1 creator of the game Tetris. How Tetris took over the world: the true story of the cult game

In the second half of the eighties of the twentieth century, young people in almost all countries twirled a Rubik's cube in their hands. Soon this hobby was replaced by a new game that required a personal computer.

The abnormal popularity of Tetris and its reasons

The mass psychosis that accompanied the appearance of the new toy is difficult to describe. Both young amateurs and gray-haired researchers clicked the keys with equal passion, trying to reach new level. It seemed that their entire future depended on success. It happened that, after working a full shift at the computer center, an operating engineer or programmer stayed to “play a little” and sat in front of the monitor for several hours in a row.

At that time, ordinary people could not purchase personal computers; they were purchased for the needs of organizations and departments. Most often these were “Robotron” machines produced in the GDR with information characteristics significantly inferior to some modern ones. mobile phones. The first Tetris was created for such computer technology. The game was simple, and this is what explained the unique popularity it enjoyed.

Historical background

With the beginning of perestroika, the Soviet Union was experiencing a systemic crisis that originated in the sixties and seventies of the 20th century. A contradiction accumulated between the high average intellectual potential of engineering and technical personnel, excellent qualifications of workers and meager material and living conditions, which were also constantly deteriorating. There was an outflow of labor resources into non-productive spheres of the national economy and private cooperative trade.

The prestige of higher education was rapidly declining. World-class programmers toiled in numerous research institutes, trying to survive on miserable wages, which were constantly decreasing due to an avalanche of inflation. One of these unclaimed intellectuals was Alexey Pajitnov, who worked at the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Russian secret weapon

In the USSR, many devices and technologies were invented that found application in countries that were considered much more technologically advanced. The inventors often remained unknown, and their copyrights were taken over by more energetic and legally literate people who profited from the introduction of these innovations. The question of who invented Tetris, unlike many other similar cases, has a very specific answer. This is Pajitnov, a citizen of the USSR, who, by the will of fate, became a symbol of the intellectual potential of our country.

He was even half-jokingly, half-seriously accused of undermining the defense capabilities of the United States. Pentagon officers, instead of dealing with issues of nuclear security, intelligence and global strategy, were busy spinning grouped squares, trying to arrange them in even rows and spending most of their official time on this. There was no question about where Tetris was invented; it was called that - “the secret weapon of the Russians.”

Why was Tetris invented?

Knowing the history of the appearance of this game, one can come to the conclusion that its development was almost the goal of the life of an outstanding scientist. This is not entirely true. In fact, Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris, did not specialize in creating toys. He dealt with more serious issues. His scientific work was related to the creation of cyberintelligence. Puzzles like the Pentomino Puzzle were made by him to illustrate various logical processes characteristic of the human mind and logical thinking.

He also developed other visual aids for explaining mental algorithms. then had extremely limited capabilities, much more modest than now, so “Tetris” (in which the figures consist of four “cubes”), and not “Pentomino” (where there were five elements), became widespread. The game can also serve the simplest scheme the body's fight against aging. It shows that the efforts of the regenerative system are not always enough to replace the damage that occurs during life, and entropy wins.

Tetris in the West

The one who invented Tetris did not immediately begin to receive dividends from his product. This became possible only after international licensing and patenting. The UK company Andromeda was the first to express a desire to acquire copyright and contacted the author directly. The game has already leaked to the West and found its fans there, and therefore, many entrepreneurs have a desire to make money from it.

The director of Andromeda, Mr. Stein, brought Pajitnov to a television show, where he introduced him to live CBS so everyone knows who invented the game Tetris. During the interview, it turned out that the author and owner of all of them has not yet received a single cent for his popular puzzle, although both Microsoft and Spectrum Olobyte have already presented it on the market as their own products.

Invention and reward

The monopoly of the Soviet state on foreign trade in this case had dire consequences. The management of the Elektronorgtekhnika association finally realized that such a seemingly stupid thing as falling figures could become a source of quite serious money, and concluded a contract with Stein. At the same time, no one thought to sign an agreement with Pajitnov themselves. From the point of view of the command-administrative system, it did not matter at all who invented Tetris, the main thing was that it was a Soviet citizen who did it (no one argued with this), and therefore the profits should go to the bureaucratic machine.

The fate of the inventor

Alexey Pajitnov’s career has developed quite well, at least financially. This talented programmer has been working at Microsoft for eighteen years, where he has been given every opportunity for self-realization. The tasks he performs are incomparably more complex than the puzzle that made him famous, but in order to increase the attractiveness of the product he developed, for advertising purposes they mention that the author is the one who invented Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov himself.

In the nineties, there was a joke about a “new Russian” (there was such a popular comic image in a purple jacket and a gold chain around his neck) who bought the most expensive and modern computer. At the same time, he set a very strict condition for the seller: “If Tetris doesn’t work, you will answer me!” It is possible that the talented programmer Alexei Pajitnov will be remembered in many decades only as the inventor of this simple toy. Sadly…

All or almost all great things are created by accident. Then this accident (sooner or later) becomes a global property and changes the lives of many people.

Tetris is one of those accidents. Uncomplicated logic puzzle, written in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, an employee of the Computing Center at the USSR Academy of Sciences, for himself and his colleagues, in a short time gained worldwide fame, provoked a major scandal, a series of lawsuits and, ultimately, remained in history as the most popular computer game of all time .

Storm in a teacup

The idea of ​​Tetris was born to Alexey Pajitnov in 1984 after meeting the puzzle of the American mathematician Solomon Golomb Pentomino Puzzle. The essence of this puzzle was quite simple and painfully familiar to any contemporary: from several figures it was necessary to assemble one large one. Alexey decided to make a computer version of pentominoes.

Pajitnov not only took the idea, but also supplemented it - in his game, you had to collect figures in a glass in real time, and the figures themselves consisted of five elements (from the Greek " p enta"- five) and during the fall they had to rotate around their own center of gravity. But the computers of the Computing Center were unable to do this - the electronic pentomino simply did not have enough resources. Then Alexey decides to reduce the number of blocks that made up the falling figures to four. So from pentomino we got tetromino (from the Greek “ t etra" - four). Alexey calls his new game Tetris - from the words “ tetromino" And " tennis».

Pajitnov wrote the first version of the game quickly, using seven figures as a basis, which later became the standard Tetris set. In that version, it was not even graphic images of figures that fell into the glass, but their text counterparts, in which the squares were made up of an opening and closing bracket. This was done not out of a good life, but out of necessity: the Elektronika-60 computer, on which Tetris was created, did not even have a monitor, but a display that could display only letters and numbers (no graphics!) and only in 24 lines of 80 characters in each.

