Tetris may be a simple, innocent little puzzle game, but its history reads like a bizarre Cold War thriller – a story of secret deals and corporate intrigue spanning both sides of the Iron Curtain.

The man who made Tetris

It was in the summer of 1984 that Alexei Pajitnov, a young software developer at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, had a brilliant idea. While thinking up a puzzle game to test the capabilities of the Soviet computer, Electronica 60, he remembered a childhood game with pentominoes.

These were blocks of different shapes, each made up of five squares, that had to fit correctly into a box. Pajitnov decided to create a variant of the computer game that reduced the number of squares per block to four and increased the thrill by making the shapes fall onto the screen one at a time of bos5000 slot bonus.

Pajitnov called the game Tetris, combining “tetra” (meaning four) and his favorite sport, tennis.

Crossing the Iron Curtain

The original Electronika 60 version of Tetris was very rudimentary, using keyboard letters instead of actual blocks. One of Pajitnov’s colleagues helped him create an IBM version that not only used real graphics but also made the game accessible to users around the world. Soon it was being copied and played both inside and outside the Academy.

Two years later, software salesman Robert Stein came across a copy of Tetris while visiting Hungary and realized its commercial potential. The problem was that there was no way to communicate with the inventor in Soviet Russia… other than via printed messages sent over a teleprinter.

Stein was not discouraged and sent Pajitnov a message asking him to buy the licensing rights to Tetris. Pajitnov replied that he was basically interested. Stein interpreted this very casual “maybe” as a resounding “yes.” That was a mistake Bos5000.

Tetris arrives

Stein wasted no time, sublicensing Tetris to British software maker Mirrorsoft and its US sister company Spectrum Holobyte. Both companies prepared to release the game to their respective regional home computer markets in 1988.

Then a huge wrench was thrown into the whole thing by ELORG, the Soviet software export organization. Realizing what was happening, they ordered Stein to go to Moscow. This turned out to be more like a KGB interrogation than a business meeting, where Stein had to explain why he was selling Tetris in the West without ELORG’s permission.

A shocked Stein explained that he had no idea that permission even existed, let alone had it. Nevertheless, he managed to convince them to formally grant him the licensing rights he thought he already had, meaning that Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte were unrelated.

Tetris sold in large quantities to home computer owners. But the big money was in another market: games consoles.

Henk Rogers

In early 1988, Spectrum HoloByte presented Tetris at a trade show in Las Vegas. Among the visitors was Henk Rogers, a young software entrepreneur who specialized in securing rights for the Japanese market. Tetris “said something”, so Rogers was determined to acquire the home computer and console rights. The problem was that the console rights in Japan (and North America) had already been sold by Mirror Soft to Atari Games.

When Rogers called Atari Games to inquire about the rights, he was turned down. Not wanting to give up, he went straight to Atari Games headquarters and waited in the parking lot until he could ambush the president as he left the building. Over a sushi dinner, the president agreed to sell Rogers the rights to Japanese game consoles.

Rogers’ boldness paid off, bringing Tetris to Japanese home computers and Nintendo NES consoles. But the next challenge was to acquire the handheld rights so Nintendo could release Tetris on its exciting new device, the Game Boy.

Well, Rogers was foolishly bold. He flew to Moscow, completely uninvited, knocked on ELORG’s door, and did whatever it took to convince the Russians to give up the rights to Tetris’ handheld. This was the kind of meeting that would normally require KGB approval, but Rogers managed to sneak into the boardroom of ELORG’s fearsome boss, Nikolai Belikov, with only the help of a translator.

The battle for Tetris

The meeting didn’t start well. Belikov was surprised – and angered – to learn that Tetris also existed on consoles. Rogers, equally surprised, produced paperwork showing that the rights to ELORG had passed to Stein’s company, then to MirrorSoft, then to Atari Games, and finally to himself. Belikov responded that Stein had only acquired the rights to the home computer version of Tetris, meaning that the Japanese console version would actually be illegal in Rogers’ hands.

“I either come out of here with the rights to Tetris, or I end up in a concentration camp,” Rogers thought. Luckily, Tetris creator Alexei Pajitnov was there and took an instant liking to Rogers. The mood lightened up, and Belikov agreed to give Nintendo the rights to the handheld and eventually the global console.

By a remarkable coincidence, Stein arrived in Moscow for a meeting with ELORG on the very day that Rogers unexpectedly showed up. Having learned from Rogers, Belikov became deeply suspicious of Stein, accusing him of secretly selling sublicenses.

But now Belikov was ready to beat the capitalists at their own game. He presented Stein with a new contract, but it included the subtle additional clause that Stein’s rights only applied to computers, not consoles. Belikov also added clauses providing for heavy penalties for late license payments, but these only distracted Stein’s attention from the important console rights clauses.

It worked. Stein signed, unwittingly blocking himself and his sublicensees from selling Tetris on consoles. “Belikov was a son of a bitch,” Stein later said.

This had disastrous consequences for Atari Games, who released a North American NES version of Tetris in 1989 using the non-existent console rights transferred to them by Stein via Mirrorsoft. Nintendo sent Atari Games a cease and desist notice, correctly stating that only they had the rights. Atari Games, who had invested millions of dollars to bring the game to market, stubbornly maintained their rights and sued Nintendo.

In late 1989, a judge ruled in Nintendo’s favor, forcing Atari Games to liquidate all of its stock of unsold Tetris games. Specimens that survived the massacre because they had already been sold are now popular collector’s items.

Everything falls into place

Tetris helped make the Game Boy a huge global success. But even though companies around the world made fortunes off his invention, Alexei Pajitnov himself never received any royalties, as Tetris was technically owned by ELORG. That changed in the mid-90s, when ELORG’s license expired and the rights to Tetris eventually reverted back to its inventor.

Pajitnov and his old friend Henk Rogers founded the Tetris Company to manage the worldwide rights to all of Tetris, and the game continues to enjoy success online and on smartphones around the world.