Tetris was written by a man who could not own it. Alexey Pajitnov worked for the Computer Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and what he made on its time belonged to the Soviet state, which had no idea how to sell a computer game abroad. For three years Western companies sold the rights to one another anyway, each assuming someone further up the chain had a contract. In February and March 1989 the Soviet foreign-trade agency Elorg untangled the chain in a week of meetings in Moscow, handing the handheld rights to Henk Rogers and the console rights to Nintendo. The losers included Robert Maxwell’s Mirrorsoft and Atari Games, whose Tetris cartridges for the NES ended up in a warehouse.
Fast facts
- The game: written by Pajitnov at the Computer Centre in Moscow, 1984 by most accounts; ported to the IBM PC by Vadim Gerasimov.
- The first Western deal: Robert Stein of Andromeda, a London agent, sold rights to Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte in 1986–87 before he had a signed Soviet contract. His contract, signed in May 1988, covered computers.
- The Soviet side: Elorg (Electronorgtechnica), the state agency for exporting hardware and software, took over the negotiations from the Academy.
- Handheld rights: signed by Henk Rogers in Moscow in February 1989, and sublicensed to Nintendo for the Game Boy.
- Console rights: signed by Nintendo in Moscow on 22 March 1989.
- The court case: Atari Games’ Tengen label shipped an NES Tetris in May 1989 and was stopped by a preliminary injunction in June.
- Afterwards: Pajitnov’s own claim revived in the mid-1990s, and The Tetris Company was formed to hold everyone’s rights.
A game nobody could sell
The Computer Centre sent an evaluation copy of Tetris to the Institute of Computer Science in Budapest. In June 1986 Robert Stein, a Hungarian-born agent who ran a London company called Andromeda, saw it there. According to the account he gave David Sheff for the book Game Over, he was also shown versions for the Commodore 64 and Apple II made by Hungarian programmers. Back in London he sent a telex to Moscow asking for the rights.
Nobody in Moscow knew how to answer. “We had no copyright laws at all,” Pajitnov told Sheff. “Certainly, by the spirit of our law we had no right to sell anything to anyone.” Pajitnov wrote a reply in Russian, had it approved by the head of the Computer Centre, and spent weeks getting permission to use a telex machine in another part of the Academy. In November 1986 a telex from the Computer Centre said the Academy was ready to transfer the rights for the IBM PC version. Pajitnov later insisted he had only meant that the deal sounded good: “I had no idea that this kind of polite telex can be a document.”
Stein had already sold the game. Mirrorsoft, the software house owned by Robert Maxwell’s publishing group, and its American sister company Spectrum HoloByte took the rights, and in June 1987 Stein signed a contract with them warranting that he owned the copyright, though he still had no contract with Moscow. The two companies released Tetris for home computers in January 1988. When the Soviet side finally signed with Stein in May 1988, the negotiator was Elorg, which had told the Academy that licensing was its job, and the contract covered computers only.
The chain of sublicences
Meanwhile the rights kept moving. Mirrorsoft traded the console rights for North America and Japan to Atari Games in exchange for Atari’s Blasteroids. Atari Games sublicensed Japan to Henk Rogers’s Bullet-Proof Software, which released Tetris for Nintendo’s Famicom in December 1988 and, by Rogers’s account, sold two million copies. Atari Games planned its own versions for the arcades and, under its Tengen label, for the NES. Edge summed up the problem in 1999: Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte “understood their Tetris rights to be more extensive than they really were.”
A week in Moscow
Nintendo wanted Tetris for its handheld, and its lawyers suspected nobody held those rights. Minoru Arakawa, who ran Nintendo of America, showed Rogers the secret Game Boy prototype and offered a deal: if Rogers could get the handheld rights, Nintendo would take a sublicence from him. In February 1989 Rogers flew to Moscow on a tourist visa, without an invitation, and found his way to Elorg. Unknown to him, Stein and Kevin Maxwell were in Moscow the same week, and Elorg’s negotiator, Evgeni Belikov, met each of them separately.