The same Pentomino Puzzle.

“For several months it was such an incomprehensible work that you actually couldn’t even see: something was changing on the screen, Lesha was sniffling, Lesha was walking around, smoking a huge amount of cigarettes...- recalls Mikhail Kulagin, one of the Computing Center employees. - And suddenly he called us to watch the game. And he says: guys, look, it turns out like this. The famous glass appeared on the screen, into which some figures were falling. To be honest, I didn’t even immediately understand what the point was...”

The first version of Tetris was created in the Pascal language, popular at that time, and looked quite primitive. But the game worked, and how it worked! Such a simple idea, when the tetromino figures fall and the filled rows disappear, subsequently gave amazing results.

Eight months later, Pajitnov decided to port the game to PC. At that time it was big problem, because the networks were still very weak, and compatible media did not exist (that is, in order to exchange data between different computers, it was necessary to look for special disks that read the format at the physical level). Alexey himself had no experience working on a PC, so to port the game he hired a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, Vadim Gerasimov, who at the Computer Center was known as a young genius and everyone ran to him for advice.

Transferring the game to the PC took only three or four days, a few more days were spent debugging the timer, adjusting the work with the screen, and the like. But this was only the beginning, then Alexey and Vadim spent about six months fiddling around with making Tetris color, adding a table of records (they used a ready-made program for displaying it on the screen, written by Dmitry Pavlovsky, a colleague of Pajitnov) and a protection system so that they could then prove your authorship (any software in the USSR was distributed free of charge, and they saw nothing wrong with it). A lot of effort was also required to add support for different types of displays (!). Now it sounds funny, but then there were no uniform standards and the game had to be adapted for each display, and this greatly spoiled the code. All this took six months, but not because of the large amount of work, but because both Alexey and Vadim had their own affairs and they only played Tetris occasionally.

Much later, Mikhail Potemkin, also an employee of the Computing Center, made his contribution to Tetris. He ported the game to the next version of the Elektronika computer and was the first to add automatic garbage loading (this is when you start a game and the glass is already half full).

Tetris was distributed on 5.25-inch floppy disks, which were then gaining popularity, through banal copying from friends. Within two weeks, the game spread throughout Moscow, and then throughout the USSR. The success was simply phenomenal. The game was completely free, Pajitnov didn’t even think about deriving any benefit from it: the rights to Tetris were owned by the Computer Center (as well as to any program written within its walls), so Alexey would soon have ended up in prison than behind a computer keyboard. The sale of such things was already within the competence of the state.

Beyond the cordon

The first foreigners to become acquainted with Tetris were Budapest residents from the Institute of Cybernetics, with whom the Computing Center collaborated (this happened in 1986). They liked the game and quickly ported it to the computer Commodore 64 produced by the company Commodore International since August 1982, and on Apple 2, the first computer to be mass produced Apple Computer since 1977. Just at this time, Robert Stein, a Hungarian of English origin, owner of a British company, was visiting the Institute. Andromeda Software, involved in the development software. Stein was well versed in games, so when he saw Tetris, he immediately decided to buy the rights to it. Robert contacted Pajitnov, agreed to purchase the rights, without mentioning any specific numbers, however, received the initial go-ahead and promised to send an official agreement within a couple of days. But because of the Iron Curtain, the correspondence dragged on for many weeks.

Robert Stein.

Meanwhile, Stein, realizing how much money can be made on Tetris, is all impatient and, unable to stand it and having absolutely no official rights to do so, offers the game to his partners from the British company Mirrorsoft. They doubted the attractiveness of the game, but sent it to their American colleagues from Spectrum Holobyte. The Americans immediately saw the enormous potential hidden in Tetris, and reported to the UK that they needed to obtain the rights to sell this wonderful game as soon as possible. The result of this was a contract between Andromeda Software and Mirrorsoft for a sum of only £3,000 and 7-15% (depending on the number of copies sold) of sales profits. Alexey didn’t even know about all this.

Stein had to somehow legalize this whole business, and already in the winter of 1985 he went to Moscow with the firm intention of concluding a contract with the real owners of the rights to the game. However, such things as official negotiations with foreigners and concluding agreements with foreign companies were no longer dealt with by the employees of the Computing Center, but by government agencies, in this case, people from the top of the Academy of Sciences. But people were not interested in Stein’s proposal - either the amount seemed small, or they simply treated him with distrust. The Hungarian had to leave with nothing.

Meanwhile, the Americans from Spectrum Holobyte had no idea that neither they nor anyone else except Pajitnov actually owned the rights to Tetris. The Cold War between the USSR and the USA is still in full swing; every Russian product, even if unremarkable at first glance, immediately arouses interest among Americans. What can we say about this unusual game like Tetris. The PR department of Spectrum Holobyte is not asleep and is reshaping the game’s appearance in accordance with the most common American stereotypes: they add communist sketches, portraits of famous Russians, and use musical accompaniment Russians folk songs like “Kalinka-Malinka” and “Oh, let’s whoop!” Only remains untouched game mechanics. In general, Tetris is quickly turning into a full-fledged commercial product, which must have both a developer and a publisher with the appropriate rights.

It was already 1987, in America and Britain Spectrum Holobyte was already in full swing preparing the PC version of Tetris, and Stein still did not have the rights to the game, that is, the release was, in fact, illegal. Stein couldn't get the rights and at the same time didn't know how to tell his colleagues in Europe and the US that the game's launch needed to be delayed. In the end, he didn’t do anything and didn’t say anything to anyone.

In 1988, the Western PC version of Tetris was released.

The first commercial version of Tetris from Mirrorsoft.

For three

In the West, Tetris became popular even faster than in the USSR. The game sells decent copies and has received several prestigious awards from the American Software Developers Association: “Best Entertainment Program,” “Best Dynamic and Strategy Program,” “Best Original game development", "Best Consumer Software". Before this, no game has managed to achieve such recognition. It was a great success. There was even a story that Tetris was specially developed by the KGB to paralyze the Western economy: everyone who had computers in the office played it for days on end.

Hank Rogers.

Meanwhile, Alexey left the Computing Center and moved to the organization "Electronorgtekhnika"(or just ELORG), which was assigned to the Academy of Sciences and which now had to defend the international rights to Tetris.

At this time, Stein was under pressure from all sides: the Russians demanded to resolve the situation that had gotten out of control, and Robert’s compatriots, especially when Tetris became such a popular game in the West, began to delve into the details. The ubiquitous journalists from the CBS television and radio company contact Alexei Pajitnov and interview him. Stein had no choice but to sign the unfortunate contract on the Russians' terms.

