Tetris

• 1. Introduction

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  Tetris holds a strange record among video games. It has appeared on at least 70 platforms, more than any other game. Guinness World Records also counts roughly 220 official versions, each with its own music and images. The puzzle was created in the mid-1980s by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer. Its idea fits in one breath: blocks fall, the player arranges them, and full lines disappear.

  That simplicity raises questions that the rest of this documentary will answer. How did a pastime from a Soviet research institute end up on so many machines? Who owned it, when nobody was quite sure who had the right to sell it? And what does the game ask of the human mind that scientists, champions, and mathematicians still study it today?

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• 2. Pentominoes and Brackets

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  Alexey Pajitnov spent his working days at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences, researching speech recognition and artificial intelligence. In his spare time he built more than twenty types of games on the Elektronika 60, a Russian clone of the PDP-11 computer. One day he bought a pentomino puzzle set from a store and played with it in his office. The pieces made him want to turn tiling puzzles into a program.

  Sources disagree about when this happened. Some point to June 1984. The BBC documentary Tetris: From Russia with Love, released in 2004, suggests the spring of 1985.

  The Elektronika 60 had no graphical interface, so Pajitnov drew the playing field and the pieces with spaces and brackets. He wrote the program in Pascal for the RT-11 operating system and tried several variations. Twelve different pentomino shapes seemed needlessly complicated. He cut the pieces down to four blocks each, which come in only seven shapes. Then he programmed the basics, including flipping pieces as they fell down a vertical screen and clearing lines. The name joined "tetra," meaning four, with tennis, his favorite sport.

  The timeline of the first finished version differs again from source to source. In a 1993 interview with the Japanese magazine The Super Famicom, Pajitnov recalled finishing in 1985, after about three weeks of work. He credited the speed to the game's simplicity. Henk Rogers reported in 2024 that Pajitnov remembered first building it on the Elektronika 60 in 1984. That first version had no scoring and no levels. Even so, his colleagues were captivated, and some copied the finished code to run on their own compatible work computers.

  Pajitnov then wanted the better display of the IBM Personal Computer. He recruited his colleague Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov, a computer prodigy aged 16. Using Turbo Pascal, the three adapted the game over two months. Gerasimov added color, and Pavlovsky added a scoreboard. Floppy disk copies circulated freely through the Dorodnitsyn center, then moved quickly among Moscow computer circles. Tetris reportedly won second place in a Zelenodolsk computer game competition in November 1985. By 1986, nearly everyone in Moscow and several other major cities who owned an IBM computer had played it.

  Pajitnov kept notes on these second-hand reports of its spread. But the person who would carry the game out of the country was his own manager.

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• 3. Rules of the Fall

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  Seven tetromino shapes, each built from four connected blocks, supply every piece in Tetris. They descend one at a time from the top center of a rectangular field. While a piece falls, the player can slide it sideways and rotate it until it lands on the floor or on the pile. The aim is to build complete horizontal lines. When a line fills, it vanishes, and the blocks above it drop by one row. Each cleared line also makes later pieces fall faster.

  The game ends when the pile grows so tall that new pieces cannot enter the field. Players call this "topping out."

  Scoring pays extra for ambition. Points rise with the speed of the descent, and clearing several lines at once is worth more than clearing them one by one. Sliding an I-shaped piece into a gap one column wide clears four lines in a single move. That move is called a "Tetris," and most versions give it the highest score. Hard drops and soft drops earn points too.

  Four features recur across versions. The queue shows which pieces come next. A soft drop speeds up a piece's fall. A hard drop places it instantly as far down as it can go. Holding lets the player set a piece aside for later.

  Competitive players added finer techniques. A T-spin turns a T-shaped piece into a blocked gap. A perfect clear empties the whole field after a line clear. A combo chains line clears on consecutive placements.

  One rule changed quietly over the years. Early versions chose pieces completely at random, while modern versions use a "bag system," which guarantees that each of the seven shapes appears once in every set of seven.

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• 4. A Misread Telex

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  Ten years was the span of rights that Pajitnov arranged for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center to hold over Tetris, hoping to ease any legal trouble. As a result, he could not sell the game for profit. Soviet copyright law protected intellectual rights poorly. A state organization called Elektronorgtechnica, known as Elorg, held a monopoly on importing and exporting software.

