The design
Alexey Pajitnov was a researcher at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow in 1984, working on artificial intelligence and speech recognition. He was interested in puzzles — specifically in the mathematical properties of polyominoes, geometric shapes made by connecting squares edge-to-edge. He had been playing with a physical puzzle called Pentominoes, which used five-square pieces, and wondered what a computer game version might look like.
The working version of Tetris took him approximately four days to produce on an Electronika 60, a Soviet-made terminal that had no graphics capability — shapes were represented using text characters. Pajitnov moved to a PC with proper graphics soon after. He later recalled being unable to stop playing his own prototype, staying at the computer for hours when he should have gone home. The specific satisfaction of the game — the way a well-placed piece resolved a potentially disastrous situation, the rhythm of falling and placing — was immediately apparent to him as a player before he had any idea of what he'd made as a designer.
Pajitnov named the game by combining "tetra" (the Greek for four, the number of squares in each piece) with "tennis," his favourite sport. He gave copies to colleagues, who gave copies to their colleagues. The game spread through Soviet scientific and research institutions on floppy disk over the following months, entirely without commercial intent.
The licence nightmare
In 1986, a Hungarian programmer named Robert Stein encountered Tetris and immediately recognised its commercial potential. He contacted Pajitnov about licensing rights and received what he understood as an agreement — later disputed — before approaching publishers in the West. Stein licensed Tetris to Mirrorsoft in the UK and Spectrum HoloByte in the US, both owned by Robert Maxwell's media empire. Both began publishing the game in 1987.
The complication was that Pajitnov worked for a Soviet state institution, and the rights to anything he created at work legally belonged to the Soviet state through a government agency called ELORG. Stein had effectively negotiated with the wrong person. ELORG, becoming aware that significant commercial value existed in Tetris rights it hadn't known it controlled, began renegotiating. Meanwhile, multiple publishers had already signed deals for different versions of the game, each believing they had legitimate rights.
By 1988, the licence situation was so tangled that at least four different companies believed they held rights to at least some versions of Tetris in at least some territories, and the underlying question of who actually controlled the rights was genuinely unresolved. Atari Games (the arcade division, separate from the consumer Atari) had a deal. Mirrorsoft had a deal. Nintendo was negotiating for the handheld rights. Robert Maxwell's son Kevin Maxwell was involved in negotiations. Henk Rogers, a Dutch game publisher based in Japan, flew to Moscow in January 1989 specifically to negotiate Game Boy rights directly with ELORG.
Nintendo and the Game Boy
Henk Rogers's Moscow trip in January 1989 — during which he met both Pajitnov and ELORG officials — resulted in Nintendo securing the handheld rights to Tetris for the Game Boy launch. The decision to bundle Tetris with the Game Boy rather than Super Mario Land was made by Minoru Arakawa and was based on a simple observation: Tetris was a game that everyone understood immediately, that could be played in short sessions without story context, and that appealed to non-gamers as much as to gamers.
The Game Boy launched in North America in July 1989 with Tetris as its pack-in game. It sold over a million units in the first year. The Tetris bundle outsold the Super Mario Land bundle approximately three to one. The Game Boy went on to sell 118 million units over its production life, a significant fraction of which were sold to people who wanted Tetris and accepted the hardware as the platform to play it on.
Atari Games, which had believed it held the home console and handheld rights through its Mirrorsoft deal, sued Nintendo. The court ruled against Atari Games. The scale of what they had lost — the right to publish Tetris for the Game Boy — became apparent as Game Boy sales climbed through the early 1990s.
Pajitnov and the royalties
Through all of this — the competing licences, the lawsuits, the Nintendo deal, the hundreds of millions of Game Boys sold — Alexey Pajitnov received nothing. The rights to Tetris had reverted to ELORG as a Soviet state entity, and ELORG's commercial arrangements did not include any payment to the game's creator. Pajitnov emigrated to the United States in 1991 and worked at various companies, including Microsoft, while watching his game continue to sell millions of units annually.
In 1996, Pajitnov co-founded The Tetris Company with Henk Rogers specifically to take back control of the Tetris licence when the original ten-year ELORG arrangements expired. The Tetris Company has managed the IP aggressively since then, pursuing unofficial uses and unlicensed clones. Pajitnov now receives royalties from Tetris sales and has for the past three decades — but the twelve years from 1984 to 1996 during which his game sold in numbers that are difficult to estimate precisely but run to hundreds of millions of units, and he received nothing, remain one of the more striking examples in cultural history of a creator separated from the value they produced.