It would seem, " yay, finally!", but that was not the case. Nikolai Belikov, an ELORG employee who had to defend the rights to Tetris, recalled: “When I read the contract with Andromeda Software, I felt bad. This agreement stated that the first payment was due within three months. The agreement was signed on May 10, 1988, and it was already October. After that, I began to think about what to do with this agreement and how to get Andromeda Software to pay money.”

Abroad, the British Mirrorsoft, already convinced of the promise of Tetris, asks Stein to purchase the rights to the console and arcade versions from the Russians, while in the meantime it sells (without permission) the rights to the arcade version of the game to an American company Atari, which, in turn, immediately resold them to the Japanese SEGA, at that time one of the largest gaming companies in the world.

Andromeda Software, represented by Stein, who sent telexes to ELORG with a request to begin negotiations on a new license agreement, received a clear answer: first fulfill the terms of the first agreement, only after that we will begin negotiations on the next contact.

Just at this time, Tetris was released in Japan on PC and game console Famicom(NES) from Nintendo and eventually sells more than two million copies (!).

Tetris was noticed by the president of the American division of Nintendo, Minoru Arakawa. At one of the exhibitions, he accidentally saw Tetris and was eager to acquire the rights to it. console version. Having found out that the rights currently belong to Atari (which was sincerely confident in this, since it believed that it had honestly bought the corresponding rights from Mirrorsoft), Arakawa becomes somewhat upset: Atari and Nintendo at that time were bitter competitors who endlessly sued each other with a friend. However, another lucky chance brings him into contact with Hank Rogers, the owner of a small Japanese company Bullet Proof Software, to which the American Spectrum Holobyte sold the rights to sell the PC version of Tetris on the Japanese market. Atari had the remaining rights at that time, but Rogers managed to secure the rights to the console version of the game for the Japanese market. At this very moment he meets Arakawa. Nintendo desperately needed the rights to the console version of the game, and was not interested in the price, since the launch of a portable console was imminent Game Boy, the success of which would have been even more predictable if Tetris had been acquired.

Rogers first negotiates with Stein, but, realizing that something is wrong here, he traces the entire chain and goes straight to Moscow, where he immediately goes. Stein also doesn’t just sit there and decides to personally meet with representatives of Elektronorgtekhnika for a face-to-face conversation. At the same time, Kevin Maxwell, the son of media tycoon Robert Maxwell, who owned Mirrorsoft and Spectrum Holobyte, also went to Moscow.

On February 21, 1989, Nikolai Belikov received a call from the protocol department and was informed that a foreigner had arrived from Japan, his name was Hank Rogers, and this was a violation of the regime that existed at that time - such meetings had to be agreed upon in advance and information given to the protocol department (which per person, what will be discussed, what is the purpose of the negotiations, etc.). Hank was forced to come again the next day.

On February 22, Nikolai will have a meeting with three people at once who need the same thing - the rights to Tetris. He didn't want either of them to meet each other, so he carefully planned the meeting schedule.

Hank Rogers was the first to come to Belikov’s office. Here is what Nikolai Belikov said about this meeting: “As soon as we sat down at the table with Mr. Rogers, he immediately pulled out a game console and said: “Mr. Belikov, I am selling your product very successfully.” I answered him: “ELORG did not give anyone the right to release Tetris on game consoles. The only company to which any rights have been transferred is Andromeda Software, and they apply only to the version for personal computers. You are illegally selling something that does not belong to you." Rogers, of course, was shocked. Finally, he said, “I just didn't know... Excuse me, I want to work with you, I have very good connections with Nintendo, the world's largest gaming company. She has 70% of the market." I offered only one solution - a purely bureaucratic move: “Mr. Rogers, please write everything down on paper.” Hank said okay and I immediately sent him away - Robert Stein was about to arrive and I didn't want them to meet."

Next comes Robert Stein to ELORG. Belikov tells him: “Mr. Stein, tell me honestly, what is this document called?” He answers: “Agreement.” I say that this is not an agreement, but a set of some irresponsible phrases, according to which one party transferred rights, and the other party does not fulfill them, does not compensate for the right to use these rights.” As a result, this meeting was also postponed to the next day.

« By the time Kevin Maxwell arrived, I already knew that he was the son of Robert Maxwell, a very powerful man, one of the richest in the world,- Belikov continues, - so of course I was very stressed. I asked: “Mr. Kevin Maxwell, where did Mirrorsoft get the rights to sell Tetris on game consoles?” And then Maxwell suddenly said: “This is pirated version. We have no rights." I asked: “Are you interested in getting the rights to the version for game consoles? Maxwell: "Yes, of course." I say: “When can you give an offer?” - “I need to return to the UK, and I will send our proposal very quickly.”

Alexey Pajitnov was most interested in Hank Rogers and his proposal. Kevin Maxwell was too complex a person, he looked down on everyone, and it was off-putting. Thus, Stein only got the rights to the arcade version of the game (and at an exorbitant price at that). Hank soon returned with representatives from Nintendo, and on March 21, 1989, they were given all rights to the console version of Tetris. Maxwell Jr., left with nothing, realized that the positions of Mirrorsoft and Atari were under threat, and complained to his father. Robert Maxwell accused Belikov of disrupting trade relations between England and the USSR with his actions. Everyone needed to act quickly and decisively.

On March 23, Belikov received a telex (something like a fax, which ours didn’t have at that time) from Kevin Maxwell, in which he said that Nikolai had made a number of mistakes and that the issue would be raised during President Gorbachev’s visit to England. In a word, the telex contained continuous threats, and serious ones at that. Then Belikov received a call from the man who was preparing Gorbachev’s visit and strongly suggested that he immediately fly to London, kneel before Robert Maxwell and beg him not to say a word to Gorbachev, because otherwise, if he says even one word, then Belikova “ it just won't happen».

Nikolai, like any normal person who would find himself in such a situation, became simply scared. But he was lucky: it was 1989, a time of great perestroika, so everything worked out. If it had been 1988, the story would have been different, Nikolai is sure of that.

In June 1989, all these disputes resulted in a court case between Atari and Nintendo. Belikov was also supposed to take part in it on behalf of Elektronorgtekhnika on the side of Nintendo. Before leaving, Nikolai was invited to the State Committee on Computer Science and Informatics, where they said that if the trial was lost, a special commission would be created that would consider the question of how much " The Soviet state lost millions of American dollars from your ill-considered actions».

