From Russia With Love
I watched this BBC Tetris documentary this morning.. It’s a must-see for Tetris nerds, even though it’s an hour long and starts kind of slow. What makes it really gripping is the home video Henk Rogers shot while travelling to Moscow to negotiate for console rights on behalf of Nintendo. As usual in matters such as these, Alexey Pajitnov, the developer of Tetris, didn’t get any royalities from the original licensing agreements and eventually went to go work for Microsoft, where he continued to design puzzle games. Henk Rogers and Alexey Pajitnov remained friends, and Henk eventually started the Tetris Company, which holds the Tetris trademark, and Blue Planet Software to manages the licensing rights for Tetris. Since the BBC documentary is a bit dated, I searched around and found this story by Vadim Gerasimov, the 16-year old high school student who worked with Pajitnov and Dmitry Pavlovsky at the Moscow Academy of Sciences Computer Center and tells a slightly different version of the story. Vadim went on to study at MIT Media Lab and now works in Australia. There’s a lot more interesting Tetris stuff at the tetrisconcept wiki, like a description of the Tetris Guidelines.
Filed under: tronix, video, video games · 4 Comments
wow, i didn’t know any of this stuff about Tetris. i still remember being completely obsessed for 5 hrs straight the first time i played.
I still remember the Tengen release of Tetris for the NES. It was way better than Nintendo’s later version which is what I bought.
The Tetris story so twisted… Vladimir Pokhilko, a friend who collaborated with Pajitnov on Tetris and moved to the US with Pajitnov in 1991, murdered his family and then killed himself in 1998.