In the 1980s, the arcade game industry flourished in the United States. It was a standard cultural practice to visit gaming arcades where children and adults spent their leisure time. The influx of visitors increased even further after the introduction of a simple yet engaging game called “Tetris.” Nowadays, hardly anyone is unfamiliar with Tetris as it has been reissued several times, and almost everyone has manipulated the colorful blocks on their screens at least once in their lives. However, only a few know the man who gifted this game to the world and the battles different media magnates fought for it.
Contrary to popular belief, Tetris was not invented in the US or even in Europe. The creator of Tetris is Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet programmer who worked at the Computing Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The idea for Tetris arose in Alexey’s mind in 1984 when he was introduced to the puzzle game of American mathematician Solomon Golomb, “Pentomino”. The essence of Pentomino was to assemble one large figure from several small ones. Inspired by Golomb’s concept, Alexey decided to create something similar but tweak the concept slightly. In his game, the figures had to be assembled in a hypothetical “cup” with the possibility of collapsing into straight rows. The user had the ability to rotate falling elements at their discretion. Soviet computers, however, lacked the computing power to process figures made up of five cubes, as in Golomb’s puzzle. Thus, the number of composite parts in one figure was reduced to four, and thus, Tetris acquired its name (from the Greek “tetra” – four).
Tetris quickly spread in Moscow and beyond the Soviet Union thanks to pirate copies. Around this time, Robert Stein, a Hungarian software importer, learned about the game. During Stein’s trip to Moscow, in an attempt to obtain the exclusive right to the game, Alexey unexpectedly gave Tetris as a gift to the entrepreneur. Stein, in turn, construed the gesture as an unconditional transfer of ownership of the game and permission to dispose of the invention of the Soviet programmer at his discretion.
From that moment on, a war for the right to publish Tetris and earn money with it started among big game distributors. “The Tetris War” involved large companies such as Mirrosoft and Spectrum Holobyte, to which Asian segment manufacturers Atari Games and Nintendo later joined. They all tried to obtain the rights to the game first from Stein and then, after learning that the Hungarian entrepreneur was not the actual owner of Tetris, went to negotiate in Moscow. Interestingly, representatives of different companies even flew to the capital at approximately the same time, so in the hallways of ELOKA, where Alexey Pajitnov went to work, they were guided into different rooms so that competitors would not bump into each other.
The offer from Hank Rogers, who came to Moscow as a representative of Nintendo, interested Pajitnov the most. In the end, on March 21, 1989, all rights to the Tetris version for game consoles were transferred to the Japanese company.
The history of the battle between the business giants of the gaming industry for Tetris is actually much more extensive and can take up some time. To be precise, it takes one hour and fifty-eight minutes to watch the film “Tetris” by John Baird, which became available on the network on March 31, 2023. The film details the competition between companies and the risks that Alexey Pajitnov encountered while attempting to make the game accessible to users worldwide. It is worth mentioning that the role of the inventor was played by Russian theatre and film actor Nikita Yefremov, despite the fact that the film was produced by studios from the United Kingdom and the United States. The film can be watched online on the Apple TV+ platform.
