How Did Tetris Go from Soviet Passtime to Smashing Success?

During the Cold War, a programmer in the USSR created Tetris as a fun break for his coworkers. Learn how it became one of the best-selling video games of all time in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/tetris.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey Brainstuff Loauren
Bobblebaum here. For almost four decades, through the Cold War
and its thawing, through the fall of the USSR and
the rise of globalism, through diplomatic strains and years of
touch and go Russian American relations, people all over the

(00:24):
world have remained mesmerized by a Soviet invention, a computer
game of all things, that somehow has both persevered and prospered.
Tetris and its ever quickening trickle down of four block
shapes is immediately identifiable to just about anyone who's ever
used a digital device with the screen. When it was

(00:46):
conceived in nineteen eighty four by a puzzle happy programmer,
though Tetris was little more than an in house diversion
designed to break up serious minded twelve hour days at
the Russian Academy of Sciences. From that of Soviet controlled software,
Tetris has evolved into maybe the most famous computer game
the world has ever seen. It's a seemingly simple electronic

(01:09):
escape that's enjoyed in more than two hundred countries on
more than fifty separate platforms by millions of people playing
billions of games every year, and Tetris has been downloaded
on mobile devices alone more than four hundred and twenty
five million times, and keep in mind that download capable
mobile devices didn't really exist when creator Alexei Pajidov unveiled

(01:32):
the game to his coworkers in nineteen eighty four. Tetris
has also sold some seventy million physical copies for the
article this episode is based on how Stuffworks. Spoke with Pagidov,
he said, well, Tetris is a really good game, one
of the best. That's not very modest of me, but
that's the fact. Pasidov was born in Moscow in nineteen

(01:56):
fifty five. He was helping to develop early speech recognitions
at the Russian Academy of Sciences in nineteen eighty four
when he began building a computer game in his spare time.
The game featured tetronimos, that is, playing pieces made up
of four blocks like dominos, but Tetra is the prefix
for four. The tetronomos came in seven different shapes, from

(02:18):
straight lines to squares, and the object was to arrange
them as they fell into the playing field. He called
it Tetris after Tetra meaning four and his favorite sport, tennis.
The game was built on and initially played on, an
early Soviet computer, the Electronica sixty, which had no graphic capabilities.

(02:38):
Its monitor could only display text, still with letters serving
as the blocks of each Tetronimo. It was an instant
hit with Pachatov's colleagues. Pachatov said, the Computer Center was
a pretty serious kind of institute, very solid and very serious.
Nobody ever thought about creating a computer game. Basically, all

(02:59):
this was just an excuse for having fun among the programmers.
The game lingered for months inside the cavernous rooms at
the Center until Pajidov, pushed by his coworkers to make
it more accessible, assigned someone to port the game to
the much more popular IBMPC. Pajidov said, on the PC,

(03:20):
it starts its own life. It was like a forest fire.
It went everywhere. Eventually the game was saved onto floppy
disks and leaked into other countries. What followed were years
of legal and sometimes extra legal maneuvering outside of the
Soviet Union. People were eager to get their hands on

(03:40):
the game and to start selling it. The Soviet government,
which held all rights to Pachtov's work resisted. For example,
at one point a Hungarian software company thought that it
had secured the rights from Pajetov to sell the game
in the West, but that turned out to be a miscommunication.
A mere programmer in these bureaucracy didn't have the power

(04:02):
to authorize his creations licensing, and the Soviets declined to
give up control. By nineteen eighty eight, though, the Soviet
Ministry responsible for the export of computer hardware and software
gave its blessing and Tetris made its way onto PCs
in the United Kingdom and the US. But the real

(04:22):
Tetris explosion came a year later when the new handheld
gaming computer made by the Japanese firm Nintendo, the game Boy,
promised to include a Tetris cartridge with every Game Boy
sold in America if the Soviets agreed. One Hank Rogers,
a Dutch video game producer living in Japan, wound up
brokering the deal. He'd run across the game on PC

(04:45):
at the Consumer Electronics Show and saw its potential. Today
he's the president of the Tetris Company, which controls the
Tetris license. Rogers told CNN in twenty nineteen, I made
a handshake deal with Minoru Arakawa, founder of Nintendo of America,
to have Nintendo include Tetris in every game Boy. He said,

(05:06):
why should I include Tetris? I have Mario, And I said,
if you want little boys to buy your game Boy,
then include Mario. But if you want everyone to buy
your game Boy, then you should include Tetris. But the
Soviets were not yet convinced. Again, this was still in
the middle of the Cold War, and they were suspicious

(05:26):
of anything to do with the US. The KGB supposedly
got involved. Soviet leader Mikhel Gorbachev might have had to
say Rogers, with the lucrative deal hanging by thread, flew
to Moscow to try to convince the Soviets to sign
in on the agreement. He reportedly spent hours being questioned
by Soviet officials. The whole thing was so dramatic that

(05:48):
Apple Studios produced a feature length thriller about Rogers and
pachetobs or Deal. It debuted in twenty twenty three and
is called Tetris But Yes, the game that worked. The
Soviets agreed to a deal, perhaps as an exercise of
soft power. The original Tetris packaging included the slogan from
Russia with fun. It became part of the North American

(06:12):
game boy launch in nineteen eighty nine. Nintendo sold thirty
five million game boys that year, and Tetris boomed into
a worldwide phenomenon. The goal of conventional Tetris is to
control where and how the tetronomos fall so that they
fill up entire horizontal lines in the playing field. The

(06:32):
completed lines are eliminated from the field, clearing more space
to play. The more lines a player can completely fill
and eliminate before the blocks pile up to the top
of the playing field, the higher the score. It sounds simple,
and on the most basic level it is, but that's
part of the beauty of Tetris. Pajanov thinks of it

(06:54):
more like Chess than say Minecraft or Grand Theft Auto,
which are also in the top three be selling video
games of all time. Patchidov said Tetris is very deceptive.
It creates lots of illusions in the player's minds. You
have an extremely long learning curve. The normal video game,
you have thirty to forty hours learning curve. Tetris, to

(07:14):
my kind of thinking is one hundred and twenty hours.
In many ways, the game is so simple that it's
nearly mystical. It's so easy that it's seldom mastered. Tetris
is now one of the most awarded games in history,
and has had numerous spin offs over the years, all
of them now licensed by the Tetris Company. The game,

(07:36):
in its various forms, is played on smartphones, tablets, computers,
and basically every video game system, including virtual reality headsets.
An annual tournament featuring the nineteen eighty nine version of
Tetris on the original Nintendo Entertainment System began in twenty ten.
The Classic Tetris World Championship now hosts over twenty live

(07:57):
events around the world, ending in the champion every summer.
Through all these years Pastadov has missed out on potentially
millions of dollars in royalties, but he said that he's
content with what is created because of its lasting worth. Quote.
At some moment, I had a choice either start to

(08:18):
fight for my rights and spend the rest of my
life fighting. I decide that if God gave me such
a gift to create such a game, I will create
another game and go about it another way. The most
important thing is to give this game to the people.
Today's episode is based on the article how Tetris went

(08:40):
from Soviet mindgame to smash Hit on HowStuffWorks dot Com,
written by John Donovan. Brain stuff It's production of iHeartRadio
in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com, misproduced by Tyler Klang.
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