  Still, Pajitnov's manager, Victor Brjabrin, liked the game and wanted it to succeed beyond the Soviet Union. In early 1986, he sent a copy to the SZKI Institute of Computer Studies in Budapest. There it caught the eye of Robert Stein, founder of Andromeda Software, who made his living licensing Hungarian software to British companies. Stein found the gameplay compelling. The institute's director told him that a researcher named Gábor Bolgár had already ported the game to the Commodore 64. Stein flew back to London and sent a telex to the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center asking for the license, hoping to resell it to a larger British publisher.

  Brjabrin translated the telex from English to Russian and showed it to Pajitnov. Pajitnov then spent days composing a reply in English that was friendly but committed to nothing. Stein read it as a grant of the license anyway, and went looking for a publisher.

  He pitched Jim Mackonochie of Mirrorsoft, a British software company founded by the business magnate Robert Maxwell and Mackonochie himself. Mackonochie doubted the game would sell. He asked Phil Adam, president of the American sister company Spectrum HoloByte, for advice. During a visit to Mirrorsoft, Adam played for hours, then urged Mackonochie to accept. Still cautious, Mackonochie took the rights for Europe, and Adam took the rights for the United States and Japan. Stein sold the rights to the two companies for £3,000 plus royalties of 7.5-15% of sales. This happened even though talks with the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center were stalled, because the center resisted selling the game in the West.

  Gilman Louie, CEO of Spectrum HoloByte, chose to play up the game's Soviet roots. He pitched it as the first Soviet product sold in North America. The box was red and carried an illustration of Saint Basil's Cathedral. The game reached shops first on the IBM PC, with other computer ports planned to follow within weeks. Mirrorsoft released it in the United Kingdom on the 27th of January 1988, and Spectrum HoloByte followed in the United States on the 29th of January 1988. Bolgár sold his Commodore 64 port to Stein's company, which added sound work and licensed it to Mirrorsoft. Mirrorsoft rewrote the original IBM code for systems like the Amiga and Atari ST. Helped by word of mouth and good reviews, the game sold 100 thousand copies within a year. At the Software Publishers Association's Excellence in Software Awards in 1989, it won in three categories.

  The paperwork behind those sales was thin. The only document certifying a license fee was the telex exchange, so Stein had sold a game he did not yet own. Alexander Alexinko, director of Elorg, discovered the negotiations and disapproved of what he read. Elorg took over the Soviet side of the talks, and Alexinko tried to cancel any understanding Stein thought he had. Stein answered with a threat to create a scandal that would damage the Soviet Union's reputation abroad. That persuaded Alexinko to bargain. An agreement was drafted by the end of February 1988 and finalized by May, and it gave Stein the rights to Tetris on computers.

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• 5. Cartridges and Courtrooms

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  Henk Rogers found Tetris on public display at the 1988 Winter Consumer Electronics Show. He ran Bullet-Proof Software, a company that searched the world for games to sell in Japan.

  Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte had begun licensing the game onward for platforms the Stein contract did not cover. Mirrorsoft sold Tengen, a subsidiary of Atari Games, the non-computer rights for Japan, in exchange for worldwide rights to sell computer ports of Blasteroids. Tengen passed the Japanese arcade rights to Sega and the console rights to Rogers. Rogers also received the Japanese computer rights from Spectrum HoloByte. Bullet-Proof Software released Tetris on Japanese computers in November 1988. The version for Nintendo's Family Computer, or Famicom, followed in December 1988 and sold two million copies in Japan. Elorg knew nothing of it and collected no royalties from the game's worldwide success.

  At about this time, Nintendo built the Game Boy, an inexpensive handheld console. It interested Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi and Minoru Arakawa, president of Nintendo of America. Arakawa and his vice president, Howard Lincoln, wanted Tetris on it. The tangled rights discouraged them, so Arakawa asked Rogers to win the handheld rights. On the 15th of November 1988, Rogers faxed Stein, who replied that he was negotiating the same rights with Elorg. By then Alexinko had been replaced by Evgeni Belikov, a more adversarial director. After repeated failures to reach Stein, Rogers gave up on him and chose to deal with the Soviet government directly.

