@Play's Game Industry Guru series begins with a 35-minute telephone conversation between the author and the man behind Tetris, one of the most popular video games the world has ever known.
You may not know it, but Alexey Pajitnov is probably responsible for the disappearance of countless hours of your life.
That's assuming you've tried a game called Tetris.
Indeed, the 51-year-old game designer has touched the modern world like few others. Millions of people the world over have been hooked on his addictive block stacking game, which has appeared on more than 60 platforms.
My telephone conversation with the Seattle-based programmer takes place on the eve of one of his frequent trips home to his native Moscow. Our chat begins with him recounting how it was that he came to be a game designer.
Mr. Pajitnov grew up in the Russian capital, studying for a career in technology at the Moscow Institute of Aviation. He began his professional life at the Computer Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences. When he was assigned his own computer, he quickly began coding games and puzzles in his spare time.
"It started off as a good exercise in programming," says Mr. Pajitnov. "Then I realized I loved doing it."
His work took a life-altering turn in 1984 when he came up with an idea for a game based on a Russian wooden block puzzle called Pentamino. He called it Tetris. It was just one of several ideas he was working on at the time, but feedback from his friends and colleagues told him that there was something special about this particular puzzle game.
He wanted to market it to the world, but he knew better than to push his luck with the Soviet government. As a programmer at a public institution in Communist-era Russia, Mr. Pajitnov had no claim to the code he developed. At the time, the concept of intellectual property - let alone software property - barely existed in his country. So he granted the rights to Tetris to the Soviet government for 10 years.
"I decided at that time that I didn't want to fight," he explains.
His government reaped untold profits as companies like Nintendo and Atari licensed and sold millions of copies of his game.
Entrepreneurial justice was eventually served when rights to Tetris reverted back to Mr. Pajitnov in 1995.
"I started getting some royalties," he says, avoiding specific figures. "It wasn't the same kind of money [Tetris earned in its most popular years] but it's a substantial amount, so I'm pretty happy."
In 1991, several years prior to reacquiring the rights to his game, Mr. Pajitnov moved to the United States. He eventually became a U.S. citizen, but when he first came to America it was simply a career move. He believed that he should be closer to his target audience in order to better understand them. He never expected that he would end up immigrating.
"After three or four years I realized that the way of life here was kind of good for me," he says, still sounding surprised 15 years later. "So I decided to live and work here. But I still keep my flat in Moscow."
His first stateside job was with Bullet-Proof Software, a company run by Henk Rogers, at the time a gaming industry bigwig and friend who had licensed rights to Tetris and was opening a studio in Redmond, Wash., to be closer to his biggest client, Nintendo. Mr. Pajitnov would eventually partner with Mr. Rogers to license Tetris around the world.
Around this time he developed his first title on American soil: El-Fish; an aquarium simulator that was marketed as a "software toy" as opposed to a game.
The studio credited with developing El-Fish was AnimaTek International, a company Mr. Pajitnov founded with Mr. Rogers and his longtime friend, Vladimir Pokhilko, with whom he had moved from Russia. But AnimaTek's focus was centred on developing 3D graphics technologies, which wasn't Mr. Pajitnov's interest at the time. He left the company in 1995 and began what would turn out to be a lengthy and lucrative relationship with Microsoft in 1996.
"I love this company," says Mr. Pajitnov of the software giant. "I am from Russia, and the Soviet Union was a very bureaucratic country, so I had no problem acclimating to Microsoft. I worked very happily and successfully there for eight years."
Microsoft had mutual feelings for the game designer. Mr. Pajitnov successfully delivered five projects during his tenure and had project completion rate of about 35 per cent, which, according to Mr. Pajitnov, is about 20 points higher than the industry standard,
The first of his Microsoft projects was Mind Aerobics, a website that was updated daily with nine different puzzles.
"It was an early time for that kind of thing," says Mr. Pajitnov. "But it was very successful. It was on-line for a couple of years."
In 1999 came Pandora's Box, a PC game sold at retail. It featured more than 350 puzzles in 10 categories, and gave players the option of tackling each puzzle individually or as part of a story. Some of the challenges were riffs on classic conundrums like jigsaw puzzles, while others were completely original, such as a game requiring players to sort texture blocks and place them on realistic 3D objects.
