The Man Who Made Tetris

rossgneumann writes Life gets pretty chill after creating 'Tetris' and escaping the KGB. A quick web search for "Alexey Pajitnov" brings up pages of articles and interviews that fixate only on his seminal creation—a work that remains, far and away, the best selling video game of all time. But clearly, there's more to the man than just Tetris. Meeting Pajitnov himself led me to wonder about, well, everything else. What was the Tetris-less life of Alexey Pajitnov?

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Re:Tetris documentary

[Dutch Gun]

Cool, I'll have to check that video out a bit later.

I actually got a chance to very briefly work with Alexey Pajitnov while contracting at Microsoft. Sadly, the project ended up being cancelled before release, but I'm glad I had met him, if only really for a very quick hello and handshake while I was introduced to the team.

He's correct that Microsoft was absolutely horrible at making games back then. My project was sort of a classic example of that sort of bureaucratic ineptitude. They actually hired people (some even relocating) for that project before someone had the bright idea of running the numbers on the project only to realize "Oh, we're not going to make any money on this title" and subsequently canned it. Oops.

Fortunately, I was a local, so it didn't really bother me all that much. Since I was just a contractor, my boss was cool enough to actually buy me an Xbox and a few games as "severance" out of his own pocket, as well as letting me sort of hang around and do nothing for the next few weeks to collect my paycheck while interviewing at a few different departments. I had always worked at very small videogame companies previous to this, so the amount of money they nonchalantly pissed down the drain was sort of eye-popping to me.

I'm glad Alexey made enough from royalties and working at MS so he's comfortable now. It would be rather unfair if all these companies made many millions off the game he designed and he didn't reap any rewards from it at all.

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[jeffmeden]

This documentary about Tetris is fascinating [youtube.com]

Almost as fascinating as this documentary about Russia [youtube.com], based on the music and themes in Tetris...

Summary of the article

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Well escaping the KGB laid the foundation, and Tetris put most the of the bricks in place, but I spent the rest of my life looking for that one missing piece.

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[Anonymous Coward]

A sad life you lead, twisting anything into some weird attack on your "enemies".

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[rodrigoandrade]

Yeah, but I love the way he spelled Romney as Rmoney.

the best selling video game of all time

[znrt]

explains a lot.

Tetris is based on a Russian board game

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a classic Russian game with similar pieces where you lay them into a box and try to make them fit. Alexey implemented a refined version of this game.

So really.. he didn't invent it as much as refine it.

Sort of like this, but with wood pieces. Very old:
http://i00.i.aliimg.com/wsphoto/v0/1697507318_1/Wood-intelligence-font-b-game-b-font-toy-Russian-font-b-Tetris-b-font-tile-matching.jpg

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[CastrTroy]

The appeal of Tetris is that it was done well. There are a million Tetris clones out there, but how well the game is programmed really makes the difference between and enjoyable game, and one that is extremely frustrating. I'm not sure what the original Tetris was like, the the versions for the NES and Gameboy, which a lot of us remember playing were done very well. It's like going back and playing Mario Bros, and then going to some cheap knockoff that some kid programmed in a few weeks. The underlying g

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[Alioth]

The original game is fun to play. Last month at Retromañía in Spain we had the original game running on the Russian pdp-11 clone for which it was created (unfortunately the pdp-11 clone had to be emulated - we actually have a real pdp-11 but it's a DEC built one and the original code won't work very well on it due to the lack of the Cyrillic character set). It's a good bit harder than the PC version which I think was the next version of Tetris to be written.

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[Bonzoli]

Albert Einstein — 'Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources'

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[OhSoLaMeow]

but did albert really say this ?

"The problem with internet quotes is that you cant always depend on their accuracy" -Abraham Lincoln, 1864

from the "far and away" link

[PJ6]

For those who cannot afford to purchase a video game console but still want to play games, a computer or a mobile device is usually sufficient.

Wow.

He said free software destroys the market

[tepples]

I'm not sure we should be glorifying someone who claims that the existence of free software destroys the market [slashdot.org].

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[sexconker]

I am sure that we should not be giving your posts or opinions any weight. He's right.

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[CronoCloud]

He's right when it comes to games. Artists, musicians, voice talent, engine licensing, middleware licenses...it costs money.

Sure there's always a few guys basically donating time to thinks like Wesnoth or Nethack, but they can do that because they have full time jobs doing something else. The people who want to actually make a living making games are different.

I'm surprised you didn't ask: "What's the best practices for contacting Alexey Pajitnov to discuss his opinions on playing same-screen multiplaye

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[tepples]

He's right when it comes to games.

But not so much when it comes to the libraries that underlie games and the marketing of games. Though the free software community has so far failed to developer a business model for producing original games, it has excelled at producing infrastructure. EA's ports of Tetris to Android run on top of free libraries. Tetris Zone was first made for OS X, whose low-level components are based on Mach and FreeBSD. Tetris can be played over the Internet, and many TCP/IP stacks are based on the free TCP/IP implementa

amazing

[dizirehberi.org]

that project before someone had the bright idea of running the numbers on the project only to realize "Oh, we're not going to make any money on this title" and subsequently canned it. Oops.