Tetris | Code Like It's 198x

The first Tetris had no graphics. Alexey Pajitnov wrote it on an Electronika 60 at the Computer Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow, a Soviet machine whose green-on-black text display could only show each piece as a row of square brackets. Four years later the game was on sale in Britain and America in a red box printed with St Basil’s Cathedral, and ZZAP!64 was calling it “perfectly simple, and simply perfect”. A year after that, Nintendo had bought the console rights from the Soviet state and was packing Tetris with every Game Boy sold outside Japan. Pajitnov, as an employee of the state, received almost nothing for it.

Fast facts

Designer: Alexey Pajitnov, Computer Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow.
First version: Electronika 60, 1984 by most accounts; PC version by Vadim Gerasimov, then 16.
The pieces: the seven shapes that can be made from four squares.
Western release: January 1988, by Mirrorsoft in Europe and Spectrum HoloByte in America.
Game Boy: Nintendo’s version came in the box with the Game Boy everywhere except Japan.
Sales: “over 30 million” in its Game Boy form by 1999, according to Edge; The Tetris Company claimed more than 520 million units across all versions in 2024.

Brackets on a green screen

Pajitnov had a degree from the Moscow Aviation Institute and worked at the Computer Centre on artificial intelligence and speech recognition. He wrote games too. “One of my jobs was to kind of test this stuff,” he told Edge in 2007: new machines arrived from abroad, “and the best way to deal with a new computer is to try to write a small program and see how it works. A game was a very good example.”

The idea came from pentominoes, the puzzle of fitting shapes made from five squares into a rectangle. David Sheff, who interviewed Pajitnov for his book Game Over, describes him buying a pentomino set in a toy shop, finding it “a big problem” to put the pieces back in their case, and imagining a computer version in which the pieces fell one at a time. He cut the pieces down to four squares. That left seven shapes, few enough to recognise at a glance. Sheff traces the name to tetra, Greek for four; Vadim Gerasimov, who worked with Pajitnov, says it combines “tetramino” and “tennis”.

The Electronika 60 version drew the pieces with brackets, [ ], on a monochrome text screen. Gerasimov, a 16-year-old school student whom a Computer Centre programmer, Dmitry Pavlovsky, had introduced to Pajitnov, ported it to IBM-compatible PCs. On the PC the pieces lit up in solid colours, and a high-score table was added. Pajitnov later put the result at about 1,600 lines of code, “27 kilobytes, once compiled”. He had written it for its own sake: “Tetris in particular I did just because I liked to program those games… Tetris was a pure exercise.”

Copies spread across Moscow on floppy disk. Sheff tells of a friend at a psychology institute who gave the game to his staff, saw that no work was being done, and went round the desks one night collecting the disks and destroying them. In November 1985 Tetris took second prize at a computer game competition in Zelenodolsk.

From Budapest to a red box

The Computer Centre sent an evaluation copy to the Institute of Computer Science in Budapest. In June 1986 Robert Stein, a Hungarian-born software agent who ran Andromeda in London, saw it there and could not stop playing. “I was not a game player,” he told Sheff, “so if I liked it, it must be a very good game.” Stein offered the game to Mirrorsoft, the software house owned by Robert Maxwell, and Mirrorsoft showed it to its American sister company, Spectrum HoloByte. Its co-founder Gilman Louie gave the instruction that decided the packaging: “Put it in a red box and get the rights.”

The two companies released Tetris for home computers in January 1988; CRASH reported that it was launched at the Which? Computer Show that month. The box carried St Basil’s Cathedral and a Cyrillic title with a hammer and sickle. Spectrum HoloByte’s programmers added background pictures of battle scenes and an opening animation of a small plane landing in Red Square, a nod to Mathias Rust, the young West German pilot who had flown a light aircraft past Soviet air defences and landed in Red Square. Pajitnov, who saw the game as “a peaceful game heralding a new era”, objected to the battle scenes, and the Soviet authorities to the plane. Both went.

CRASH credited the Spectrum version to “Vagin Gerasimov and Alexi Paszitnov” and called it “the first Russian-designed computer game to be commercially available in the West”. Its reviewers liked the game more than the conversion and gave it 77%: “Fiendishly addictive but poorly implemented.” On the Commodore 64 ZZAP!64 gave it 94% and wrote that “dinnertimes come and go, evenings are destroyed and sleep is a thing of the past”. ACE listed versions for the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga and PC. In America it won the Software Publishers Association’s awards for Best Original Game Achievement and Best Entertainment Program in 1988.

