Tetris game history

Illusion of control: Why the world is full of buttons that don't work. 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. 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.

The Game Boy. Concordski: What ever happened to Soviets' spectacular rival to Concorde? Tetris was selling well on computers, but the big money in the games sector was being made elsewhere: consoles. Henk Rogers, a Dutch video game developer and businessman living in Japan, was the first to realize that Tetris was a perfect match for the Game Boy, a new handheld system released by Nintendo in Japan in early The console was about to launch in North America and Europe too, and Rogers set out to convince the company to bundle a copy of the game in the box, a common practice outside of Japan.

I have Mario. But if you want everyone to buy your Game Boy, then you should include Tetris. Rogers set out to obtain the necessary permissions, and soon realized what a challenge that would be.

He had already published a version of Tetris in Japan, for the popular Nintendo Famicom home system, only to discover that there were half a dozen companies all claiming to own the rights to the game. Once in Moscow, Rogers made little progress until he hired an interpreter, who swiftly took him to Elorg. They're not supposed to talk to foreigners, and I wasn't supposed to talk to the Russians, let alone people inside the government.

So I broke all kinds of rules by being there. They interrogated me for two hours. I thought they were trying to figure out whether they were gonna send me to Siberia or not," he said. But among the officials in the room was Alexey Pajitnov, who immediately took a liking to Rogers. The Game Boy version of Tetris sold 35 million units and helped the console become one of the most successful of all time. It is still considered by many -- Pajitnov included -- to be the best version of Tetris, and it created an unprecedented synergy between hardware and software, epitomizing the gaming mantra "easy to learn, hard to master.

After signing the deal for handheld rights, Elorg proposed Rogers to make them an offer for the still untapped console rights. Atari, with their unknowingly faulty agreement with Mirrosoft, built , Tetris games, a huge investment for their first day launch, most of which went to advertisement, even taking a full page ad in USA Today.

They signed a deal for , in guaranteed royalties as well as fifty cents on every cartridge. This was Nintendo's chance to harm their competitor, Atari. Meanwhile, by the twenty-third of March in , Keven Maxwell, son of Robert Maxwell who had ties in the Russian government , was sending threatening telexes to Belikov, which could have made a difference if not for Russia being on the horizon of political change.

Nintendo immediately sent a cease and desist letter to Atari advising them to stop any marketing or production of Tetris because they had sole rights to the game. Atari's legal consultants assured them that they in fact doubtlessly had sole rights, so they sued Nintendo in return.

Nintendo provided Belikov as their key witness. The court date was set for November thirteenth, Before this, the state committee for computer technology told Belikov that if he lost the lawsuit, a special commission would be created that would look into how much money he had lost the soviet state. He joined Rogers in San Fransisco where they waited to testify. The judge spared them the witness stand and granted all video game rights to Nintendo. Atari's hundred thousand cartridges were now worthless.

To date, Nintendo dealers across the world have sold eight million copies of their NES version of Tetris.

On November fifth, , Robert Maxwell disappeared, leaving Mirrorsoft near bankrupt, and Atari still hurting. Tetris accounted largely for the Game Boy's success, but Pajitnov had yet to receive anything for his game.

He was still working for the Computer Center. After his game's huge success, he lost interest in scientific programming, and with the help of Henk Rogers, he and his family moved to Seattle. He established a company to develop games, and in gave up working for himself and joined Microsoft to make games. He regularly returns to Moscow and thinks of one day returning to live there. Tetris Wiki Explore. Explore Wikis Community Central.

Register Don't have an account? History Talk 1. Pazhitnov gets a small degree of fame for his program. These versions catch the eye of Robert Stein, president of the British software house Andromeda. He plans to get the rights to the PC version from Pazhitnov directly, and to get the other versions from the Hungarian programmers.

Jigsaw Puzzles. History of Tetris Tetris originated in Russia around and was never patented, at the time intellectual property rights were not established in then communist Russia for private individuals.