  In February 1989, Rogers flew to the Soviet Union and walked into the Elorg offices uninvited. Talks were set for the next day. To show how well the game was doing, he laid a Famicom Tetris cartridge on the table. Belikov had never seen it. As he read the Stein contract, the rights covered computers only, and he accused Rogers of illegal publication. Surprised, Rogers handed over a check for more than $40,000 to repair the breach and raised the idea of console rights. Belikov saw the advantage of siding with Rogers over Stein and Robert Maxwell's son Kevin, the other incoming negotiators. He pushed Stein to sign an updated contract that defined computers in a way that excluded consoles. He also baited Kevin into admitting that Mirrorsoft held no console rights, unaware that a Famicom version was already on sale. Rogers returned to Moscow with Arakawa and Lincoln, and after a few days Nintendo received both the handheld and console rights.

  On the 31st of March 1989, Lincoln used the new agreement to send a cease and desist fax to Hideyuki Nakajima, president of Atari Games. Tengen was already producing Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the North American counterpart of the Famicom. Believing it owned the console rights, Tengen filed US copyright applications and sued Nintendo first. Meanwhile Kevin Maxwell told his father, who pressed Elorg for ignoring earlier agreements. Robert Maxwell contacted ministers in both the Soviet and British governments, and he met the Soviet General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev answered that Robert "should no longer worry about the Japanese company". Even so, Belikov told Lincoln in conversation that he would not give way.

  After a marketing push ordered by Nakajima, Tengen released its NES version on the 17th of May 1989. It sold tens of thousands of copies within weeks. The next month, Judge Fern M. Smith of the US District Court for the Northern District of California heard the competing suits. Each company asked for an injunction to stop the other from selling the game. On the 15th of June 1989, Atari Games argued that the NES counted as a computer under the original contract. It claimed Elorg excluded consoles from that definition only to profit from Nintendo. Smith rejected the argument on the evidence. She found that Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte never received explicit authorization to sell on consoles, and on the 22nd of June 1989 she granted an injunction against Atari Games. The next day Atari Games pulled its cartridge, leaving thousands unsold in warehouses. Because some players preferred it to Nintendo's version, copies later sold for up to $300 on the secondary market. On the 13th of November 1989, Smith ended the dispute by summary judgment and gave Nintendo the console rights.

  The Game Boy version reached Japan on the 14th of June 1989. It came packed in with the console in the United States on the 31st of July 1989. Nintendo's NES version arrived the same year. Tetris was the main game Nintendo promoted for the handheld, and it became the title that sold the machine. It brought in $80 million in revenue. The NES version quickly sold three million copies and stayed on Nintendo's most popular games list for over a year. Many buyers, including people who had never played games, bought a Game Boy only to play Tetris. The bundle sold out its first run of a million units soon after release. By June 2024, the Game Boy version had sold 35 million copies, more than any other version. Writers credit Tetris and Pokémon Red and Blue (1996) for the Game Boy's long life, since it was not discontinued until 2003.

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• 6. Guardians of the Game

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  In 1991, with help from Rogers, Pajitnov and his family emigrated to Seattle. He worked there as a freelance game designer and made several follow-ups. Welltris (1990) had pieces drifting down one of four walls of a three-dimensional well. Hatris (1990) swapped the falling blocks for hats, and Faces...tris III (1991) swapped them for faces. Reviews were generally positive and sales did well. Faces...Tris III won "Best Action/Arcade Program" at the 1991 Excellence in Software Awards. None matched the original's success. Others made sequels without him, including Super Tetris (1991), Tetris 2 + BomBliss (1991), Tetris Battle Gaiden (1993), and Nintendo's Tetris 2 (1993).

  At the end of 1995, the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center's ten years of rights expired and returned to Pajitnov. Elorg had become a private company under Belikov during the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, and Pajitnov feared it would claim the rights. He asked Rogers for help. Rogers formed Blue Planet Software, and after a year of talks he set up the Tetris Company in 1996. It was an equal partnership between Elorg and Blue Planet, created "to own and administer" the rights and "to serve as the exclusive source of all Tetris licenses." Blue Planet became the "exclusive agent for the Tetris brand." That same year the company wrote quality guidelines and a "minimum specification" for licensed games. In 2005, Rogers acquired Elorg and moved the trademarks and rights to a new firm, Tetris Holding. The company also defends against copies. In the 2012 case Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc., a judge ruled that the iOS game Mino violated the Tetris copyright through its look and feel.