The rights

Stein had sold rights he did not yet hold, and when the Soviet foreign-trade agency Elorg took over the negotiations, the contract he finally signed in May 1988 covered computers. Mirrorsoft had meanwhile passed the console rights for North America and Japan to Atari Games, in exchange for Atari’s Blasteroids, and Atari sublicensed Japan to Henk Rogers’s Bullet-Proof Software, which published Tetris for the Famicom in December 1988.

Nintendo wanted the game for its new handheld. In February 1989 Rogers went to Moscow and signed with Elorg for the handheld rights; Elorg told him it had never licensed Tetris for consoles to anyone. On 22 March 1989, after three days of talks, Minoru Arakawa signed a contract for the console rights for Nintendo, with Pajitnov signing as the game’s author. Atari Games’ Tengen label shipped its own NES Tetris in May 1989 and was stopped by a preliminary injunction in June. Edge summed up the outcome as console rights “lasting until 1995 for Nintendo”. The negotiations and the court case are told in the Tetris legal battles and the entries on Howard Lincoln and Minoru Arakawa.

The Game Boy

Arakawa first played Tetris at an arcade trade show in June 1988, on a prototype of Atari Games’ coin-op version. Back in Redmond his engineers made a test version for the prototype Game Boy, and Arakawa decided: “We must have this game.” The pieces were big enough to read on a small monochrome screen, and he believed the game would appeal to every age group. Nintendo Power broke the news to readers in its July/August 1989 issue: each Game Boy would come with a Game Pak, and “Which game? Better hold on to something! It’s Tetris!!!”

Arakawa was right about the audience. Sheff reports that Nintendo’s own feedback found a third to a half of Tetris players were adults, and that 46 per cent of Game Boy players in the West were adults. Two Game Boys joined by the link cable played head to head: “For every two line completion of yours, one line will move over to your opponent,” Nintendo Power explained, and a four-line Tetris sent four. In 1989 Howard Lincoln took a hundred Game Boys to the Soviet Union as a gift, and gave one with Tetris to the cosmonaut A. A. Serebrov to take into orbit.

The sales followed. Edge put the Game Boy version at “over 30 million” by 1999. Sheff gives three million for Nintendo’s NES Tetris and two million for Bullet-Proof’s Famicom version, a figure Rogers also gave Edge. Tengen’s NES cartridges went into a warehouse, and copies became collectors’ items selling for as much as $150.

The music

Many of the versions leaned on Russian music. The Macintosh version played balalaika and violin arrangements of folk songs, Apple 2000 reported in 1989, among them “Korobushka” and “Moscow Nights”, with a different tune for each of its ten levels. The tune usually called the Tetris theme is one of those folk songs, Korobeiniki; Retro Gamer called it “probably the most covered videogame tune in history”. The 8-bit versions had their own soundtracks: ZZAP!64 gave the Commodore 64’s continuous 25-minute score 98% for sound, while CRASH thought the Spectrum tune was “more a good piece of programming than a good piece of listening”.

The Computer Centre gave Pajitnov a personal computer, an IBM AT clone, which Sheff notes would have taken sixteen years to buy on his salary. Henk Rogers wrote to Elorg on his behalf: “If someone plants an apple tree and it brings you many, many apples, you ought to give them some apples.” Rogers, Pajitnov and Vladimir Pokhilko founded Animatek, a Moscow 3D graphics company, and Pajitnov later settled in Seattle. He went on to design puzzle games for Microsoft, including Hexic.

According to Rogers, Pajitnov licensed his rights to Rogers’s Blue Planet Software in 1995, and everyone who claimed rights in the game then licensed them to a single company, The Tetris Company, owned half by Blue Planet and half by a subsidiary of Elorg. Blue Planet wrote a document called “What is Tetris?” that fixed how fast the pieces fall and how they rotate, so that every licensed version played the same game. Pajitnov is a co-founder of The Tetris Company, and has advised on new versions, among them EA’s Tetris Blitz for phones in 2013.

