Created in Russia in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris is one of the most successful computer games of all time. After all, it holds the Guinness World Record of the ‘most prolific puzzle videogame series’ AND the ‘most ported videogame’ in the world, with 50 games carrying the Tetris name (a number that triples if localised versions, grey-area licensed copies and unofficial games inspired by the Tetris formula are added into the mix).
Sitting down with Pajitnov at this year’s Lucca Comic and Games convention in Italy, he remembers when he realised he’d created a winning computer game: “When I worked on the first code of Tetris, it was a prototype. Just the first figures falling. No score, no prediction, no statistics, no decoration, just pure dynamics… and I couldn’t stop playing! I gave myself the excuse that I was debugging something but in reality I just enjoyed playing it. At that moment, I realised that this was a very good game.”
“At that time, he was the best Tetris player in the world!” laughs the Tetris company co-founder Henk Rogers. “For me, it was at the Consumer Electronics Show. I’m supposed to stand in line and play a game for a couple of minutes and then go stand in line for another and look for the games that I want to bring to Japan,” he remembers. “I was standing in the Tetris line for the fourth time when I said, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t stop playing this game!’ I was wasting time at a game show – I’m supposed to be looking for games, but I just wanted to go back and play [Tetris].”
Though the game was undoubtedly good, distributing it around the world would be more complicated – the copyright law of the Soviet Union at the time created a state monopoly on the import and export of copyrighted works.
Indeed, Pajitnov and Rogers’ adventure in bringing the game to the wider world is a complicated one. Their 40-year friendship is obvious as they sit opposite us joking about who is the best Tetris player out of the two of them. But how did a Russian computer engineer and video game designer meet a Dutch Indonesian video game designer and entrepreneur?
Well to find that out, you can watch the 2023 Apple+ film Tetris, directed by Jon Baird and starring Taron Egerton as Rogers and Nikita Yefremov as Pajitnov.
The pair had a hand in making the movie. “We were involved from the very beginning,” Pajitnov nods. “They consulted with us on the script. We did our best with the script and tried to fix all the bullshit which was being inserted and somehow we got to the point of some kind of satisfaction!”
However, when the Covid pandemic hit during the shooting process, Pajitnov and Rogers had to take a step back and it wasn’t until the movie was completed that they had the chance to watch the whole thing. That experience, for both of them, was emotional, though not necessarily because of nostalgic memories: “There are several times in the movie when I cried, and they are about things that didn’t happen!” Rogers laughs.
“There’s too much emotion related to this movie,” Pajitnov adds. “When we first watched the movie, we were positively impressed. We did expect some kind of compromise but it’s a good movie.”
Speaking of compromise, Pajitnov reveals one of the big changes in the movie that has stayed with him isn’t a change that one might expect… it’s the ELORG building!
Elektronorgtechnica (or ELORG for short) was a state-owned organisation with a monopoly on the import and export of computer software in the Soviet Union. A lot of the action in the movie takes place there and the organisation’s HQ is shown as a big, cold, concrete building.
The reality, however, couldn’t have been more different. “In reality the office ELORG was in an absolutely beautiful 18th century mansion in the centre of Moscow. It was in this very quiet place with the trees outside.
“They shot [the ELORG scenes] in Glasgow, and they had no idea! They put it in a very 60s, glass and concrete building, which exactly coincided with the spirit of ELORG. They put it in the right place instead of the strange phenomena of the real place. That’s the magic of cinema – they improved the Tetris reality for me!”
For Rogers, the experience of the movie inspired him to write a book of his whole career, The Perfect Game: Tetris: From Russia With Love, which will be released next April: “When we were going through [the story of Tetris], we have different memories of the same events. So I decided to write the book of my whole game career which clears up all that stuff. All the questions you have in the movie are all cleared up in the book. I started with the movie and then added before and after.
“Alexey has told his parts in his broken English, which is so quaint. I specifically didn’t correct the grammar or the spelling or anything like that. So it comes through as Alexey.”
One of the other challenges in bringing Tetris to the wider world was marketing it. Though it did result in the game incorporating the classic music, Korobeiniki (a classic Russian folk song) that is synonymous with the game: “Mirrorsoft in the UK, Spectrum HoloByte in the US, and Bulletproof Software in Japan were marketing the game as a Russian game because who wants to play a simple block game? They just couldn’t think about how to market it,” Rogers remembers. “It’s a hard sell. So they’re trying to find hooks to sell it, and that’s where [the music] came about. I thought, ‘hey, you know what? This music has withstood the test of time, and there are no royalties!’
“The great thing about that is that we’ve played it for people over and over again to the point where they associate that music with Tetris. Now if somebody wants to use that music in a game, they actually have to ask us for permission. We’ve got the copyright on classical music. It’s very strange…!”
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