Tetris Made Millions and Its Soviet Inventor Saw None of It for a Decade

In the spring of 1984, Alexey Pajitnov, a 29-year-old researcher at the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, was working on a project to study artificial intelligence in pattern recognition. He took a break to write a small game inspired by a classic puzzle of fitting pentominoes into rectangles. He simplified the shapes to four-square pieces, made them fall, and called it Tetris. The first version ran on an Elektronika 60 with no graphics; the falling pieces were drawn from typewriter brackets.

There was no path for a Soviet citizen to commercially release software. Pajitnov gave copies to colleagues. Floppy disks circulated to other institutes, then westward through Hungary, where in 1986 a British software broker named Robert Stein saw the game running and assumed he could license it like any other product. He cabled Pajitnov, got a friendly reply that he interpreted as agreement, and signed sublicenses to Mirrorsoft in the UK and Spectrum HoloByte in the US. Both released Tetris commercially in 1988. Pajitnov, in Moscow, knew nothing about it.

The Soviet government noticed when royalty money started moving. Elorg, the agency that controlled foreign software licensing, repudiated whatever Stein thought he had bought and opened its own negotiations. The decisive bidder was Henk Rogers, a Dutch entrepreneur living in Tokyo who flew uninvited to Moscow with a sample cartridge in his briefcase and ended up sitting across a table from Pajitnov. Rogers carved off the handheld rights for Nintendo. The Game Boy launched in 1989 with Tetris bundled in. The bundle sold 35 million units and turned the console into the bestselling handheld of its era.

Pajitnov was paid in his Academy salary. The copyright on his game reverted to him only in 1996, when he co-founded The Tetris Company with Rogers and finally began collecting royalties — twelve years after he had finished writing the code.