June 6, 1984 — Tetris Is Created

On June 6, 1984, programmer Alexey Pajitnov completed the first working version of Tetris on an Elektronika-60 computer at the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

The game grew out of Pajitnov’s fascination with puzzles. He was inspired by the board game Pentomino, where players arrange shapes made from multiple squares. The Soviet computer he was using had limited capabilities, so the pieces were simplified to four blocks. That led to the creation of the now-famous tetrominoes, while the name Tetris came from the Greek prefix “tetra” (“four”) and tennis, Pajitnov’s favorite sport.

The first version was extremely simple. There were no colors and no graphics in the modern sense. The pieces were built from text characters, yet the game already had the addictive gameplay loop that still captivates millions of people today: complete lines, clear the board, and survive for as long as possible.

Tetris quickly spread through Soviet research institutes and universities before making its way into Eastern Europe and eventually the West. In Western countries, where software intellectual property was already well established, nobody really knew who owned the rights to such an intriguing game. At the same time, Soviet officials responsible for software exports were beginning to discover that people all over the world were already playing Tetris.

In 1988, entrepreneur Henk Rogers traveled to Moscow hoping to secure the rights for Nintendo. Rogers discovered that, in practice, the rights to the game had never been properly granted to anyone. Representatives from several other companies also flew to Moscow in an attempt to obtain a license. To their credit, Soviet officials insisted on enforcing intellectual property rights for the game. In the end, Nintendo secured the license that allowed it to publish Tetris on its platforms.

Naturally, Alexey Pajitnov received nothing from the game’s early success. Under Soviet law, the rights belonged to the state. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union was he able to receive the financial rewards from one of the most successful games in history.

It is worth noting that while Soviet officials ultimately helped establish a clear legal status for Tetris, the original confusion existed largely because the Soviet Union did not have a mature culture of software intellectual property.

An interesting side effect of Tetris’s success could be seen across the former Soviet republics in the 1990s. Many people referred to handheld game consoles simply as “Tetris.” The Nintendo Game Boy, which officially launched Tetris as a commercial phenomenon, was expensive and largely out of reach for most consumers. However, the market was flooded with inexpensive Chinese handheld clones whose main attraction was Tetris, making the game’s name synonymous with the devices themselves.

The story of Tetris was complicated and unusual for everyone involved. Yet it remains one of those rare cases where, in the end, things worked out well for almost everyone.