The Soviet government, which held all rights to Pajitnov's work, resisted.Īt one time, a Hungarian software company thought it had secured the rights from Pajitnov to sell the game in the West. Those outside the Soviet Union were eager to get their hands on the game to sell it. What followed were years of legal and sometimes shadowy maneuvering.

It went everywhere.'Įventually, the game was saved onto floppy discs and leaked into other countries. 'On PC, it starts its own life,' Pajitnov says. The game lingered for months inside the cavernous rooms at the center until Pajitnov, pushed by many of his co-workers to make it more accessible, assigned someone to import the game to the much more popular IBM PC. Basically, all this was just an excuse for having fun. Nobody ever thought about creating a computer game. 'The Computer Centre was a pretty serious kind of institute,' says Pajinov, speaking from his home just outside of Seattle. Unfortunately for the fledgling worldwide gaming population, the academy's purpose was not to build computer games. Still, with blocks of flashing lights serving as the tetrominos, it was an instant hit with Pajitnov's colleagues. The game was built on, and initially played only on, an early Soviet computer, an Elektronika 60, which had no graphic capabilities. The game featured tetrominos - four-block playing pieces (tetra being a prefix for 'four') that come in seven different shapes, from straight lines to squares - falling into a playing field.

Pajitnov, born in Moscow, was helping to develop early speech-recognition software at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre at the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1984 when he began building a computer game in his spare time.

Game boy tetris screen shots