The court eventually ruled that Mirrorsoft did not own any rights, and therefore the contract with Atari was invalid - hundreds of thousands of cartridges were sent to the warehouse. When Hank told Nikolai that they had won, and took him for a ride around San Francisco with the radio turned on at full volume, while breaking every conceivable traffic rule, it was only after a while that a sense of reality began to return to him - now he could calmly return home without fear.

Tetris has become one of the most popular games of all time. The Game Boy, with which the game was sold, sold more than 30 million copies in the first few years, and about 15 million cartridges with the game were sold. Subsequently, the Game Boy became one of the most successful consoles of all time. history of electronic entertainment. Tetris itself brought Nintendo about $2-3 billion (if you take into account all the ports, versions and licensing fees). Over twenty years, the game (including official statistics, electronic devices and illegal sales) has sold a fantastic number of copies, estimated at about a quarter of a billion copies. Probably no other title in the world has been able to achieve such popularity. And even get closer. And it’s not a fact that it will ever succeed.

Unfortunately, Alexey himself did not receive any money from Tetris until 1996 - at first the rights to the game were owned by the state in the person of ELORG, and after the collapse of the Union in 1991, they were inherited by ELORG itself, which Belikov then reorganized into a private company. They couldn’t even pay Alexey a good bonus, because this money had to be agreed upon with the leadership of the Academy of Sciences.

After Tetris

In this whole story, the fate of Alexei Pajitnov was not easy, but interesting. After all these scandals surrounding Tetris, Alexey understands that you can make quite real money from games, and considerable money at that. In 1989, he, his old friend Vladimir Pokhilko (the psychologist who first saw the potential of Tetris) and new friend Hank Rogers created the studio AnimaTek, where he developed logic games and questions artificial intelligence. At first, things went quite successfully. The studio completed a couple of large orders and took part in the development of more than three hundred games (some of its developments were used in Age of Empires And Final Fantasy Tactics). But in the late 80s - early 90s, everyone in the USSR had no time for games, and in 1991 Alexey moved to San Francisco, where AnimaTek headquarters opened. Vladimir Pokhilko was appointed managing director of the studio.

However, in the USA, the fate of AnimaTek is also not easy: the company produces several good, innovative animated games, but they never receive recognition. A couple more 3D modeling programs come out of AnimaTek's pen, after which it closes.

In 1993, Pajitnov moved with his family to the United States, with the help of Hank Rogers, with whom they entered into an agreement to jointly manage the rights to Tetris after 1995, when ELORG ran out of these rights and they would have to go to Alexey.

In February 1995, between Nintendo, ELORG and Hank Rogers, who created a new company in Hawaii specifically for this purpose Blue Planet Software, negotiations begin regarding the future fate of the rights to Tetris. All three parties were slightly puzzled, since no one thought that the game would remain popular for such a long time. Nintendo receives exclusive rights to sell Tetris worldwide for three years on all of its platforms. In the Japanese market, this right is reserved for Blue Planet Software.

The following year Pajitnov and Rogers founded The Tetris Company, which is created specifically to consolidate rights to Tetris and resolve licensing issues. Sony receives the right to sell the game for three years PlayStation in Japan, Hasbro- in the USA.

In 2002, Rogers created Blue Lava Wireless, which is entrusted with the development of mobile versions. Tetris is quickly becoming the most played mobile phone game.

Three years later, in 2005, the last negotiations finally took place between Blue Planet Software and ELORG regarding the transfer of all other rights to Tetris. In January, Alexey and Hank again founded a new company, now Tetris Holding Company, to which all rights to Tetris are finally assigned. Rogers sells Blue Lava Wireless to mobile giant for $137 million in April Jamdat, and he, in turn, is soon bought by Electronic Arts and secures rights to everything mobile versions Tetris for your unit EA Mobile Games.

Rogers' company is now working on creating innovative new mechanics (without changing the core principles) for Tetris, which should maintain interest in the game for years to come.

Our man

As for Alexei directly, almost nothing was heard about him after 1991. In life, Pajitnov is a kind, simple, canonically Russian man; not pretentious at all, even when he says that his inventions were always ahead of their time. Our call found him at home in Seattle.

[Gaming addiction] Good morning, Alexey. True, it’s already late evening here. Straight to the point. To be honest, it is not entirely clear to us who contributed what to Tetris. The fact is that Vadim Gerasimov wrote quite strange things on his website (he himself never contacted us). According to him, you once asked him to sign a certain document, according to which: 1) his participation was limited only to porting the game to the PC (although this is exactly what it was, apparently); 2) he transferred to you the right to conduct all Tetris affairs; 3) refused any remuneration in his favor. So what does all this mean?

[Pajitnov] Yes, there was something like that. In 1989, I entered Tetris into a computer game competition held by the district committee of the Komsomol of the city of Zelenograd, and I probably needed this piece of paper to confirm authorship. By the way, the game took second place in the competition...

Ahh, I think I understand what we're talking about. In the late 80s, an article was published in one of the newspapers, from which it followed that Tetris was created from beginning to end by Vadim. Well, you know, how it usually happens: some journalist came to the Computing Center, asked who was the most interesting here, and he was pointed out to Vadim - he seems to be a schoolboy, and academicians run to him to consult. The journalist was delighted and dashed off the article without even bothering to figure out what and how. Of course, I didn’t bother with any refutations, but I just needed to stake out my priority and I asked Vadim to write a paper stating that he participated in the conversion, but had nothing to do with the creation of the game itself. In fact, this was the case, because porting is a purely technical work, and the concept itself was invented by me. Ultimately, this piece of paper was never needed (the Western partners took my word for it), except Vadim and me, no one even saw it.

It’s a pity, of course, that Vadim didn’t get anything, although, they say, the Computer Center still gave him a computer.

[Gaming addiction] Since when did you start receiving income from Tetris? Since 1996, when ELORG's rights to it expired?

[Pajitnov] Yes, since 1996. The Computing Center itself could not pay me anything even if it wanted to - by the time the game received recognition in the West and began to bring in money, I was already working at ELORG. But I don’t regret it, I was ready for it. Back in 1986, I transferred the rights to the Computing Center so that, through ELORG, it could license the game for Western companies. ELORG was the only organization in the USSR that had the right to sell software abroad.

[Gaming addiction] You don’t know how much ELORG earned from Tetris?

[Pajitnov] It’s difficult to give exact figures, but the most money was probably earned on the Game Boy. The game was sold in the same box as the Game Boy, and it was a very popular console and the circulation was very large. If my memory serves me correctly, from each copy ELORG received either $0.5 or $0.25.