Tetris kept changing shape. The BBC told its history in the 2004 documentary Tetris: From Russia with Love. In 2019 Nintendo released Tetris 99 for the Switch, in which 99 players compete at once, and in 2023 Apple released a feature film, Tetris, with Taron Egerton as Henk Rogers. For the game’s 40th anniversary in 2024 The Tetris Company claimed sales of more than 520 million units.

Sources

David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999): chapter 13, “From Russia with Love” (Arakawa and the June 1988 trade show, “We must have this game”, Pajitnov’s background, the pentomino set and the name, the Electronica 60 and its brackets, Gerasimov and Pavlovsky, the psychology institute, Zelenodolsk, Stein at SZKI in June 1986, “Put it in a red box”, the January 1988 release, the box, the Rust animation and the battle scenes, the Software Publishers Association awards, Stein’s May 1988 contract, the Atari Games and Bullet-Proof sublicences and Blasteroids, Rogers’s Famicom version); chapter 14, “The ‘Tetris’ Song” (Rogers’s February 1989 handheld deal, Elorg’s position on console rights, the contract of 22 March 1989, Tengen’s release in May 1989, the June 1989 injunction, the $150 collectors’ price, NES sales of three million, adult players, the hundred Game Boys and the cosmonaut, Pajitnov’s computer and Rogers’s letter).
Edge issue 74, August 1999, Henk Rogers interview: Stein’s computer rights, the console rights traded to Atari for Blasteroids, two million Famicom copies, the February 1989 Moscow trip, console rights “lasting until 1995 for Nintendo”, Animatek, Pajitnov’s 1995 licence to Blue Planet, The Tetris Company’s ownership, “What is Tetris?”, “over 30 million sales in its Game Boy form”, Pajitnov at Microsoft.
Edge Christmas 2007 edition (issue 183), pp. 68–71, “Puzzle quest”: the Computer Centre, testing new machines, 1,600 lines and 27 kilobytes, “a pure exercise”, more than a decade in Seattle, Hexic for Microsoft, the 2004 BBC documentary.
Edge issue 244, September 2012: Pajitnov as co-founder of The Tetris Company. Issue 254, June 2013: Tetris Blitz and Pajitnov’s consultation with EA Salt Lake.
CRASH issue 50, March 1988, p. 10: Spectrum review (Mirrorsoft, £7.99 cassette, £12.99 disk), the credits, the Which? Computer Show launch, “the first Russian-designed computer game”, Gerasimov as a Moscow University student, 77%, “Fiendishly addictive but poorly implemented”, the Spectrum tune.
ZZAP!64 issue 33, Christmas Special 1987, p. 29: Commodore 64 review (Mirrorsoft, £8.95 cassette, £12.95 disk), “perfectly simple, and simply perfect”, the 25-minute soundtrack, sound 98%, overall 94%.
ACE issue 5, February 1988, “Screen Test”: review and release box listing the Commodore 64, Amstrad, Spectrum, ST, Amiga and PC versions.
Nintendo Power issue 7, July/August 1989, p. 84: Tetris in the Game Boy box. Issue 8, September/October 1989: p. 53, Pajitnov’s background, Lincoln’s visit, the hundred Game Boys and Serebrov; Tetris strategy feature, the two-player line transfers.
Apple 2000, February 1989, Ceri Fisher’s review of Macintosh Tetris: the balalaika music and the tunes by level.
Retro Gamer issue 16, 2005, feature on videogame cover versions: the Tetris theme and Korobeiniki.
Vadim Gerasimov, “Tetris Story” (web, secondary): the Electronika 60 prototype and its bracket display, the PC port, “tetramino” and “tennis”, his age. https://vadim.oversigma.com/Tetris.htm
Game Informer, 13 February 2019, “Tetris 99 Is A Battle Royale Puzzler” (web, secondary). https://www.gameinformer.com/nintendo-direct/2019/02/13/tetris-99-is-a-battle-royale-puzzler-nintendo-switch-online-exclusive
Apple TV Press, “Apple Original Films unveils trailer for ‘Tetris’”, February 2023 (web, secondary). https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2023/02/apple-original-films-unveils-trailer-for-tetris-new-thriller-starring-taron-egerton/
The Tetris Company, World Tetris Day press release, 2024 (web, secondary): 1984 and “over 520 million units”. https://tetris.com/news/world-tetris-day-press-release-2024