized that Tetris was being sold all over the world under contracts they had never signed, the situation became a tangle of overlapping claims — home-computer rights, arcade rights, console rights, handheld rights, each sold to someone, sometimes to several someones at once.
Moscow, 1989
Into that mess walked Henk Rogers, a Dutch-born game publisher based in Japan, who flew to Moscow in 1989 to negotiate for the rights Nintendo wanted most: the right to put Tetris on a small gray machine it was about to launch, the Game Boy. He and Pajitnov met for the first time in those negotiations and liked each other immediately — a friendship that would outlast everything else in the story.
Rogers had a particular argument for Nintendo. The company’s president in America, Minoru Arakawa, wanted to bundle Mario with the Game Boy. Rogers pushed back. “If you want little boys to buy your Game Boy, pack in Mario,” he told him. “But if you want everyone to buy your Game Boy, pack in Tetris, because everybody plays Tetris — young, old, male, female.”
On July 31, 1989, the Game Boy went on sale in North America with Tetris in the box. The two became inseparable. The little stacking game from a text-only Soviet computer turned a handheld into a global habit and went on to sell in the tens of millions, one of the best-selling video games ever made.
The two clocks meet
By the time the Game Boy made Tetris a worldwide habit, the game had been earning money on three continents for years, and Pajitnov had not seen a cent of it. Under the arrangements his institute had made, the rights ran to ELORG, then to the Russian state, and the man who built the game was simply its author, not its owner.
That changed only in 1996, when the rights finally reverted to him and he co-founded the company that has controlled Tetris ever since. Twelve years after he decided to make a puzzle move, the two clocks finally read the same time.