Mr. Pajitnov speaks of these and other projects at Microsoft with a clear air of accomplishment, but it isn't until I bring up his most recent game, Hexic-a version of which comes pre-loaded on Xbox 360 hard drives-that he starts to get really excited.
Even though thousands of kilometres of fibre optic cable separate us, I can tell his bearded face is beaming as he speaks. "I am very proud of this game," he says. "Do you like it?"
He calls Hexic his answer to the popular puzzle game Bejeweled. "I played Bejeweled a lot - it's a great concept," says Mr. Pajitnov.
But he notes it's not perfect. "Sometimes I played poorly but got great results. And sometimes I played really hard and didn't [score well] That bothered me."
So he set about designing a game that made use of Bejeweled's strengths and eliminated its weaknesses. Mr. Pajitnov was intrigued by the way Bejeweled only allowed players to make successful moves that increased the player's score.
"That's a very good motivation," he explains. "You're always achieving at least some small success."
Hexic provides players with the same kind of motivation; only successful moves are allowed as players rotate groups of hexagonal shapes in an attempt to match three of the same colour. According to Mr. Pajitnov, this simple concept is enough to appease most casual game players.
"Many people play Hexic and they are fine with the first, second, and third level for their 10-minute lunch break, because there is enough to do there," he says.
But just when you start to get comfortable with the gameplay, it changes. "All of a sudden you discover something unusual - the flower," says Mr. Pajitnov, referring to the player's ability to surround one hexagon with six others of a different colour, which results in the hexagon turning into a star. "Sooner or later it comes up and you see that you have a whole bunch of new opportunities in the game. That's what hooks you and keeps you playing," explains Mr. Pajitnov.
Once a star is created, the interface changes. Rather than rotating just three hexagons, players can now rotate the six hexagons surrounding the star.
"I don't believe anybody has ever done this in a puzzle game," says Mr. Pajitnov about the game's dynamic interface.
He explains that puzzle game designers typically strive for a consistent interface; a means of interacting with the game that players can pick up in seconds that won't change throughout the life of the game. A puzzle game that doesn't follow that formula might be considered a milestone for the genre.
"It likely means nothing to the player," he says, reflecting on his daring design."They just take it and enjoy it. But professionally, as a designer, I have my point of pride in it."
Mr. Pajitnov has always enjoyed puzzle design and the psychological motivations inherent to the genre. Prior to his professional career in game design, he assisted psychologists by designing puzzles that could be used in their studies.
There are three key psychological ingredients that he believes make Tetris - and most other computer games, by his reckoning - successful, a topic on which he has lectured. He calls the first ingredient visual insight. Insights are made with each move and cause players to experience a series of emotions. The second component is unfinished action; there are always more things to do in the game. The final element is automation. After just a few minutes the game becomes habitual. Combined, these constituents make for a powerful and quasi-addictive experience.
But apparently understanding puzzle games and being good at them are two different things. Mr. Pajitnov claims his puzzle solving skills are not exceptional. "I can't say that I'm very good at solving puzzles," he says earnestly. "I'm good enough, but I am not a genius at it. I know of people who are much better than me."
Of course it could be argued that creating a puzzle game is itself a type of puzzle, and in that capacity Mr. Pajitnov seemingly has few equals.
I ask whether or not retirement is looming.
"I don't plan my career anymore," replies Mr. Pajitnov. "I don't think in this way. Whatever happens happens. Sometimes, if an idea comes to my mind, or someone asks me to make a puzzle for them, I just sit down and do it."
As it happens, someone did recently ask him to make a puzzle. He's currently back at work on a new project for Microsoft, the details of which he is not yet allowed to reveal.
And it seems likely that even if no one asks him to build a puzzle game he'll go ahead and make one anyway.
"I just like to do it," he says. "It's so much fun to play good, simple, interesting puzzle games. And I am just so glad when it works out and I can give people several hours of happiness."
Which brings us back to Tetris, a game that has generated literally billions of hours of entertainment for millions of people around the world. I ask him how it feels to know he was the cause of so much happiness.
He sighs contendedly, before replying, "That's a very good feeling, to be frank."