On the other hand, a lot of money was spent on legal costs (there were always trials there) and the prosecution of pirates.

[Gaming addiction] So the Game Boy owes a lot of its popularity to Tetris?

[Pajitnov] And Tetris "Game Battle". They were simply made for each other - however, created by chance and independently.

About money issues, you’d better ask someone from ELORG, if, of course, this organization is still alive. Fortunately, I did not have any access to their papers.

[Gambling addiction] We contacted them, but they never got in touch. By the way, it would be interesting to trace the history of the rights to Tetris. Soon after creating the game, you transferred the rights to it to the Computing Center, and from them they passed on to ELORG. In 1991, when the Union collapsed, Belikov privatized ELORG and registered the rights to himself. In 1996, their rights expired, but even after that the litigation with them continued for a very long time. It wasn't until 2005 that ELORG finally stopped having anything to do with Tetris. Is everything correct?

[Pajitnov] In general, yes. I personally tried not to interfere in all these proceedings, so I don’t know the details. In 1996, we first tried to fight with ELORG, but then we decided to tear the rights in half, although this was no longer entirely my decision. In business it is always better to negotiate.

[Gaming addiction] Almost nothing is known about what you were doing in the early 90s. Tell me?

[Pajitnov] Oh, it was an interesting time. The results of my work during that period were not particularly noticeable, but I was very busy. I made some puzzles ( Hatris, Wordtris, Breakthru! and others), then took up a 3D aquarium simulator El-Fish, but this project was ahead of its time, like almost everything I do. Nowadays three-dimensional aquariums are taken for granted, but then, in 1993, it was something bordering on science fiction. El-Fish turned out to be so resource-intensive that even on a computer with a 386 processor it barely moved, and as a result no one really bought it. Although, most likely, this is not only a matter of system requirements: You could put your own fish in this aquarium, but most people ended up with pretty ugly fish, and because of this, they quickly lost interest in El-Fish.

Then I made more levels for some games, but I don’t remember which ones exactly.

[Gaming addiction] It would be interesting to know about the period of your work at Microsoft (1996-2005). Did you go there more for the money or were you attracted by the possibilities of this company?

[Pajitnov] And for money too. The company where I worked before refocused from games to 3D technologies, and I left there, but I had to make money somehow. Then I turned to Microsoft with a proposal to create a site with a paid subscription, where small puzzles would be posted every day (future MSN Games). They liked the idea and they hired me. I worked on this project for two years, but at that time it was not very popular - the Internet was still in its infancy and online puzzles were, naturally, not a priority among users. It’s now that casual games have ruined everyone’s baldness, but back then it was too early to do this.

I really liked Microsoft. When I got there, I honestly didn’t know what to expect. I knew that I could get a decent salary, I knew that the working conditions were good, but that’s all. All my other knowledge was at the level of stereotypes invented by programmers. They all criticize Microsoft products, but they do this because they are forced to use them, because no one has produced anything comparable in scale and quality. Yes, they have a lot of errors and it’s annoying, but there’s nothing better anyway.

Microsoft is organized very rationally, mostly smart people work there, so the atmosphere is excellent. This was felt especially strongly at first. Of course, there is also its own bureaucracy, but after Soviet Union the entire American bureaucracy is generally ugh.

For the first three years, work went very quickly and efficiently. During this time I made two games, but then I started Pandora's Box and things slowed down a bit. This was a very original project in many respects; it took me (no matter how I lie!) two and a half years. “Pandora's Box” included about 350 puzzles, and in total I made one and a half thousand - so that there was plenty to choose from. The games there were original, and overall it was a lot of work. But she was again ahead of her time, although she covered the costs and gained some kind of popularity. While in Moscow, I saw on Gorbushka three different editions of Pandora’s Box from three different pirate companies (!).

And then I started to stagnate because Microsoft got excited about the idea of ​​making an Xbox. They also pushed me hard there, and I myself didn’t mind getting involved, because the project looked promising. But somewhere halfway through, Microsoft restructured its marketing strategy: they decided not to make a “universal” console, but for such hardcore players - primarily young people. The decision was absolutely correct, I think, but two of my three projects were immediately canceled because of this - teenagers are still not very interested in puzzles.

[Gaming addiction] In what year did Microsoft start the Xbox project? In 1999?

[Pajitnov] Yes, about a year before the premiere. After they restructured their marketing strategy, I went through a rough period. Well, you know, it’s a shame when you’re thinking through a project and suddenly - rrrr! - and it is cancelled. The hardest and most interesting stage is the beginning, when you work on the concept. At this moment, you love what you do most, and the cancellation of a project is especially painful.

But in general, cancellation is normal practice. My colleagues and I once did some calculations and it turned out that only 15% of games make it to release. I have more efficiency (22-25%), which makes me incredibly proud.

When the Xbox didn't work out for me, I was offered to move to another group that worked on small puzzles published on the Internet. This is just my thing, so I immediately accepted the offer. As part of this group, I made Hexic and a few other games, but then I felt tired and quit Microsoft about two years ago.

[Gaming Addiction] The Xbox 360 online service includes, among other things, Live Arcade, which sells casual and retro games. Did you have any involvement in its development or was your involvement limited to Hexic HD?

[Pajitnov] No, I didn’t participate at all. Even Hexic HD They've already done it without me. Of course, they showed it to me, but I did not take direct part in this project. Although now I'm working on new version; However, we have not yet decided what it will be called - Hexic 2 or Hexic 360. Coming out this summer.

[Gaming addiction] Have you ever participated in the development of “big” games? Well, there are action games, RPGs...

[Pajitnov] I don't like action games, nor do I like RPGs. At the concept discussion stage, I participated a little, we even released one such game, but I don’t like to remember it. It was called Ice & Fire, was released in 1994 on PC and PlayStation, but failed miserably. Making such games is very long and tedious, I don’t like it. How can I tell you... it's not God knows what, I can do it, but no better and no worse than any other designer. But puzzles are mine, I’m good at them.

[Gaming addiction] By the way, recently a lot of puzzles based on rhythm and music have appeared. Are you planning to do anything in this vein?

[Pajitnov] We once worked on such a project. It's a very tedious thing, very hard. You see, it’s difficult to conceptualize something there; it has to be done by musically sensitive, gifted people. But I am not like that. I passively participated in the development of one such project, but it was suspended.

In general, I participated in a lot of things, but it only made sense when I did puzzles ( laughs). Right now word games very popular, but I will never do them either - I just don’t like them. My element is abstract games with colors and shapes.

