It’s safe to say that Tetris has become the most iconic video game of its era and its popularity is showing no signs of fading. The game looks easy enough with its simple premise of stacking falling blocks. However, looks can be deceiving. As the blocks begin to fall faster and faster, the game continues to challenge the player while they keep their growing stack from reaching the top of the screen for as long as they can before the inevitable happens and their game ends. If players would want to get to where they were before, they’d have to start from the beginning. This infinite replayability paired with the game’s simple concept was what helped Tetris’ popularity soar, and the challenge of getting as far as possible into the game kept players coming back for more. The urge to get further and further into the game has recently caused Tetris to get a lot of attention from the media, as the game was finally beaten for the first time since its creation in the 1980s. So how did the most recognizable video game on the planet come to be what it is today? 

Our story begins in June of 1984, in the Soviet Union, where 29-year-old Alexey Pajitnov worked as a computer programmer for the Moscow Academy of Sciences. In his spare time, he enjoyed coding puzzle games on his PC, an Electronika 60. One day, while trying to come up with ideas for more games he could create, he remembered an old puzzle game from his youth. It consisted of twelve differently-shaped blocks, each made out of five squares, that had to be correctly placed within a larger box to make all the pieces fit inside it. Pajitnov took inspiration from this and used it to create the Tetris we know today. 

In its first two years, Tetris was confined to the Soviet Union. This was until a software salesman, Robert Stein, managed to get a copy of Tetris while in Hungary. Seeing its potential, he purchased the rights to Tetris after sending a message to Pajitnov asking to do so. In 1988, Stein granted software publishers Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte sub-licenses to Tetris and began distributing copies of the game for computers throughout the United States and the UK. However, what he didn’t realize was that the company in charge of exporting software in the Soviet Union, ELORG, had heard about his endeavors and called Stein to their headquarters in Moscow, where they accused him of selling Tetris in the West without their permission. Stein was shocked and confused, claiming that he hadn’t known they’d even existed, but he still convinced them to officially grant him the rights to the game.

Elsewhere, at a trade show in Las Vegas, a young Dutch entrepreneur named Henk Rogers was watching a Tetris showcase, and the more he observed the game, the more he wanted to purchase the rights to it and bring it to consoles worldwide. Which was exactly what he did. When he began this undertaking, however, Mirrorsoft had already sold the rights to Atari, a giant in the video game industry at the time. This setback wasn’t going to stop Rogers, who flew to Atari’s headquarters in California. He then waited outside the building until the president of Atari himself walked out of it and Rogers invited him to dinner. There, he persuaded the president to sell the Japanese console rights to Tetris to Rogers. This allowed Tetris to be brought to Japanese PCs and Nintendo’s NES consoles. 

Rogers wasn’t finished, though. He still had one more goal in mind, and that was to acquire the handheld rights to Tetris so that Nintendo could publish it on their newly released Game Boys. To do this, in 1989 he flew to Moscow, and, completely unannounced, showed up at ELORG and managed to talk his way into a meeting with their CEO, Nikolai Belikov. Belikov had a reputation as a very intimidating man, but Rogers remained undaunted as he began to negotiate for the rights. Belikov hadn’t known that Tetris even existed on consoles, to which Rogers responded by showing him the paperwork that proved that the rights to Tetris currently belonged to him. Belikov, however, claimed that the previous owners of said rights were only granted those for the PC version of the game, meaning that the Japanese console version was illegal. Luckily, the creator of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov, was also at the meeting, and he and Rogers hit it off. The tension in the room slowly wore off, and Belikov finally agreed to sell Henk Rogers and Nintendo the worldwide console rights to Tetris. This was huge, as it legally allowed Nintendo to keep distributing Tetris to the masses, which is what allowed it to become as well-known as it is today.

This wasn’t the end of the legal trouble, though. In the same year that Nintendo was granted the rights to Tetris, Atari, the company that Henk Rogers had originally bought the rights from, began distributing their version of NES Tetris in North America. This created many problems for Atari, as when they released the game they’d used the console rights that they no longer had. Nintendo sent them a cease and desist letter, telling them that they owned the rights, but Atari had already spent a huge amount of money to be able to sell their game, so they claimed that they owned the rights. Atari subsequently sued Nintendo, and the case lasted until late 1989, when the judge ruled in favor of Nintendo, and Atari was ordered to destroy their stock of NES Tetris games that hadn’t been sold.

Finally, all the legal trouble was over. Tetris continued to rise in popularity with its release on the Game Boy, and in 1996, ELORG’s license to the game’s rights expired, allowing its original creator to finally profit from it. Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers remained good friends, and that same year they founded the Tetris Company to globally manage the game and its rights.

So, there you have it; the history of one of the most iconic video games of all time. It is safe to say that without the persistence and boldness of Henk Rogers, Tetris would not be where it is today. It continues to soar past many milestones as a mobile game and has a devoted community that regularly holds tournaments and is always finding new ways to push the game to its limits.

SOURCES:

Corporate Bios | Tetris

History of Tetris

The history of Tetris: The Soviet mind game

How Tetris Was Born with Henk Rogers and Alexey Pajitnov | io9 Interview