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Tetris Turns 25

Posted by timothy on from the where-were-you dept.

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.'"

6 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Summary by Darkness404 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    1. Re:Summary by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Informative

      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. 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?

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    2. Re:Summary by 117 · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    3. Re:Summary by asdf7890 · · Score: 3, Informative

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

      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...

    4. Re:Summary by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

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    5. Re:Summary by Risha · · Score: 3, Informative

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