[Gaming addiction] Do you follow events in Russia, the state of the Russian gaming industry?

[Pajitnov] I used to watch it closely, but now it’s somehow less. I stopped following it at the moment when such a dense, good market formed. Small but reliable. Three or four years ago I was told that any game in Russian and on Russian themes can be sold in a small, but sufficient circulation. Even despite the cheap prices, you can live.

[Gambling addiction] Now everything has become more complicated. Prices for games are rising, but the quality of Russian projects remains unsatisfactory and this irritates players.

[Pajitnov] Currently, Russia is experiencing a rather difficult entry into the world market. The same thing happened in Japan at one time. In the 80s, Japan was worse than today’s China; they didn’t even know about rights and the like. But then everything somehow got better.

The first period is especially painful, but sooner or later everything will settle down. Everyone benefits from order and the absence of piracy, because it greatly improves the quality of local games.

[Gambling addiction] Not going to return to Russia?

[Pajitnov] And I visit Russia very often. Last year I spent four months in Moscow. I have two projects going on in Russia, puzzles from a Kronstadt company WildSnak e. I once matched some of them Microsoft games, then did a couple more projects with them. After I left Microsoft, they asked me to help - so I helped. I don't have much to do right now. However, there is no need to go to Russia for this - Skype and ICQ are enough.

[Gaming Addiction] Do you mostly live in Seattle? Why we ask: your company-Tetris Holding-She's located in Hawaii.

[Pajitnov] Yes, in Seattle. I also go to Hawaii, four or five times a year. There is a purely commercial enterprise there, it is engaged in licensing and approving ready-made versions of Tetris for all platforms, I have nothing special to do there. When things pile up, I come.

[Gaming addiction] Do you still have the very first versions of Tetris, back in the 80s? Surely there are versions that no one except you and a few other people have seen.

[Pajitnov] Something has been preserved in Hawaii; we have a museum there. But overall the answer is more likely no than yes. I have a box of old Tetris lying around somewhere, but they are all on 3.5- and 5.25-inch floppy disks. Floppy drives for 3.5" floppy disks can still be found; for 5.25" diskettes - only in landfills or museums. There must be a separate person who would make sure that everything is in working order and keep DOS alive on the computer. There is no such person, so everything goes into oblivion. Where does he go?

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Tetris appeared in June 1984 on the Electronics-60 computer, thanks to the work of Alexey Pajitnov. At that time, the developer worked at the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences and specialized in the problems of artificial intelligence and speech recognition. To test his ideas he used various kinds puzzles, including pentomino, which became the prototype of Tetris.

Pentomino represents five flat figures, each consisting of five identical squares connected to each other by sides. The essence of the game is that these figures must be arranged into different shapes, ranging from simple ones (rectangle, etc.) to complex images.

Alexey Pajitnov tried to automate the placement of pentominoes into the necessary figures. But the computing power of the equipment of that time was not enough to rotate pentominoes, and the developer had to use tetrominoes. This determined the name of the future game.
Then Pajitnov came up with the idea that the figures should fall from top to bottom, and the filled rows should disappear.

Game rights controversy

“Tetris” quickly became famous not only in the USSR, but also in other countries. When the game reached Budapest, Hungarian programmers completed it on different platforms. This is how the game attracted the attention of the British company Andromeda. She tried to buy the rights to the PC version from Pajitnov, but the deal never materialized. And while negotiations were ongoing, Andromeda dishonestly sold the rights (which, in fact, it did not have) to Spectrum Holobyte.

In 1986, Spectrum Holobyte released a version for the IBM PC in the United States. In a short time, the game gained popularity around the world and instantly became a bestseller.

Further developments are unclear, but in 1987 Andromeda announced its rights to Tetris for PC and any other home computers. In 1988, the USSR government declared its rights to the game through the Elektronorgtekhnika (or Elorg) organization. By 1988, neither Pajitnov himself nor the Elektronorgtekhnika organization received any money from Andromeda. While the company itself was quite successful in selling licenses for the game to other organizations. As a result, by 1989, about 6 companies announced their rights to various versions of the game for different types of computers, game consoles And electronic toys.

Elorg reported that all of these organizations have absolutely no rights to the versions for slot machines. Elorg later granted these rights to Atari Games, and the rights to versions for handheld electronic toys and game consoles were given to Nintendo.

Who is he, what is he like - the creator of the popular game of all times and peoples?

I'm driving a Tesla with a license plate that simply says TETRIS, Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of that legendary video game, is sitting in the passenger seat.

"Get on the gas, turn on the gas!" - shouts Pajitnov, a bearded man in a denim jacket. "Faster!"
Earlier that day, after lunch at a mutual friend's house, Pajitnov, 58, asked to relieve him behind the wheel of his Tesla as we drove through the tranquil suburb of Bellevue, Wash., where he lives, constantly being forced to accelerate, which left a momentary feeling of weightlessness in me. breasts every time the road went downhill.
Over lunch we discussed Russia's fight against the Nazis during World War II, Pajitnov's long-time love for classic game Lode Runner, its time, the development of artificial intelligence and speech recognition platforms during the Cold War, and many other games he worked on.
A quick online search of "Alexey Pajitnov" turns up a huge number of pages of articles and interviews that focus only on the creation of Tetris, the best-selling video game of all time - work that is far in the past. Meeting Pajitnov himself made me wonder about, well, everything else. What is the life of Alexey Pajitnov without Tetris?
Sheila Boten, President of ​Tozai G​ames, gave me some insight into the psychology of operating Pajitnov's machine. Boten got into the video game industry through the now-defunct Bullet-Pro​of Software, where her first job was to coordinate American and Russian immigration in the early 90s so that Pajitnov could move to the US and join the team Bullet-Proof, which sponsored his work visa.

“Everyone in Russia drove like crazy,” Boten told me about her experience driving a clone of a Soviet-era Fiat in Moscow at the time. “And Alexey was no exception. He drove like crazy. I was afraid. I said: “Alexey, I don’t want to die in Russia. Be careful.""
“Sheila,” he said, laughing, “I can guarantee you that you would prefer death, because you certainly don’t want to end up in a Russian hospital.”
Everything seemed dark and dirty back then, especially to Westerners visiting Russia for the first time. When Boten and her Bullet-Proof colleague, Scott Tsumura, were scheduled to leave for Moscow's Leningradsky Station for a trip to St. Petersburg, Pajitnov insisted on escorting them to the platform and boarding the train, despite their protests.
Boten remembers people trying to snatch their luggage from their hands as she, Tsumura and Pajitnov walked along the platform. “There was chaos all around,” she said. "They saw Americans with suitcases and knew that what they wanted was inside. Alexey was like an icebreaker on the way to the train, literally cutting through the crowds of people and throwing our luggage into the carriage."
“You won’t understand,” he said.

