Tetris Turns 25

teh.f4ll3n writes "25 years ago a Russian (Soviet) researcher thought of one of the world's most popular games. It is now that we celebrate its 25th anniversary. 'Twenty-five years ago, inside the bowels of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, a young artificial intelligence researcher received his first desktop computer — the Soviet-built Elektronika 60, a copy of an American minicomputer called a PDP-11 — and began writing programs for it.'"

Summary

[Darkness404]

And because the summary doesn't tell you, that researcher was Alexey Pajitnov, who, despite creating Tetris made comparatively little money off of it even though it is one of the most iconic games of all time and helped revolutionize handheld gaming.

Re:Summary

[hardwarejunkie9]

He also later made a pretty decent little game called Clockwerx which I enjoyed quite a bit as a kid. I highly recommend it.

Re:Summary

[eldavojohn]

One of the great travesties of gaming, that. The man got little more than a new computer and a modest bonus.

In America, you get games and play them. In Soviet Russia, you make games and get played!

Uh, to be fair, it was really the British and the Hungarians that began the ruination of Pajitnov's rights [wikipedia.org]. From Wikipedia:

The IBM PC version eventually made its way to Budapest, Hungary, where it was ported to various platforms and was "discovered" by a British software house named Andromeda. They attempted to contact Pajitnov to secure the rights for the PC version, but before the deal was firmly settled, they had already sold the rights to Spectrum HoloByte. After failing to settle the deal with Pajitnov, Andromeda attempted to license it from the Hungarian programmers instead.

There's no way you could (at that time) stop the same thing happening to an American. I think this history of litigation and the international scene of respect for software rights had a lot more to do with it than him being Soviet. Also, note that he sold the rights to this game to Spectrum HoloByte in Russia so he got the initial money he was looking for at least for Russian distribution rights it seems. Did he really get played or just fail to realize how great his game was? Sad when someone sells oneself so short but it happens even today, doesn't it?

Re:Summary

[117]

I don't know how reliable it is, but this link [mobygames.com] mentions that Alexey Pajitnov didn't have anything to do with the making of Clockwerx, he simply "introduces" the game

Re:BBC Documentary

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd highly recommend getting hold of the BBC documentary "Tetris : From Russia with love".

Better links:

Torrent 1 [mininova.org]
Torrent 2 [thepiratebay.org] (Big honking file of documentaries, including the Tetris one.)

Re:Summary

[asdf7890]

Uh, to be fair, it was really the British and the Hungarians that began the ruination of Pajitnov's rights [wikipedia.org]

It was far more complex than that. The BBC did an interesting documentary about the history and rights issues of the game a few years back (around the 20th anniversary IIRC). They got fairly frank interviews with people involved at the time (including the man himself, some of the developers and business people who were fighting for the publishing rights, and the Russian civil servant whose job it was to play all the suiters off each other). Well worth a watch.

Search for "tetris from russia with love" - if you can't find it to purchase/rent/stream legitimately I'm sure you'll find a copy on your preferred alternative online TV source...

Re:Summary

[Mooga]

The original DOS version is actually available for FREE [oversigma.com]. It's worth loading up and enjoying old-school style.

Re:Ztetris port available?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Gameboy Tetris did in multiplayer. =)

Other versions as well, including the short lived arcade version.

Re:Summary

[TheRaven64]

Who's richer Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak?

Jobs, but most of his personal fortune comes from NeXT and Pixar, not from Apple. Wozniak did well enough out of Apple not to need to work ever again.

Re:Tetris predcessor: pentamino

[TheRaven64]

Pentominos were a prominent plot device in Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth [wikipedia.org], published in 1975.

Re:Summary

[Chabo]

You realize that sometimes Wikijerks prevent people from revising an article to present the truth, right?

But what is his property?

[tepples]

Uh, why should he make his game "more freely available?" Why would you hate him for protecting his property so that he can make a living?

But what exactly is his property? Had Pajitnov patented Tetris, it would have expired by now. Copyright is not intended to protect game rules [copyright.gov], and I don't see how trademark would apply to games with names like Lockjaw [pineight.com]. The Tetris Company's claim that other tetromino games are copies of Tetris starts to sound like SCO's claim that Linux is a copy of UNIX.

Re:Best of Arcade games

[Chad Birch]

Appropriately referred to as "The Tetris Effect" [wikipedia.org]

Re:Ztetris port available?

[klausboop]

For multiplayer where you send garbage to your opponent, what you want is Tetris for the Nintendo DS. As essential on the DS as it was on the earlier Game Boys, this is a tremendous value in that you can do a 10-player local (line of site) game when only one of you has the cartridge. You can also play against three people online.

Ooh, and they released Tetris via WiiWare and its multiplayer lets you send garbage as well.

I always loved Tetris Attack for the SNES (and Gameboy Color), and was disappointed that they didn't include that as one of the modes in Tetris DS. However, Planet Puzzle League plays very similarly.

Re:Summary

[Risha]

It's called the Tetris effect [wikipedia.org], believe it or not. Even people with anterograde amnesia [damninteresting.com] experience it, despite not remembering playing the game!