Rogers signed for the handheld rights on 21 February, according to Sheff. Then he produced his Famicom cartridge, and Belikov told him Elorg had never licensed Tetris for any games console. “I was a pirate in their eyes!” Rogers told Edge. He offered to pay Elorg directly for the cartridges he had already sold and promised to come back with a partner big enough to fight Atari Games and Mirrorsoft: Nintendo. Stein left Moscow with the arcade rights; Kevin Maxwell, who oversaw his father’s software companies, came away, as Edge later put it, “with nothing”.
Arakawa and Howard Lincoln flew to Moscow in March, telling almost no one at Nintendo where they were going. After three days of talks the console contract was signed on 22 March 1989: Arakawa signed for Nintendo, Pajitnov as the author and Belikov for Elorg. A US court later described it as an exclusive worldwide licence for five years, with an option to extend. The same day Elorg telexed Mirrorsoft that the console rights had gone to Nintendo.
Robert Maxwell then tried to reverse the deal through his contacts in the Soviet government. Accounts disagree on how far he got. Sheff writes that Maxwell raised Tetris with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow and that Elorg came under pressure from the Kremlin; Rogers told Edge in 1999 that the meeting in which Maxwell was to raise it, during Gorbachev’s visit to London, never took place, because Gorbachev cut his trip short after the Armenian earthquake. Both accounts agree that Elorg kept its contract with Nintendo.
Tengen in court
On 31 March 1989 Nintendo told Atari Games to stop selling Tetris for the NES. Tengen replied that it held “all NES rights to the game”, sued Nintendo, and shipped its cartridges in May with a full-page advertisement: “It’s like Siberia, only harder.” Its case was that the NES was a computer, so Stein’s contract covered it; the Japanese name of the machine, Family Computer, was part of the argument. Nintendo’s answer was that the contract meant computers, and the NES was not one. Rogers later put it simply: the Soviet side “knew exactly what they were doing when they entered into that contract”.
After a hearing on 15 June 1989, Judge Fern Smith in San Francisco granted Nintendo a preliminary injunction, and Tengen had to stop making and selling its version. Edge reported in 1997 that 268,000 Tengen cartridges were destroyed, and that used copies later sold for as much as $300; Sheff put the collectors’ price at $150. In January 1990 ACE reported that Nintendo had “just won its long court battle with Tengen”, while the two companies’ other lawsuits went on. Edge later described the outcome as console rights “lasting until 1995 for Nintendo”. Nintendo’s NES Tetris sold three million copies, by Sheff’s count, and the Game Boy version, packed with the machine everywhere except Japan, more than 30 million by 1999.
Rogers told Edge why Nintendo moved so fast. Atari Games was already fighting Nintendo over unlicensed cartridges, and Tetris was to be Tengen’s first: “Basically, I handed them a silver bullet with which they could shoot Tengen.” Lincoln was blunter with Sheff: “It was revenge.”
Pajitnov’s rights
Pajitnov received almost nothing. Elorg defended the arrangement: “If ‘Tetris’ had been made by a Boeing employee on Boeing time and Boeing sold the license, would the designer have received any more than Pajitnov?” Belikov asked Sheff. By Rogers’s account, the Soviet licences were meant to last ten years from the game’s creation, and in 1995 Pajitnov licensed his rights to Rogers’s new company, Blue Planet Software. Elorg, by then privatised, still held the trademarks and did not accept that Pajitnov had any rights: “The Russians don’t agree that he has any rights. They still don’t,” Rogers said in 1999. Instead of fighting, everyone who claimed a share licensed it to a new company, The Tetris Company, owned half by Blue Planet and half by a subsidiary of Elorg. Edge reported in 1997 that Pajitnov and Rogers had formed it after the rights reverted to Pajitnov in 1996.
