June 1984, Moscow, Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences on Vavilov Street. Programmer Alexey Pajitnov launches a puzzle on an Elektronika-60 machine in which shapes made of squares fall from top to bottom and stack into rows. No graphics—just text characters, square brackets instead of blocks. A few years later this program would become the most widely distributed computer game on the planet, but the path from a scientific institution to the global market would prove more tangled than the puzzle itself.
Alexey Pajitnov worked in a lab dealing with speech recognition and artificial intelligence, but in his spare time he was into puzzles. One of them—pentomino, a set of twelve shapes, each made of five squares—demanded patience and spatial thinking. Pajitnov decided to adapt it for the computer, but quickly realized: static layout is boring, it needs dynamics.
Elektronika-60—a Soviet clone of the PDP-11—couldn't draw graphics in the usual sense. The screen worked as a terminal: monochrome text mode, 80 characters per line. Pajitnov used square brackets [ ] to mark the blocks that made up the shapes. Shapes fell from above, the player controlled their rotation and shift with keys, filled rows disappeared.
The machine didn't have enough power to rotate pentomino, and Pajitnov reduced the shapes from five blocks to four—tetromino. There were seven variants: stick, square, letters T, L, J, S, Z. This was enough for the balance between complexity and manageability to become nearly perfect. Dmitry Pavlovsky, a colleague from the lab, helped refine the code, suggesting mechanical improvements. By summer 1984 the game was working, spreading on floppy disks inside the Computing Center and already capturing the attention of those who launched it.
The first version had no name. The word Tetris appeared later—a hybrid of tetromino (from Greek tetra, "four") and tennis, Pajitnov's favorite sport. Nobody planned a commercial launch, nobody thought about rights. This was a program for themselves, written during work hours in a Soviet research institute, where the concept of an author's intellectual property in software simply didn't exist in the form understood in the West.
Elektronika-60 stood only in a few institutions, and Tetris would have remained internal entertainment if not for the appearance of more accessible machines. By 1985 sixteen-year-old schoolboy Vadim Gerasimov, brought to the center by his computer science teacher, had already rewritten the game for IBM PC. This was the turning point: IBM-compatible computers were spreading across the world, their graphics allowed using colored blocks instead of brackets, and the platform itself was the standard for business and education.
Gerasimov added visual improvements, made the interface clearer, sped up rendering. The game began copying through floppy disks, passing from hand to hand, reaching universities and offices beyond the USSR. No copy protection, no licenses—people just gave the game to friends, and it spread on diskettes by itself. By 1986 the game reached Hungary, where it was seen by Robert Stein, owner of British software company Andromeda.
Stein saw commercial potential and contacted Pajitnov through acquaintances, proposing to arrange rights for Western distribution. Pajitnov agreed—but couldn't sign the contract himself. International software trade in the USSR was handled by the state organization ELORG (Electronorgtechnica), subordinate to the Ministry of Foreign Trade. All negotiations went through it, all contracts were signed by it, all money was received by it. Pajitnov could only count on a symbolic bonus within the system.
Stein began selling sublicenses without having a single signed agreement in hand. Mirrorsoft (British publisher, part of Robert Maxwell's empire) and Spectrum HoloByte (American company) bought rights from Andromeda and released versions for Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS. The game became a hit in Europe and the USA, but the legal foundation of this entire chain remained shaky. ELORG hadn't signed exclusive contracts, wording was vague, and nobody knew exactly which rights were sold—for computers, arcade machines, or consoles.
By the end of the 1980s Tetris had turned into a minefield. ELORG was selling rights directly to several companies, Andromeda was reselling sublicenses, Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte considered themselves lawful rights holders in the West, and Atari Games (through its trademark Tengen) was preparing a version for Nintendo Entertainment System, believing it had bought all necessary rights from Mirrorsoft. Simultaneously Nintendo was negotiating directly with ELORG, hoping to get exclusive console rights.
In 1989 Henk Rogers, founder of Bullet-Proof Software and Tetris distributor in Japan, flew to Moscow without warning. He met with ELORG director Nikolai Belikov and learned that console rights hadn't been sold yet—despite claims by other companies. Rogers signed a contract on behalf of Nintendo, securing the Japanese corporation exclusive rights to home consoles. This meant the Tengen version for NES that Atari was preparing for release had become illegal.
Atari Games tried to bypass Nintendo's cartridge lock—the 10NES chip that controlled console compatibility. The company filed a request with the U.S. Copyright Office, falsely claiming it needed the 10NES source code for litigation, when actually it planned to use it to create its own unlocking chip. When this was revealed, the court qualified Atari's actions as abuse of procedure and stripped the company of protection under the fair use doctrine for reverse engineering.
In 1992 the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled on Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America Inc. (975 F.2d 832). Nintendo won on all counts: console Tetris rights belonged to it, Tengen's contract with Mirrorsoft didn't cover home consoles, and using the stolen 10NES code was copyright infringement. Tengen had to recall cartridges from the market—having managed to sell about 50 thousand copies. Nintendo, on the contrary, strengthened its position: Tetris for Game Boy, released in 1989, became one of the best-selling games in portable console history—over 35 million copies.
Pajitnov didn't receive a cent from Western sales in the 1980s. All money went to ELORG, then was distributed within the Soviet system. When the game was earning millions in the West, its creator continued working at the Computing Center for an ordinary research staff salary. This wasn't an act of malicious theft—the system simply didn't provide for commercial copyright on software created at a state institution.
In 1991 Pajitnov emigrated to the USA; he joined Microsoft only five years later. Contracts with ELORG were still in force, and rights remained blurred between several companies. In 1996 Pajitnov and Rogers founded The Tetris Company—a structure designed to consolidate license management. But full control over rights didn't come immediately.
Only in 2005 did The Tetris Company buy out from ELORG (by then already a privatized organization) the rights to the game, including all derivative versions. This was the finale of a twenty-year legal saga: Soviet state monopoly on software collided with the Western licensing system. Pajitnov began receiving royalties only after 1996, when the original ELORG contracts expired—twelve years after he wrote the first version of the game from square brackets on a machine without graphics.