Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris for fun, as a test program on a new machine, and could not stop playing it. “My programming stopped,” he told Edge. “I just kept playing and playing, and pretending that I was designing the game.” Within a few years the game was on sale in the West, and companies in London, California, Tokyo and Kyoto were fighting over the rights, while Pajitnov went on working at the Computer Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow, which owned his work. “I kept my mouth shut for ten years,” he said later. He has been paid for Tetris only since the mid-1990s, through the company he founded with Henk Rogers.
Fast facts
- Born: Moscow, in the mid-1950s; published sources give both 1955 and 1956.
- Education: Nintendo Power in 1989 gave him a degree in engineering and mathematics from the Moscow Aviation Institute, where Sheff says he also taught.
- Employer: the Computer Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow, working on artificial intelligence and speech recognition.
- Tetris: written on an Electronika 60, 1984 by most accounts; ported to the IBM PC with Vadim Gerasimov.
- Moved to America: 1991, to work for Rogers’s Bullet-Proof Software near Seattle.
- Microsoft: puzzle designer from about 1996 until the mid-2000s; Pandora’s Box, Hexic.
- Today: co-founder of The Tetris Company.
Moscow
Pajitnov was a strong young mathematician: David Sheff reports that he was a finalist in a Moscow mathematics competition at fourteen and wrote his first program, a number game, at fifteen. After teaching at the Moscow Aviation Institute he moved to the Computer Centre, where he worked on artificial intelligence and the recognition of speech. “One of my jobs was to kind of test this stuff,” he told Edge in 2007: 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.”
Tetris began with a pentomino set bought in a toy shop, twelve shapes made from five squares each. “Five squares was too much because people can’t remember 12 shapes, so I simplified it down to four,” he told Edge in 2001. “There are seven of them, and seven is very good number to remember.” The Electronika 60 had no graphics, so the pieces were drawn with brackets. The first version took about two weeks. He later put the whole program at about 1,600 lines, “27 kilobytes, once compiled”.
The year is less certain than it looks. Most accounts, including The Tetris Company’s, give 1984; Nintendo Power said 1985 in 1989, and Pajitnov told Edge in 2007 that he had written the program “22 years ago”. The move to the IBM PC took half a year, with the help of Vadim Gerasimov, a 16-year-old schoolboy who knew DOS; the colour PC version spread across Moscow on floppy disks. In November 1985 Tetris took second prize at a computer game competition in Zelenodolsk.
Watching from Moscow
When the London agent Robert Stein telexed the Computer Centre about the game in 1986, Pajitnov handled the reply himself, because nobody else knew how. “We had no copyright laws at all,” he told Sheff. “We could do nothing for personal gain.” The Soviet foreign-trade agency Elorg later took the negotiations out of his hands, and Pajitnov sat in on its meetings with Rogers in February 1989 and with Nintendo in March, when he signed the console contract as the game’s author. The story of those deals is told in the Tetris rights wars.
The rewards were small. The Computer Centre gave him an IBM AT clone, which Sheff notes would have taken sixteen years to buy on his salary. Pajitnov said he was not bitter. “I will make my games and send them to you. You can fight over them,” he told a reporter in 1989. He did object when Spectrum HoloByte added battle scenes to the Western version, because he wanted Tetris to be “a peaceful game heralding a new era”.
He kept designing. Welltris, which Sheff calls a “quasi-three-dimensional version of Tetris”, reached the West through Bullet-Proof Software and Spectrum HoloByte; Hatris, made with his colleague Vladimir Pokhilko, dropped hats instead of blocks. In spring 1989 Rogers brought him to Japan, where he met Nintendo’s staff and fixed a bug in the Game Boy Tetris, and in January 1990 he made his first visit to the United States, for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “Then I was treated like a king,” he told Edge. “People were fascinated to meet me, a strange person from a strange country.”
America and Microsoft
At the Consumer Electronics Show in January 1991, war was about to start in the Gulf and Soviet troops were moving into Lithuania. Pajitnov and Pokhilko decided to stay. Rogers, whom Pajitnov counted as his best friend outside Russia, arranged for their families to follow, and Pajitnov signed to work for Bullet-Proof and settled near Seattle. In 1996 Edge described him as living in the US and under contract to Spectrum HoloByte, and he worked with the studio Zombie on Ice & Fire, a 3D game for PC and Macintosh. For Nintendo he worked on the N64’s Tetrisphere, a game he later called “awful… It was so complicated. But I really enjoyed working on it.”