The partnership did not settle everything. In 2004 Blue Planet and Pajitnov were in a federal court in New York against Elorg’s American companies, arguing over whether his 1986 grant to the Computer Centre had run for ten years or for ever; at the preliminary stage the court turned down their request for an injunction and granted part of the Elorg companies’ request. By Rogers’s account, in 2005 he raised the money to buy Elorg out, and he and Pajitnov put its trademarks and Pajitnov’s rights into a new company, Tetris Holding.
The rights since
With the rights in one place, the owners turned on imitators. In 2012 a federal court in New Jersey ruled for Tetris Holding against Xio Interactive, whose iPhone game Mino had copied the look of Tetris while trying to take only its unprotectable rules; the court found that the “look and feel” had been copied. The saga itself became a story. The BBC told it in the 2004 documentary Tetris: From Russia with Love, and in 2023 Apple released a feature film, Tetris, with Taron Egerton as Henk Rogers.
Sources
- David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999): chapter 13, “From Russia with Love” (the evaluation copy sent to Budapest, Stein at SZKI in June 1986, the Hungarian Commodore 64 and Apple II versions, the telexes and “We had no copyright laws at all”, the November 1986 telex and “polite telex”, Stein’s June 1987 contract with Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte, the January 1988 release, Elorg taking over and the May 1988 contract, Kevin Maxwell and the Blasteroids trade, Rogers’s Famicom version, Arakawa’s offer to Rogers, the three visitors in Moscow); chapter 14, “The ‘Tetris’ Song” (the handheld deal signed on 21 February 1989, Belikov and the Famicom cartridge, Stein’s arcade rights, Arakawa and Lincoln’s journey, the contract of 22 March 1989 and its signatories, Robert Maxwell and Gorbachev, the cease-and-desist of 31 March, Tengen’s reply and advertisement, the NES-is-a-computer argument, the hearing of 15 June and the injunction, the $150 collectors’ price, three million NES copies, “It was revenge”, Belikov’s Boeing comparison).
- Edge issue 74, August 1999, Henk Rogers interview: Stein in Budapest in June 1986, the publishers’ rights “more extensive than they really were”, Blasteroids, two million Famicom copies, the February 1989 visit, “I was a pirate in their eyes!”, the Gorbachev meeting that “never did” happen, the contract and “knew exactly what they were doing”, the “silver bullet”, console rights “lasting until 1995 for Nintendo”, ten-year rights, Pajitnov’s 1995 licence to Blue Planet, “The Russians don’t agree that he has any rights”, The Tetris Company and its ownership, “over 30 million sales in its Game Boy form”.
- Edge issue 43, March 1997, “From Russia with Litigation”: the NES as a computer, 268,000 Tengen cartridges destroyed, $300 for used copies, the rights reverting to Pajitnov in 1996 and The Tetris Company.
- Edge issue 100, August 2001, making-of feature on Tetris with Pajitnov: the three negotiators in the same building; Stein’s coin-op rights and Kevin Maxwell’s empty hands.
- ACE issue 28, January 1990: Nintendo “has just won its long court battle with Tengen” over Tetris.
- Retro Gamer issue 100, March 2012, “Henk Rogers and the making of Game Boy Tetris”: arriving in Moscow in February 1989 on a tourist visa, unannounced.
- Blue Planet Software, Inc. v. Games International, LLC, 334 F. Supp. 2d 425 (S.D.N.Y. 2004): the March 1989 Nintendo licence, Pajitnov’s 1986 grant and the dispute over its term, The Tetris Company’s formation, and the preliminary-injunction rulings. Summary via vLex (web, secondary): https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/blue-planet-software-inc-889199893
- Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc., 863 F. Supp. 2d 394 (D.N.J. 2012); Loeb & Loeb, case summary, June 2012 (web, secondary). https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2012/06/tetris-holding-llc-v-xio-interactive-inc
- Chris Remo, “The Man Who Won Tetris”, Gamasutra, 10 September 2009 (web, secondary): Rogers on buying out Elorg in 2005 and Tetris Holding. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-man-who-won-tetris
- Edge Christmas 2007 edition (issue 183), “Puzzle quest”: the 2004 BBC documentary.
- 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/