It wasn’t until the early 2000s that The Tetris Company standardized the tetriminos’ colors. With it, the pair issued copyright registrations for American Tetris products, and deployed trademarks across the globe. Once he got Tetris’ rights back in 1996, Pajitnov established The Tetris Company (TTC)–with Rogers. Speaking to IGN in a 2009 video interview, Pajitnov said the handheld outing was the best of the bunch. Pajitnov says the 30-year-old Game Boy version of Tetris is his favorite. In an IGN Japan interview last November, transcribed by Nintendo Enthusiast, Rogers explained how he convinced Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa to ship every Game Boy with the game, “because everybody plays Tetris–young, old and male, female.” Rogers was the man who convinced Nintendo to bundle the Game Boy with Tetris. Luckily, it paid off with the deal of a lifetime. Each one cost him $10 to make, and he’d used his partner’s family’s entire property as collateral. Gettyīefore he made the deal, Rogers had already greenlit the production of 200,000 Tetris cartridges. His desperate attempt to curry favor failed.Ĭzechoslovakian-born British media baron Robert Maxwell, who unsuccessfully tried to buy 'Tetris'. Robert Maxwell, the infamous former owner of the British Mirror newspaper group (and now-defunct videogame publisher Mirrorsoft), had published Gorbachev’s autobiography–and was also in the advanced stages of contract negotiation. In a 2014 interview with the Guardian, Dutch gaming icon Henk Rogers explained that after he approached ELORG for distribution rights, two agents were dispatched to his office in Tokyo–but luckily for both parties, it ended with Rogers successfully offering the Russians “the best contract ever seen in the industry.”Ĭompetition was so fierce that Rogers’ main rivals lobbied Mikhail Gorbachev directly. The licenser who acquired Tetris for Nintendo was visited by two intimidating KGB agents. The deal was signed for ten years, and Pajitnov barely made a ruble from his creation during that time.
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It was one of the first games acquired by the state-run Elektronorgtechnica (ELORG), which monopolized both imports and exports of software in the Soviet Union.
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With no idea of how to publish the game–and scared of the anti-Soviet concept of making money from it–Pajitnov ceded the game’s rights to the Soviet government, taking advantage of its recent socio-cultural evolution through perestroika. The Soviet Union originally owned the rights to Tetris. Different developers in Hungary, Britain, the United States and beyond “discovered” Tetris around the same time due to “shareware” versions of the game–and they began to publish their interpretations whether Pajitnov knew it or not. Ownership of Tetris was hotly disputed for years, all because of rampant piracy. In the initial test run, bracket elements were used for the tetriminos themselves.
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As this video demonstrates, the original playing zone consisted of exclamation points, periods and slashes. The Elektronika 60 had no graphics capability–text was used to form its blocks. Vadim Gerasimov, who worked on the early game with him, wasn’t a fan of the name at all.
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With “tetra” as half of the title’s inspiration, Pajitnov derived the “is” from tennis, his preferred pastime.
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Its name also came from Pajitnov’s favorite sport. Tetrominoes, later known as “tetriminos” in the game, inspired the title Tetris. This provided Pajitnov’s game with five “free” shapes–the famous I, O, T, S and J formations – alongside mirrored versions of the S and J (Z and L). Pentominoes have five blocks, while tetrominoes have four. The name Tetris derives from the shapes chosen by Pajitnov. As a youngster, the mathematically minded Soviet scientist was a big fan of pentominoes–a tiling puzzle which used shapes that consisted of five blocks. Pajitnov’s inspiration came from a childhood hobby. Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of 'Tetris', in 1990.