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?

Comments

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.