There are games that everyone has heard of that were such a hit that they are remembered as historic milestones. Perhaps after Super Mario Bros, that first adventure of the mountebank plumber, the video game Tetris is the best candidate for a special mention. The title of Alexey Pajitnov was created in the mid-1980s in the now-non-existent Soviet Union and would show that his intellectual defiance and simple approach were a perfect fit for society.
Color blocks
In 1985 Pajitnov was a member of the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center, as part of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow . The mathematician, very fond of puzzles and riddles, wanted to create a computer version of the classic Pentomino game. In this, a series of geometric pieces formed by five squares must be placed so that they fit inside a square or rectangular figure or in a box if the game is three-dimensional. Pajitnov set himself a new challenge: what would happen if the puzzle were made vertically and the pieces were falling from above?
As if it had to be solved inside a glass seen from the front and with the possibility of dragging or rotating the pieces , Pajitnov began to work on his video game. After understanding the difficulty of using pieces of five squares, he decided to use those of four and named it ‘ Tetris ‘, a word that combines the Greek term ‘ tetra’ (four) and his favorite sport, tennis. Its official launch took place on June 6, 1985 and in its first version, the game was in black and white and had no music, in addition it used simple figures such as brackets and asterisks to shape the pieces and the vertical box.
The conquest of the international market
Tetris liked and liked a lot. It became known to Pajitnov’s colleagues within the Moscow Academy of Sciences , was adapted for use on IBM PC computers by Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov, and soon conquered all of Russia. At first it was a shareware , a file that was passed through a floppy disk and without any financial repercussions for its designer . Pajitnov sent his game to the Hungarian Institute of Technology and was discovered by Robert Stein , director of Andromeda Software and who was looking for a game that he could commercialize abroad.
An unwritten agreement was reached and the baton was passed to Mirror Soft , which would be in charge of producing the game and selling it, initially, in Russia . Later, and seeing the enormous success that it had been, other companies such as Spectrum Holobyte , Sega or Atari would end up getting involved. But you have to take into account the context in which all this took place and what was the situation in the Soviet Union.
Property issues
When he created Tetris , Alexey Pajitnov told the Moscow Academy of Sciences, for which he worked, and they contacted the Elektronorgtechnica (ELORG). This state body founded in 1971 was in charge of controlling the export and import of software and hardware within the Soviet Union and, according to the law, Tetris belonged to the Soviet state . Pajitnov had sold rights that in theory he did not have and this situation triggered an important conflict between the Soviet state and the different companies that were involved in which Mikhail Gorbachev himself would eventually get his hands on it.
Andromeda Software managed to secure the sale of Tetris for IBM computers around the world, but ownership messes did little to prevent others (almost everyone except Pajitnov himself) from profiting . Mirror Soft continued to market what was, in theory, a pirated version of the game and reached an agreement with Atari . The company in turn gave the rights to Henk Rogers to take advantage of the Japanese market and it would be with him that Nintendo would contact when he wanted Tetris on his Game Boy . After many more discussions, the story ended with a transfer of rights (this time legal) for Henk Rogers and a real bombshell when it reached the Nintendo console.
‘Tetris’ and Pajitnov since then
Tetris became one of the best-selling games in history , the only one that has a version for any support and a classic among the classics. It has made more versions than can be counted, it has created a merchandising market, it has tournaments and it has produced books and documentaries that tell the story and trivia of the game. Tetris has crossed over to consoles and is currently part of popular culture, a video game without borders .
And what happened to Pajitnov? During the disputes over the exploitation rights, he had rather little to say since the owner was the Soviet Union and his anger was with the companies that were profiting more than with the Russian mathematician . In 1991, when the USSR officially disintegrated, Alexey Pajitnov moved to the United States and founded The Tetris Company with his friend Henk Rogers, beginning to be recognized for his work as a creator of Tetris . The company is currently responsible for managing gaming licenses around the world.
