The History of Tetris

Tetris was invented in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, a young researcher at Moscow's Academy of Science. Pajitnov was bored by his job in the cybernetics department and decided to create a new game. Inspired by his love of mathematical puzzles and the board game Pentomino, he created Tetris. Because computers were limited and thus shared among colleagues at the time, his coworkers quickly became hooked on the game and started playing it instead of doing their work. Moscow lacked a computer industry due to the Iron Curtain, so the game wasn’t sold, but simply replicated over and over again and shared via floppy disks. It spread throughout the Soviet Union and the government eventually became aware that it was affecting workplace productivity. To combat this, the government created an early version of spyware for state computers that would corrupt both Tetris and the floppy disk it originated from, but the game didn’t die out. In the mid-1980s, a British software manufacturer visiting an office in Hungary noticed the staff playing Tetris. He successfully negotiated the distribution rights with the Soviet government and the game was introduced to the rest of the world. However, handheld games were the future, and Henk Rogers, an American software developer working in Japan, decided that he wanted the distribution rights for handheld Tetris. In 1989, he boarded a plane for the USSR, despite having no contacts there, and set out to secure them. While he was there, he met Alexey Pajitnov and they became friends. After a week of negotiations, Rogers secured the rights to distribute Tetris on both personal computers and handheld consoles. With this step, the game continued to grow in popularity all over the world. Today, Henk Rogers and Alexey Pajitnov co-own the company that holds the rights to Tetris and continue to develop versions of the game for the latest technology. Tetris is now played by millions of people all over the world on smartphones, computers, social media sites like Facebook, and more.