Tetris

Tetris is an electronic puzzle game in which falling geometric pieces made of four connected squares must be arranged to form complete horizontal rows, which then vanish; it was created by the Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov? in the mid-1980s.¹⁶¹³ It has been released on virtually every computer and gaming system in existence and is routinely counted among the best-selling and most recognizable video games in history.¹⁶²³

The game’s core loop is elementary: differently shaped pieces drop into a rectangular field at increasing speeds, and the player rotates and moves each one to complete uninterrupted rows.¹⁶ A full line clears from the field, granting points and creating space; the game ends when the accumulating pile reaches the top.¹³¹ The playing field, called the “Matrix” in later official terminology, is a grid of 10 by 20 cells.¹³¹ The pieces are known as tetrominoes — later branded “Tetriminoes” — of which there are seven distinct shapes, including a square, a straight line, a T, an S, a Z, an L, and a J.¹³¹

Origins in Moscow

Pajitnov conceived the game while working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, a government research center where he studied artificial intelligence.¹⁸⁵ He wrote the first version to test the capabilities of the Electronika 60?, a Soviet clone of the American PDP-11 minicomputer that had no graphical capabilities, forcing him to build the falling pieces out of text characters.²⁵ He drew directly on pentominoes, a puzzle he had loved since childhood in which twelve shapes made of five squares are fitted into a box; judging twelve rotating pieces too complex, he reduced each shape to four squares, cutting the count to seven.²¹⁸ The name combined the Greek prefix for four with tennis, his favorite sport.³¹⁸

Pajitnov later recalled that the game had no scoring and no levels but was already impossible to stop playing, and that making completed lines disappear rather than leaving them on screen was the key insight.⁵² Because the Electronika 60? lacked graphics, he assigned the job of porting the game to the more widespread IBM PC to Vadim Gerasimov, a 16-year-old on a summer job in his office.³¹⁷ The game spread rapidly by word of mouth and floppy disk across Moscow and the Soviet Union.³¹⁸

The exact date of the game’s creation is disputed. Sources published before 2009 — including David Sheff’s 1993 book Game Over, a BBC documentary, and the game’s own copyright registration — cite 1985 as the release year, and Pajitnov himself said in a 1993 interview that he believed it was completed in 1985.⁶ A June 6, 1984 date came into wide circulation only around 2009, when the PR firm Grayling Connecting Point ran a $250,000 “25th Anniversary” media campaign for the client Blue Planet Software during E3.⁶¹¹ According to Henk Rogers, who co-founded The Tetris Company with Pajitnov, Pajitnov’s recollection is that he first developed it on the Electronika 60? in 1984 and that the IBM PC version came out in 1985.⁶ Britannica and several other reference works date the game to 1985.¹⁶

Escape to the West and the rights battles

Because the Soviet Union had not joined international software conventions and had no domestic intellectual-property law, Tetris was for a time effectively ownerless.⁹ It was smuggled to Hungary and by mid-1986 had gained popularity at a Budapest computing institute, where Robert Stein, owner of the London-based Andromeda Software, encountered it.⁹¹⁸ Stein sought the rights, but they lay with a new Soviet agency, Elektronorgtechnica (Elorg), which oversaw the export of Soviet software.¹⁸³ Stein licensed the game onward to two firms in the empire of media magnate Robert Maxwell — Mirrorsoft in London and Spectrum HoloByte in California — which released the first commercial versions for Western computers in 1988, playing up the game’s Soviet origins with Kremlin imagery, matryoshka dolls, and Cyrillic characters.⁹³¹⁷ It was the first piece of software the Soviet Union exported to the West.¹⁸²³

Spectrum HoloByte chose “Korobeiniki,” a 19th-century Russian folk song, as the game’s music; the tune became so identified with Tetris that a 1992 Europop cover by Doctor Spin, produced with Andrew Lloyd Webber, reached number six in the U.K. charts.²⁵¹⁷ The Tetris Company later required any official version to include a rendition of it under its “Tetris guidelines,” an exacting standard governing everything from the size of the playing field to the colors of the pieces.⁵

A tangle of overlapping licenses erupted into legal warfare in the late 1980s. Henk Rogers?, a Dutch game publisher based in Japan, first saw Tetris at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 1988 and traveled to Moscow on a tourist visa to secure the rights directly from Elorg.²⁵ The negotiations were conducted simultaneously with Kevin Maxwell, and the KGB dispatched two agents to Rogers’s Tokyo office; Elorg ultimately granted him the console and handheld rights and used his contract as a template for its other deals.² Atari subsidiary Tengen distributed an unauthorized NES version anyway, triggering a lawsuit that Nintendo won, cementing its exclusive console rights.¹³¹⁷

The Game Boy and global success

Rogers convinced Nintendo to bundle Tetris with every Game Boy, the handheld system Nintendo launched in 1989.³²³ He recalled telling Minoru Arakawa, head of Nintendo of America, that including Mario would sell the machine to little boys but including Tetris would sell it to everyone.³ Arakawa is said to have packed some 30 million units with the game.⁵

The pairing made both products; the portability and simplicity of the Game Boy version turned it into the most famous incarnation of the game and one of the most widely played titles in history.²³¹⁷ By 2009 the game had sold more than 70 million copies across all its forms; a 2023 reference source put lifetime sales above 170 million copies across more than fifty platforms.⁵¹³ The Tetris Company earned a Guinness World Record for “Most Variants of a Videogame,” with 215 official variants released as of May 2015.²¹

Pajitnov earned nothing from the game at first, as the rights were held by the Soviet state; they reverted to him in 1996, by which time he had moved to the United States and was working as a game designer at Microsoft.⁵²⁰ That year he and Rogers formed the business relationship that became The Tetris Company, which trademarked the game and pursues unlicensed versions.¹⁷²⁰ Pajitnov, born in Moscow on April 16, 1955, received the International Game Developers Association’s First Penguin Award in 2007 for “pioneering the casual games market”.²⁰

Mechanics, competition, and legacy

Later official versions standardized advanced mechanics. Most versions after 2006’s Tetris DS share a scoring chart in which a single-line clear is worth 100 points times the level and a four-line clear — a “Tetris” — is worth 800 points times the level.¹ Modern competitive play relies on the T-Spin, a technique that rotates a T-shaped piece into a gap it would not appear to fit, allowing two- or three-line clears that can send more “garbage” to an opponent than a standard Tetris.⁸¹² Britannica notes that later “infinite spin” mechanics, which grant extra placement time, angered purists.¹⁶

The game spawned a dedicated competitive scene; Jonas Neubauer won the Classic Tetris World Championship seven times.¹ It has been inducted into The Strong’s World Video Game Hall of Fame, added to the permanent design collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and has generated versions ranging from the battle-royale Tetris 99 to the audiovisual Tetris Effect.²¹¹ Britannica groups it among the defining works of the electronic puzzle game genre alongside Sokoban, Minesweeper, and Lumines.¹⁶

The story of the rights battle was dramatized in the 2023 Apple TV+ film Tetris, directed by Jon S. Baird and starring Taron Egerton as Rogers, with Nikita Efremov as Pajitnov.¹⁴²¹

Tetris Trailer #1 (2023)Rotten Tomatoes Trailers