In 1997 Edge reported that he had moved to Microsoft. His puzzles appeared in its Entertainment Pack: The Puzzle Collection (1997), and he designed Pandora’s Box (1999), a collection of jigsaw-style puzzles that Computer Gaming World found clever but “surely no Tetris”. His best-known Microsoft game was Hexic (2003), made for its casual games department as an answer to PopCap’s Bejeweled, which he felt had a good idea “realised really badly”: “no matter how good a player you are, your score is always about the same”. He left Microsoft in the mid-2000s.
The Tetris Company
The Soviet licences had been meant to last ten years, and in 1995 Pajitnov licensed his rights to Rogers’s new company, Blue Planet Software. The Russian side did not agree that he held any rights; rather than fight, Rogers and Elorg put their claims into a new company, The Tetris Company. Edge reported in 2001 that Pajitnov was “now receiving royalties” for the game. The disagreement with Elorg reached a New York court in 2004, and by Rogers’s account ended in 2005, when he bought Elorg’s share and he and Pajitnov put their rights into a new company, Tetris Holding.
Pajitnov has remained the face of the game. He received the First Penguin award for pioneering casual games at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2007; he advised EA on Tetris Blitz for phones in 2013; and at the game’s 40th anniversary in 2024 he and Rogers were still appearing together for The Tetris Company. Asked by Edge whether Tetris had wasted people’s time, he gave the answer he gives most often: “Sometimes people say: ‘Oh, I wasted so much time playing your game’. I ask: ‘Was it a good time?’ They say: ‘Sure!’ Well, it’s not wasted, then.”
Sources
- David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999): chapter 13, “From Russia with Love” (his childhood, the mathematics competition and first program, the Moscow Institute of Aviation, the Computer Centre and the Electronica 60, the pentomino set, the brackets, Gerasimov, Zelenodolsk, “We had no copyright laws at all”, the battle scenes and “a peaceful game”); chapter 14, “The ‘Tetris’ Song” (the Moscow meetings, the contract of 22 March 1989, the IBM AT clone, “You can fight over them”, the trip to Japan and the Game Boy bug, the first American visit in January 1990); epilogue, “Forest of Illusions” (Welltris, Hatris, the January 1991 CES, the decision to stay, Rogers as his best friend, Bullet-Proof, the Seattle suburb).
- Nintendo Power issue 8, September/October 1989, p. 53: the Moscow Aviation Institute degree, speech recognition, Tetris created in 1985 on the Electronica-60.
- Edge issue 100, August 2001, making-of feature on Tetris with Pajitnov: the pentominoes and seven shapes, the two-week prototype, “My programming stopped”, the half-year PC port and Gerasimov, “I kept my mouth shut for ten years”, “treated like a king” at the 1990 show, the move in 1991, royalties, Microsoft.
- Edge Christmas 2007 edition (issue 183), pp. 68–71, “Puzzle quest”: testing machines at the Computer Centre, 1,600 lines and 27 kilobytes, “22 years ago”, Tetrisphere, Hexic and Bejeweled, the casual games department, “Was it a good time?”.
- Edge issue 30, March 1996: living in the US, under contract to Spectrum HoloByte. Issue 43, March 1997: the move to Microsoft; The Tetris Company. Issue 44, April 1997: Ice & Fire with Zombie. Issue 244, September 2012: Hexic (2003). Issue 254, June 2013: Tetris Blitz.
- Edge issue 74, August 1999, Henk Rogers interview: ten-year rights, Pajitnov’s 1995 licence to Blue Planet, the Russian position on his rights, The Tetris Company.
- Computer Gaming World issue 160, November 1997: Microsoft Entertainment Pack: The Puzzle Collection, “several” puzzles by Pajitnov. Issue 187, February 2000: Pandora’s Box review.
- Blue Planet Software, Inc. v. Games International, LLC, 334 F. Supp. 2d 425 (S.D.N.Y. 2004). Summary via vLex (web, secondary): https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/blue-planet-software-inc-889199893
- Chris Remo, “The Man Who Won Tetris”, Gamasutra, 10 September 2009 (web, secondary): the 2005 buyout and Tetris Holding. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-man-who-won-tetris
- Wikipedia, “Alexey Pajitnov” (web, secondary): birth in 1955 (other sources give 1956); leaving Microsoft in 2005. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Pajitnov
- Game Developers Choice Awards press release, “Miyamoto and Pajitnov Honored by Developers”, 2007, via Nintendo World Report (web, secondary). https://nintendoworldreport.com/pr/12897/miyamoto-and-pajitnov-honored-by-developers
- The Tetris Company, World Tetris Day press release, 2024 (web, secondary): 1984; Pajitnov and Rogers at the Classic Tetris World Championship. https://tetris.com/news/world-tetris-day-press-release-2024