Tetris: The Soviet ‘mind game’ that took over the world

Like many of history's greatest ideas, Tetris came about quite unintentionally. Alexey Pajitnov was a software engineer at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, tasked with testing a new type of computer, the Electronika 60. To do so, he wrote a simple game based on a puzzle from his childhood. It would help assess how powerful the computer was -- and provide a bit of fun.

Little did he know that the resulting game would go on to become one of the greatest, most addictive and most successful of all time. It was June 6, 1984, and Tetris had just started its journey from behind the Iron Curtain. Tetris is a puzzle game in which geometric shapes called “tetrominoes” fall down onto a playing field, and the player has to arrange them to form gapless lines. Pajitnov took inspiration from pentomino, a classic puzzle game consisting of all the different shapes that can be made by combining five squares -- 12 in total -- with the goal of arranging them in a wooden box like a jigsaw puzzle. To simplify things, he knocked that down to four squares, thus reducing the number of shapes from 12 to seven. 

He called the game Tetris, combining the Greek numeral “tetra” (meaning four) and tennis, his favorite sport. Pajitnov himself was immediately hooked. “I couldn't stop myself from playing this prototype version, because it was very addictive to put the shapes together,” he said on the phone from Seattle, where he now lives. But creating a video game in Soviet Russia at the height of the Cold War was far from easy. It was only through the sheer brilliance of its design that Tetris was transformed from a quirky test program into a worldwide phenomenon.

Word of mouth

Although Tetris became immediately popular among programmers with access to an Electronika 60, the machine had no graphical capabilities -- and less memory than today's calculators. Pressed with requests to create a version of the game for the IBM PC, a more widespread computer with better graphics, Pajitnov assigned the job to Vadim Gerasimov, a 16-year-old student on a summer job at his office (today an engineer at Google). The game spread quickly. “It was like a wood fire. Everyone in the Soviet Union who had a PC had Tetris on it,” said Pajitnov. Pajitnov wasn't making any money off the game, nor did he intend to. Ideas were owned by the state and the very concept of selling software as a product was unfamiliar to him. People were just sharing Tetris through word of mouth and by copying it onto floppy disks.

Then, Pajitnov heard rumors that the game might have crossed borders and was being played in other Eastern bloc countries. In 1986, he got a message via telex -- a forerunner of the fax machine -- from Robert Stein, a salesman for a Hungary-based software company called Andromeda. Stein, who had seen Tetris in Hungary, wanted to secure the rights to sell it as a computer game in the West. He offered significant money in advance.  “My English was really bad at that time, so I put together some kind of positive answer, saying we were very glad to receive the proposal and that some agreement could be made,” said Pajitnov. He knew that doing business directly with a Western firm could have landed him in jail, even before making any money, so he started investigating how he could sell the rights to Tetris through the state. Stein, however, interpreted his response as a green light and immediately started producing the game. But as he was preparing to launch, he received another telex from Elorg -- short for Electronorgtechnica, the Soviet organization that oversaw software and hardware exports. It said that the rights had not been officially granted and that his launch was illegal.

Eventually, Stein cleared the rights, and Tetris was released as a commercial PC title in the UK and the US in 1988. The game played up its Soviet origins through Kremlin-themed illustrations and Cyrillic characters. But the misunderstanding between Pajitnov and Stein showed how tricky it would be to export a video game from Soviet Russia to the West for the first time -- an issue that led to years of confusion and legal battles, and is even rumored to have landed on the desk of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.