  Pajitnov and Rogers tried to keep the game fresh. Tetrisphere, made by H2O Entertainment and released on the 11th of August 1997, asked players to rotate a three-dimensional sphere and place pieces on its surface. It was the first puzzle game on the Nintendo 64 and gained a cult following. David Crookes of Retro Gamer called it "proof that the concept could be modernised and tweaked, while still being faithful to the original". Tetris 64 (1998), released only in Japan, supported four players and was the one game to use the console's Bio Sensor, which reads the player's pulse. Tetris Plus (1996), Tetris DX (1998), and The Next Tetris (1999) added new modes. Tetris: The Grand Master (1998) was an arcade game for experienced players.

  According to Rogers, the Tetris Company began adding new features to its guidelines to attract beginners. The hold feature and both kinds of drop came with The New Tetris in 1999. The easy spin and the super rotation system arrived with Tetris Worlds in 2001. Critics panned easy spin, which lets players delay a piece's fall by rotating it again and again. Pajitnov was reluctant, but the mechanic entered the guidelines anyway. The super rotation system, which defines how pieces turn, has been used by most games since. The scoring system came with Tetris DS in 2006. Pajitnov regards the annual specifications, kept since 1996, as a baseline and not "set in stone."

  Tetris reached mobile devices in 2001 through G-Mode. In 2002, Rogers formed Blue Lava Wireless to build mobile versions. JAMDAT bought it in April 2005, which gave JAMDAT a 15-year mobile license. By December 2005, when Electronic Arts began acquiring JAMDAT, the game was selling steadily on American carrier phones. The purchase closed in February 2006 and passed the mobile license to EA. EA Mobile's version launched with the iTunes store on the iPod 5G on the 11th of September 2006, and reached the Apple App Store on the 10th of July 2008. By January 2010, EA's mobile releases had passed 100 million paid downloads, which made Tetris the most popular mobile game of its time.

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• 7. Second Wind

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  In January 2014, Maya Rogers, the daughter of Henk Rogers, became CEO of Blue Planet Software after eight years working in the business. She started by planning events for Tetris's 30th anniversary. In an interview with VentureBeat in June 2014, she said she wanted to expand the brand through merchandise and keep the game fresh.

  Sega released Puyo Puyo Tetris, a crossover with the Puyo Puyo puzzle series, in Japan on the 6th of February 2014. It sold over 60,000 copies in a week, and its Nintendo 3DS port was the second-best-selling game of that week, according to 4Gamer.net. Ubisoft's Tetris Ultimate came to the 3DS in November 2014 and to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in December 2014. Reviews were mixed, though its online multiplayer drew mostly favorable notice.

  PCMag credited the late-2010s revival to the 2017 release of Puyo Puyo Tetris in the Western world. It earned good reviews there and sold 1.4 million copies worldwide by November 2020. Then came Tetris Effect, made by Monstars and Resonair and published by Enhance Games. It reached the PlayStation 4 on the 9th of November 2018 and Windows on the 23rd of July 2019. It drew widespread praise for its visuals and its emotional effect. Tetris 99, a battle royale version, appeared on the 13th of February 2019 for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, announced as a surprise during a Nintendo Direct. Reviews were positive. Nintendo's president, Shuntaro Furukawa, said 2.8 million subscribers played it within a few months.

  In January 2020, EA announced that its mobile license would end on the 21st of April 2020, and that the game would stop working then. Developer N3twork released authorized mobile versions for iOS and Android on the 23rd of January 2020. They gathered 30 million downloads before the social casino company PlayStudios bought the rights in November 2021. On the 28th of March 2023, PlayStudios added a playAwards loyalty program to the apps, letting players earn points that can be redeemed for real-world rewards. Tetris Forever, a collection of Tetris games with an interactive documentary by Digital Eclipse, appeared on the 12th of November 2024. Reviewers praised how it recounts the game's history.

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• 8. Why It Lasts

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  In April 2014, Henk Rogers told VentureBeat that Tetris had totaled 425 million paid mobile downloads and 70 million physical copies. The Tetris Company puts the series total at 520 million sales, second among video game series, with most from paid mobile downloads. Some publications call it the best-selling game of all. The BBC disputes that, because the versions differ so much, mobile ones among them.

