Ever played Tetris?
Maybe it was on a Game Boy in the back seat of a car.
Maybe it was on a desktop computer when you were supposed to be working.
Maybe it was on your phone last week.
It’s one of those games that requires no instruction, crosses every language barrier, and produces in almost every person who touches it the same response: one more game.
Tetris has been downloaded on mobile devices alone more than 500 million times. It has been played in more than 200 countries on more than 50 platforms. Neuroscientists have studied it and found it can reduce symptoms of PTSD and improve brain efficiency.
It is almost certainly the most widely played game in human history — certainly the most-played video game.
So it might be surprising, if you don’t know, to learn that it was created by a 29-year-old Soviet programmer in his spare time at the height of the Cold War, on a computer with no ability to create graphics, all as a way to test his machine.
His name is Alexey Pajitnov, and honestly the only less probable thing than for him to have invented an incredibly viral game long before anyone talked that way was all that had to happen in order for him to make any profit from the venture whatsoever.
If you’ve seen the 2023 Apple TV+ film about how Tetris escaped the Soviet Union and reached the world, spawning a high-stakes international licensing battle, you know that part.
But I think Pajitnov, the inventor, might be the more interesting person in the story.
Pajitnov was born on April 16, 1955, in Moscow, the son of a film critic and a woman who worked in publishing. He was a quiet, puzzle-obsessed child — the kind who could spend hours with a pentomino set, fitting differently shaped pieces into a box, turning the problem over and over until it resolved.
He studied applied mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Aviation, then joined the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where he worked on speech recognition and artificial intelligence — yes, all the way back then.
It was serious and kind of unglamorous work at the time, but he was good at it.
In the summer of 1984 — remember this was around the time of the Los Angeles Olympics, which the Soviets boycotted, in case you want a chronological marker — the Computing Centre received a new machine: the Electronika 60, which was basically a Soviet rip-off of a DEC minicomputer.
Pajitnov’s job was to test its capabilities, so he thought back to those pentomino puzzles from his childhood, simplified the pieces from five squares to four, and added the mechanic that made everything work: the pieces falling from the top of the screen.
The player had to arrange them into complete lines before the screen filled up. It was he who came up with the name “Tetris,” combining tetra, the Greek prefix for four, and tennis, his favorite sport.
The Electronika 60 had no graphics card, so the first version of Tetris was built entirely from keyboard characters — letters and symbols arranged to suggest blocks falling down a screen. It took up 2.7 KB of storage; by way of comparison in 2026, I’m guessing this email newsletter alone will run between 40 KB and 100 KB.
Still, back then it was impressive. Pajitnov showed it to his colleagues, and within days, productivity at the Computing Centre had collapsed, as all around him comrades played Tetris instead of working.
He sometimes had to pretend to be busy when he was actually playing himself. “Magic is in it,” he said.
From there:
A 16-year-old intern named Vadim Gerasimov built the first proper IBM-compatible version with actual graphics.
It went viral the quasi-old-fashioned way, spreading via copies on floppy disk, hand to hand from office to office across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and eventually into the West.
In 1988 it reached a Las Vegas game trade show, where a Dutch-American designer named Henk Rogers first saw it and understood immediately that it was unlike anything else.
Now we get into what you might have seen in the recent film — one of the stranger legal battles in the history of entertainment.
Three people flew to Moscow simultaneously in February 1989 without knowing about each other — Rogers, a British software broker named Robert Stein of Andromeda Software, and Kevin Maxwell, son of media tycoon Robert Maxwell — all trying to negotiate rights with ELORG, the Soviet state organization that controlled software exports.
ELORG discovered that console versions of Tetris were being sold across Japan and the West without their knowledge or payment, and they were displeased. But Rogers won the handheld rights by offering ELORG a royalty per cartridge rather than the flat fee his rivals were proposing — more valuable to the Soviets in the long run, although more costly to Rogers himself.
He then convinced Nintendo to bundle Tetris with its new Game Boy rather than Mario or Donkey Kong. The Game Boy launched in 1989 and sold a million units in the United States in its first few weeks, and my little brother was playing with his in the back seat of a station wagon a few weeks later.
Throughout all of this, Pajitnov received nothing.
Because: communism.
He worked for a Soviet state institution, so the government owned what he created, and while Tetris made fortunes for publishers, console makers, and licensing bodies around the world, Pajitnov got nothing.
But then: Glasnost, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Pajitnov emigrated to the United States in 1991, and he got a job at Microsoft — and then in 1996, the ten-year license on Tetris expired.
Pajitnov teamed up with Rogers, and they founded The Tetris Company together. For the first time, Pajitnov began receiving royalties from his own game — twelve years after he built it on a machine that couldn’t display proper graphics.
Just past his 71st birthday, Pajitnov talks about all of this without apparent bitterness. Creating the game itself was its own reward, he says — although I assume he also doesn’t mind being financially rewarded.
Because: capitalism.
He’s still working in game design, although talk about a heck of a first entry into the industry.
“I never could have imagined,” he said, “anything like the history it actually had.”
7 optimistic moments from history this week
May 31: “It is working better than expected.” — Werner von Siemens, writing to his brother Carl two weeks after demonstrating the world’s first electric locomotive on this day in 1879 at the Berlin Trade Exhibition. Every subway, tram, and electric train in the world descends from what debuted that day in Berlin.
June 1: “A decisive moment in the history of Western civilization.” — Critic Kenneth Tynan of The Times of London, on the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on this day in 1967.
June 2: “Throughout all my life and with all my heart I shall strive to be worthy of your trust.” — Queen Elizabeth II, in her broadcast to the nation on the evening of her coronation on this day in 1953 — the first coronation in history to be televised.
June 3: “At 10:00 p.m. … a switch was thrown … and electricity traveled 14 miles.” — From the Willamette Falls Heritage Foundation’s account of the first long-distance transmission of electricity in the United States, on this day in 1889. Before this moment, electricity could only be generated and used in the same location.
June 4: “I came up with the idea while waiting in a long line at a Dallas bank.” — Don Wetzel, describing the moment of inspiration that led to the invention of the ATM, which he patented in the U.S. on this day in 1973 along with engineers Tom Barnes and George Chastain.
June 5: “The Lord himself wrote it, and I was but the humblest instrument in his hand.” — Harriet Beecher Stowe, describing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the first installment of which appeared in the National Era on this day in 1851. Published as a book in 1852, it sold 1.5 million copies worldwide.
June 6: “We’ll start the war from right here.” — Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the 26th president, on this day in 1944 at Utah Beach, Normandy, after discovering that strong tidal currents had carried his landing craft more than a mile south of the intended target. He was 56 years old, walked with a cane due to arthritis and World War I injuries, had petitioned three times for permission to lead the first wave of the assault, died of a heart attack five weeks later and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
June 7: “I began to think of my duty. It would be cowardice to run back to India without fulfilling my obligation.” — Mohandas Gandhi, writing in his autobiography about this day in 1893, when the then-24-year-old Indian lawyer was thrown off a train in South Africa for refusing to move from his first-class compartment — for which he held a valid ticket — to a third-class car. The movement for Indian independence from Britain began on a train platform.