"Tetris" released - June 6, 1984

On this day in 1984, the video game "Tetris" was released. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class. It's a production of I
Heart Radio. What's Up? Everyone? Welcome to this Day in
History class, where we bring you a new tidbit from
history every day. Today is June six, nineteen. The day

(00:24):
was June six, nine four. Soviet Russian computer engineer Alexey
Pogetof launched a video game he called Tetris. Today, Tetris
is one of the best selling video games of all time.
Pogetnov have been working at the doubt Nietschen Computing Center
of the Academy of Science of the U s s

(00:46):
R and Moscow as an artificial intelligence researcher. When the
lab was sent new software, researchers there would figure out
the software's power by writing a program for it. Pogetof
would sometimes makes games as the simple programs. One game
that Pogetknoff particularly liked was Pentomenos. A penomeno is a

(01:07):
plane geometric figure made by joining five squares of the
same size together edge to edge. In ninety four, poget
Knov realized that pentominoes could be part of a good
computer game. But there are twelve variations of pentominoes, which
Pogetnov thought was too many, so he decided to go

(01:28):
with Tetraminos, which used four squares and have only seven variations.
He was working on a computer called the Electronica sixty,
which had a text based display, so he had to
create the puzzle pieces using letters. Then he set up
the procedures for the game, which are fairly simple. The
player flips and rotates puzzle pieces of different colors and

(01:50):
shapes as they fall so they fit together. As the
pieces form solid rose rose disappeared to make room for more.
The player loses when a puzzle piece hits the top
of the screen. Once the game was refined, he and
his colleagues founded enjoyable. The game was soon ported to
a PC. Poget Kov called the game Tetris, which was

(02:12):
a combination of the words tetraumino and tennis. The first
playable version of the game was released on June six.
N Early on, players used floppy disk to copy and
share the game. It quickly spread across Moscow, and soon
the PC version was sent to Hungary. Pirate it versions

(02:33):
spread to western countries. In Hungary, the game was put
on display in a software exhibit at the Hungarian Institute
of Technology. Hungarian programmers had made versions of the game
for other computers, including the Apple too. Owner of Andromeda
Software Limited, Robert Stein, saw the game there and found
out poget Knoff was the creator, but poget Knov had

(02:56):
granted his rights to the game to the government for
ten years. Electron North Technica or l ORG was a
state owned organization that controlled the export of computer software
from the Soviet Union. It was responsible for licensing Tetris,
and it handled all rights to the game. L OR
licensed Tetris to Stein, who licensed it to distributors Spectrum

(03:18):
Holloby and Mirror Self Limited in the US and UK, respectively.
The version Spectrum Hollabite design had Russian themed imagery and music.
Tetris was one of the first pieces of software to
be exported from the Soviet Union to the United States.
After some conflict over the right to distribute Tetris on

(03:38):
devices other than computers, l OR signed rights for an
arcade version over to Atari and non Japanese console and
handheld rights over to Nintendo. A copy of Tetris came
bundled with every game Boy, helping spur the device's success.
Even though Tetris was becoming a hit around the world.
Podgetnov did not make much money in the beginning, but

(04:01):
in n when the Russian license expired, the rights of
the game went back to podgeting Off and he began
to collect royalties. He and game license their Hank Rogers
founded the Tetris Company, which owns Tetris rights worldwide. I'm
each jeffco and hopefully you know a little more about
history today than you did yesterday. If you're so inclined,

(04:25):
you can follow us at T D I h C
Podcasts on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And if you're interested
in learning even more about history, then I suggest you
listen to another podcast I host called Unpopular. In it,
you'll hear the stories of people in history who challenge
the status quo to create meaningful change, even when their

(04:48):
descent had serious consequences, and I'll try to parse what
their descent can teach us about protests and contrarianism today.
Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you tomorrow. M hmmm.
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