Tetris is written on a minicomputer in Moscow

What happened

Working at a computing center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Pajitnov was interested in puzzles that stayed interesting after the solution was understood. Taking a set of pieces made of four squares, he had them fall into a well where completed rows vanished, which meant success postponed defeat rather than achieving it. The original ran on an Electronika 60 with no graphics, so pieces were drawn from keyboard characters. A colleague and a student helped port it to more capable machines, and copies moved between institutes on floppy disks.

State employment meant the author had no obvious claim to a program written on state equipment, and Soviet institutions had no mechanism for selling software abroad. Copies nonetheless reached Hungary and then Western publishers, and several companies licensed rights from parties whose authority to grant them was unclear. The resulting disputes over computer, console and handheld versions ran for years and are usually told as one of the strangest intellectual property stories in the industry.

The world at the time

Computers in the Soviet Union were institutional machines, often domestic copies of Western designs, used by researchers who wrote their own tools. There was no consumer software business, no games press and no legal route to publish commercially. Informal copying between colleagues was the only distribution channel available.

What it changed

Bundled with Nintendo's handheld a few years later, the game reached adults who had never bought a console and became one of the most widely played titles ever made. Rights were eventually consolidated under a company its author co-founded, and the design has been ported, imitated and studied continuously, including in psychological research.