  Praise began early. Macworld inducted the game into its 1988 Game Hall of Fame as best strategy game, citing "the addictive quality" and saying its "simplicity is bewitching". Compute! gave it the 1989 Choice Award for Arcade Game, calling it "by far, the most addictive game ever". At the 2007 Game Developers Choice Awards, Pajitnov won the First Penguin Award, later renamed the Pioneer Award, for pioneering casual gaming. That same year Henry Lowood of Stanford announced a game canon of ten titles to consider for preservation by the Library of Congress, and Tetris was on it. In November 2012, the Museum of Modern Art acquired it along with thirteen other video games. In 2015, The Strong National Museum of Play inducted it into the inaugural class of the World Video Game Hall of Fame.

  Puzzle games owe it a good deal. Wired considered the game unusual for appealing to players of any gender and age, and 1Up.com credits it with creating a market for puzzle games with universal appeal. Dr. Mario (1990), Columns (1990), Puyo Puyo (1991), Puzzle Bobble (1994), and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (1996) all show its influence.

  A 29-story building, the Cira Center, hosted a game of Tetris on its side in April 2014, earning a Guinness record for the largest architectural video game display. The game turns up in The Simpsons, The Big Bang Theory, Family Guy, Futurama, Office Space, Muppet Babies, and Monty Python.

  Sound became part of its identity too. The original Elektronika 60 version had no music. Spectrum HoloByte's American version used Russian pieces, including Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "Trepak" from The Nutcracker and Reinhold Glière's "Russian Sailor Dance" from The Red Poppy. Elsewhere the approach differed: Mirrorsoft's Commodore 64 versions used an atmospheric soundtrack, and Sega's arcade version used a synthesized, pop-influenced one. Nintendo's NES version used Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" as Music A. The Game Boy version opened with "Korobeiniki," a Russian folk tune from the 1860s, then offered an original piece by Hirokazu Tanaka and the Menuet from Johann Sebastian Bach's French Suite no. 3. "Korobeiniki" became the game's signature theme and appears in most major versions, as the Tetris Company guidelines require. A 1992 Eurodance cover by Doctor Spin reached number six on the UK singles chart. The "Tetris effect" names the habit of seeing patterns in dreams and mental images after a repetitive activity. Jeffrey Goldsmith coined it in a 1994 Wired article, where he compared the game to an "electronic drug".

  The story behind the game has been retold often. David Sheff covered it in Game Over (1994), and later accounts include Steven L. Kent's The Ultimate History of Video Games (2001), Tristan Donovan's Replay (2010), Dan Ackerman's The Tetris Effect (2016), and Box Brown's graphic novel Tetris: The Games People Play (2016). The independent documentary Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters followed in 2010. A film dramatization starring Taron Egerton as Rogers premiered on Apple TV+ on the 31st of March 2023. Samba TV reported a viewership of 88,000. Rogers published his own memoir, The Perfect Game, on the 1st of April 2025.

  Competition has grown around the NES version. Jonas Neubauer won the inaugural Classic Tetris World Championship in 2010, and Ecstasy of Order, which followed him, helped popularize competitive play. Competitors, typically adolescents, have used the event to show off new techniques. "Hypertapping" and "rolling" let players push scores past level 29, once thought impossible to survive because of its speed. In a 40-minute livestream in January 2024, Willis Gibson "beat" the game by playing NES Tetris until it crashed, which drew wide media attention.

  Scientists have studied the game as well. Vladimir Pokhilko, a Soviet clinical psychologist at the Moscow Medical Center, was the first to use it in clinical experiments, around 1985. He first noticed that copies shared with colleagues disrupted medical research because everyone kept playing. He destroyed those copies. When new copies reached his facility, he used the game in psychological tests of patients. By 2014, cognitive scientists John K. Lindstedt and Wayne D. Gray of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute had traced 133 scholarly papers across many fields that used Tetris. Starting with Richard J. Haier in 1992, psychologists have used it in brain imaging studies. Its use as imagery treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder remains experimental, though several reviews found some evidence that it reduces intrusive memories, especially alongside other treatments.

  Mathematicians have probed it too. John Brzustowski argued in a 1992 master's thesis at the University of Waterloo that a traditional game cannot go on forever. Heidi Burgiel of the University of Minnesota affirmed this in 1997, blamed the Z-shaped tetrominoes, and calculated a hard cap of seventy thousand pieces. In 2003, a trio of MIT students proved that finding the best strategy is NP-complete, meaning no algorithm is known to solve it in reasonable time. That holds even for a player who knows the full sequence of incoming pieces in advance.

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