Alexey Pajitnov is by no means a household name. But chances are that if you've ever played a video game, you've played his.
Exactly 25 years ago, Mr. Pajitnov was a researcher at the Moscow Academy of Science. A superstar mathematician with a love of logic puzzles and arithmetic games, he was recruited directly out of university and put to work on a new Soviet artificial-intelligence project.
He was given access to his first desktop computer, the 64-kilobyte Russian Elektronika 60. Before long, his fascination with the machine and his passion for puzzles began to mesh. Instead of programs, he started designing games.
“I put together five or six different games,” Mr. Pajitnov says in an interview. However, one in particular began to dominate his attention. He found himself staying at work for 14-hour days, working on it long into the cold Moscow nights. Even without defined levels or any way of keeping score, it quickly became a favourite of his co-workers.
And in two weeks, on June 6, 1984, the first version of Tetris was complete.
Tetris convinced many people that games weren't just for pubescent boys and didn't need to be violent or destructive. They also found out how addictive games could be.
College students who spent hours enthralled by the falling bricks reported “Tetris hangovers” in which they could still see the blocks after closing their eyes and trying to sleep.
The object is to complete full rows of blocks without a hole. When this happens, the row disappears. Otherwise the rows pile up and the player has less room to manoeuvre. Players advance to the next level when they've completed a set number of rows.
“The simplicity is a very important part of it,” Mr. Pajitnov says. “It takes the chaos of the falling pieces and tries to make them into some sort of order – to build something reasonable out of it.”
Early versions of Tetris began circulating around Eastern Europe in 1985 after being produced by the Soviet ministry in charge of importing and exporting technology, known as ELORG. But under Communism, Mr. Pajitnov wasn't able to cash in on his creation.
At least not yet.
The basic difference between Tetris and most other games in history is that they are destructive and Tetris is constructive. You're not blowing anyone up. You're building little blocks, little walls, lines. Order out of chaos is basic human nature. — Henk Rogers, game developer and publisher who license Tetris and helped turn it into an international sensation
Henk Rogers played his first game of Tetris at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January of 1988. Netherlands-born, U.S.-educated and living in Japan, Mr. Rogers was a seasoned game developer and publisher. He didn't think much of Tetris when he first played it and walked off to the thousands of other booths. But something drew him back.
“I kept coming back more and more,” Mr. Rogers says. “And I realized that I wanted to license this game.”
He flew home to Japan with a plan to make Tetris an international sensation. It wasn't long before he had inked a deal with the copyright holders there to publish it on several platforms. But he also knew that Nintendo was planning to launch a new hand-held system in the U.S. – the Game Boy – and was looking for a game to package with it.
Nintendo was considering Super Mario Land, but Mr. Rogers explained to Nintendo executive Minoru Arakawa that Tetris could reach a different kind of audience.
“I told him, ‘If you want to sell your Game Boy to little boys, pack in Mario. If you want to pack in my game, Tetris, you can sell it to everybody.'”
“He said that I was the first game designer he had met from another country. We hit it off,” Mr. Rogers remembers. “Everybody else in the room didn't have a clue about what was going on.”