A few days after our Tesla adventure, I asked Pajitnov about his current workload.
“I’m not overwhelmed,” he replied.
Compare this with his daily routine during the era of the former Soviet Union. Working at the state-run Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Pajitnov woke up between 7:30 and 8:00. "Maybe later," he explained, "because I worked until midnight every day."
For breakfast he ate sausage, eggs and cottage cheese. He would then run errands for his wife or do housework before showing up for work sometime around 10:00. The tiny space in which he was assigned to work "was extremely crowded." It was an office for four or five people sitting at tables. Most days it had to accommodate 15 researchers.
"We didn't have personal account", he says, laughing. "I shared my table with three other people. So I left my work until later, when my desk was free." Then, in relative silence, he would work on the development of artificial intelligence and automatic speech recognition, an area that he says is, to some extent, "still very primitive."
In a word, he considered the work "heuristic." But he accepted the reality that his experiments were primarily of interest to the military. Although Academy scientists did not always know exactly how the results of their work would later be applied, various rumors circulated. “Legends,” as Pajitnov puts it.
According to one such legend, which circulated among Academy scientists, automatic speech recognition technology, he likened it to Siri in the iPhone, was used in fighter jets. Pilots could control the plane using their voice when doing so manually was not possible.
Pajitnov explained that at the time the KGB wanted to eavesdrop on people for information, but it was difficult, given the technology of the time, to continuously record. The KGB was then heavily interested in applying Pajitnov's speech recognition experiments to an audio system that would begin recording automatically when certain words were spoken. keywords, which are considered dangerous to the state or incriminate the speaker.
It was work that Pajitnov said his Academy colleagues were trying to avoid.

Boten told me that during the trip, she and Pajitnov went to the Kremlin to look at the body of Vladimir Lenin.
“Alexey had a hard time walking past Lenin’s body,” Boden told me. She asked her Russian friend and colleague, as they waited in line, if he had gone to see Lenin as a young man.
Decades ago, Russian children went on a mandatory trip to the Mausoleum to contemplate the ennobled corpse of the leader. But Pajitnov found a way to avoid this. “I was always sick that day,” he told Boten.
“He couldn’t talk about it openly,” she said of Pajitnov’s dislike of Lenin, “he had a hard time that day.”
Ultimately, the Academy of Sciences gave Alexey access to his own personal computer, which he could use “without anyone looking over his shoulder.” Since he needed to run artificial intelligence tests and speech recognition software, which he continued to work on anyway, Pajitnov did this while playing video games. He experimented and tested new computer, developing games in the Pascal programming language.
Some of these earliest experimental video games that he wrote on this personal computer were later published as Microsoft Entertainment Pack: The Puzzle Collection. Upon their release, there was no mention that the games were created through long hours of work in the heart of the Soviet Union.
But with the help of a friend, Vladimir Pokhilko, a Russian clinical psychologist interested in human-computer interaction, Pajitnov created the most successful video game in history.

Tetris was formally released in June 1984 by the Academy of Sciences after initial distribution to academics and computer publications on floppy disks. Tetris fascinated the intelligentsia. After all, this was a game made up of forms of Platonic idealism.
The game was later introduced at the 1988 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by Bullet-Proof Software founder Hank Rogers, who helped bring Tetris to the world. Bullet-Proof released the game in America in 1989. The game has sold over 70 million copies plus approximately 100 million downloads worldwide.
Because the game was created within a few hours of work on a government computer, the Soviet government made demands for the rights to Tetris and all revenues from it, which were ultimately not satisfied. So, despite his sudden international recognition as a developer, Pajitnov remained essentially a laborer when he joined Rogers and Bullet-Proof and immigrated to America in 1990 on a work visa they sponsored. Six months later, Pajitnov moved his wife Nina and sons Peter and Dmitry to Bellevue, Washington.
At the same time, Vladimir Pokhilko, with whom Pajitnov created a Moscow software development company called AnimaTek, also immigrated to the United States. Pokhilko is sometimes credited as the co-creator of Tetris, and he encouraged Pajitnov to further develop Tetris as a marketable product.
The two met at the 1990 CES in Chicago, where Boten was at an exhibition with Pajitnov, which received his first major recognition outside of Russia. She remembers Alexei and Vladimir drinking and dancing every evening after the exhibition.
“It said a lot about Pajitnov,” Boten told me, and it was something befitting a man who had created something that could only be played well in a state of full attention. "He was real. He's real."

However, getting used to life in the West took time. Boten remembers how confused Pajitnov was when she took him to an American grocery store for the first time. “He was so amazed,” she said. "He was really impressed with how much he could buy."
Boten helped Pajitnov acclimatize to his new life. She made an appointment for him to see the dentist. She helped him deal with a huge ticket he found under his windshield wiper after leaving his rental Cadillac parked at a fire pump for three days. She helped him understand fast-talking businessmen who were drawn to his game by interest.
One day, while Pajitnov was working in the Bullet-Proof Software office, an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation appeared and wanted to talk to him “about any KGB prosecution.”
The “heart-to-heart conversation with the FBI” made an impression on Pajitnov. The agent even arranged a meeting at which his wife Nina, a teacher English language, was also interrogated about secret connections with Soviet intelligence.
But the Federal Government quickly realized that they were wasting resources investigating a happy-go-lucky developer who spent all his time thinking about puzzles without anyone betraying their secrets to the KGB. And Scott Tsumura recalls that “the Russian hug and greeting from Alexey was very awkward.” He kissed women and men on the lips.
In 1996, the rights to Tetris, after a complicated lawsuit following the collapse of the Soviet Union, were finally transferred to Pajitnov, and he began designing games for Microsoft's pre-Xbox.
His routine at Microsoft remained "essentially the same" as it was in the Soviet Union. He arrived at the office every morning between 9:00 and 10:00, worked until approximately 1:30 and left for lunch. Around 22:00 or 23:00 he finished work.
"That's how I used to work," he told me, "and I continued at that pace all the time. It's a way of life."
I expressed some amazement at working 12-14 hours day after day, even in America, but then Pajitnov said that he actually took breaks during the day. To play video games, of course.
“Sometimes I got tired,” he admitted. "I stopped working and played a little. Then I realized that I had to finish my work. I returned to it and continued."
Pajitnov was responsible for own projects at Microsoft, was a generator of ideas. “Basically I didn’t have to write anymore,” he said.

