Pressed with requests to create a version of the game for the IBM PC, a more widespread computer with better graphics, Pajitnov assigned the job to Vadim Gerasimov, a year-old student on a summer job at his office today an engineer at Google. The game spread quickly. Pajitnov wasn't making any money off the game, nor did he intend to.
Ideas were owned by the state and the very concept of selling software as a product was unfamiliar to him. People were just sharing Tetris through word of mouth and by copying it onto floppy disks. Then, Pajitnov heard rumors that the game might have crossed borders and was being played in other Eastern bloc countries.
In , he got a message via telex -- a forerunner of the fax machine -- from Robert Stein, a salesman for a Hungary-based software company called Andromeda. Stein, who had seen Tetris in Hungary, wanted to secure the rights to sell it as a computer game in the West. He offered significant money in advance. 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. With the PC version able to support color graphics, the true value of Tetris as a puzzle game became apparent. You can buy tons of versions of Tetris and a lot of swag here! Like a virus, Tetris was spreading its addictive properties from computer to computer.
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Its founder members were Jim Mackonochie and Robert Maxwell, the latter being the flamboyant publishing tycoon whose empire collapsed following his death in Nevertheless, Tetris was an immediate hit, earning ecstatic reviews and selling in healthy quantities. The problem was, so did several other influential industry figures across America, Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union.
Behind the iron curtain, a state-owned company called Elektronorgtechnica or Elorg for short had taken over the responsibility of selling the rights to Tetris overseas.
Because Pajitnov and his colleagues had created Tetris while working for the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Tetris effectively belonged to the state, and by extension, Elorg. But first, Rogers had to get the rights to a handheld version of Tetris from Elorg.
Rogers headed to Moscow to make a deal with Elorg face to face, without the correct permission from the Soviet government he was traveling on a tourist visa rather than a business visa, which could have landed him in serious trouble. Ultimately, Rogers used his charm and won the console rights to Tetris — despite the best efforts of Robert Maxwell, who even made a direct appeal to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in an attempt to change the deal. The huge legal tussle over the game would continue to rage — quite publically — for several years to come.
One of the biggest names in the battle for the rights to Tetris was Atari. It created an arcade version of Tetris in , and through its publishing arm Tengen, released a port of the game for the Nintendo Entertainment System in May the following year. Sega, having created its own version of Tetris for arcades in the late 80s, had also readied a port for its bit console, the Sega Mega Drive. That's 30 years of getting the theme music stuck in your head. The game is simple. But its story is anything but.
Let's go back in time and check out the history of those falling blocks — called "tetrominoes" — and how they came to be synonymous with Nintendo's Game Boy handheld gaming system.
I had no idea it would turn out to be such a global success. But in , everything changed. That's when Dutch video game designer and publisher Henk Rogers discovered "Tetris" at that year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and became instantly hooked on the game. And again. Soon I realised there was something going on — no game had grabbed me at a show just like that. But that's just the beginning of "Tetris'" success. As with any great origin story, there first was some drama to sort through.
At the time, "Tetris" was being distributed under a master license agreement. And the details of the licensing were still uncertain. In fact, by , several different companies claimed the rights to create and distribute "Tetris" software for computers, consoles, and handheld systems. Companies were licensing and sublicensing rights to the game that they didn't even hold to begin with. Some companies were distributing the game on consoles, some on computers.
But none of them was sanctioned by the Soviet government, which actually held the rights to the game. It began to market rights to "Tetris" through an organization called Elorg.
It decided that Atari Games would have rights to the arcade version, and Nintendo would have rights to the console and handheld versions of "Tetris.
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