Then Microsoft began developing the Xbox. "It was a big failure for me. I'm interested in puzzles. And the Xbox wasn't for puzzles," he said. "I tried to find as peaceful ideas as possible to keep working. I don't like shooting in games."
But according to Alexei, Microsoft was far from being the skilled console maker it eventually became.
"Microsoft wasn't good at games," he says of the early years. "They didn't understand what they were all about. They didn't have enough people. They hired the wrong people anyway. So I felt a little out of place. The first two years [of the Xbox development era] were a complete disaster. They started and canceled so many good ones." and bad projects. It was like being in a blender."
He fought with the groups he worked with. "Nobody wanted to see me in their projects. And I didn't want to see anyone in my projects either," he said.
PC puzzle games were abandoned as Microsoft geared up for the console wars. "All my projects were now low priority. 'We have to work on Xbox!'" he said, emulating the Microsoft campus rallying cry. By the time Halo was released in late 2001, Pajitnov said Microsoft had "caught the wave."
“I was there at the very beginning,” he continued, “when there were a lot of mistakes and bad moves.”
While Pajitnov settled into Microsoft, the life of his old friend and business partner Vladimir Pokhilko ended tragically. In 1998, Pokhilko and his family were found murdered in their home. What happened that night in south Palo Alto shocked Pokhilko's closest friends. The brutality of the killings made it all even more horrific.
Newspapers reported that "Pokhilko beat Fedotova, a yoga teacher, and Peter, a seventh-grader, with a hammer and stabbed them several times with a hunting knife, apparently while they were sleeping. He then cut his own throat with the same knife."
"It's unfathomable that anyone would do this to themselves and a child," a Palo Alto police spokesman said.
Pajitnov later emailed me: “I can say that we have always been friends, colleagues and partners with good and warm relations.”

At the beginning of the new millennium, Pajitnov had plenty of royalties from Tetris. "Basically, I became rich through Microsoft stock, not just licensing fees. I felt like I was done with Microsoft anyway." And he left.
But in 2005, Pajitnov returned, albeit briefly, as a Microsoft contractor to help with Hexic, a puzzle game for the Xbox 360. "Hexic was pretty good," he said. "It was an interesting name. But Microsoft is sitting on so much intellectual property. They don't have the brains to give it a second or third life that could easily turn a profit."
“This is bad,” he continued, “and large number my colleagues wasted their time. It's a pity."
I couldn't help but ask about ​the recent announcement that a Tetris movie is being made. This seems like a missed opportunity to me - a story based around falling blocks rather than about the man who invented the game in secret while working for the Soviet government. Has Pajitnov ever thought about a story for Tetris?
"No, and frankly, I don't think they have one. They're just brainstorming. They have some good ideas," he said. But recently they were "trying to figure out how interesting this whole idea would be to the media."
Today, when he's not driving around Bellevue in his Tetris-ready Tesla, Pajitnov is working on his own "crazy projects." He does squats and push-ups in the morning and eats a bowl of cornflakes. He then enters into his daily gamer routine by collecting coins in several mobile games.
"In order not to invest real money in modern games"You have to log into the game regularly," he says.
Then Pajitnov answers several business calls on Skype or looks at friends’ messages. He checks his email, then reads fantasy or modern scientific books (always in Russian and Russian authors) or watches TV. The rest of the time he plays games.
"After lunch I begin to understand what I have to do good project", he explains. "Come up with the next few levels or something like that." Although he's not currently working on the project new game. "I have a project in my head that I think about, but I don't actually do it."
When he sits down to design, Pajitnov doesn't need a computer. "I usually use a notepad and pencils to create something," he says. "When evening comes I go play tennis, have a drink at the bar or sit at home and watch TV or read books. And that's my day. Nothing exciting or unusual."

Who invented Tetris?

Man!! but seriously
INVENTOR OF TETRIS
You will practically never meet such an inhabitant of the Earth, except perhaps in the tribes of inner Africa, who would not play Tetris at least once in his life. But not everyone knows that its inventor is the pride of Russia, a former employee of the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Alexey Pajitnov. It was 1985, the beginning of “perestroika,” and young scientists were languishing in the laboratories with boredom. Many people later came to fruition, for example, Evgeny Veselov was already working at that time on the multi-window text editor E-9, later renamed Lexicon.

And Alexey Pajitnov specialized in the problems of artificial intelligence and speech recognition. The latter required creating and solving various kinds of puzzles. Pajitnov's favorite puzzle was the classic Pentomino Puzzl. In it, shapes had to be created from various elements consisting of five squares.

Inspired by Pentomino, Pajitnov also initially developed a computer puzzle in which similar five-squares changed their position under the influence of gravity. But the capabilities of computers at that time were such that the task had to be simplified - there were four squares (hence Tetris), and the figures made from them only fell down.

A record amount of time passed - only two weeks, and all of Moscow was already going crazy over Tetris. Colleagues contributed to the transfer of the game to the IBM PC, which was possible in such an advanced office as the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Tetris penetrated behind the Iron Curtain thanks to the Hungarian brothers in the socialist camp, who created the Apple II and Commondore 64 platforms for it.

The history of Tetris' patenting, licensing, and introduction to the West is dark and complicated. According to one version, a certain Robert Stein, the head of the British company Andromeda, was the first to try to acquire the rights to the game from Alexey Pajitnov himself. At the same time, the nimble companies Microsoft and Spectrum Holobyte released the first foreign versions of Tetris to the market. The game has captured the attention of millions. Stein contributed to Pajitnov's showing on CBS, where it turned out that the author of the super-popular computer game I didn’t receive a penny for my invention. The Western audience was extremely perplexed, and the Soviet authorities finally realized that money could be made from falling squares, and connected the enterprising Robert Stein with the foreign trade association Elektronorgtekhnika. This did not stop them from further distributing the rights to replicate Tetris separately, and they never had any agreement with Pajitnov.

But the author of the hit puzzle has an excellent reputation. He founded the company Anima Tek, which was soon invited to cooperate with Microsoft itself. In 1991, Pajitnov moved to the United States and finally created the Tetris company, after which part of the proceeds from the release of the game flowed into the pocket of its author.

Since 1996, Alexey Pajitnov began officially working for Bill Gates. Moreover, on the Microsoft product created with his participation, there is a special note that there is a share of the work of “the very person who invented Tetris.

Anastasia ASKOCHENSKAYA