Tetris’ creator was raised in relative poverty
The creator of Tetris was once a boy in Soviet Moscow who could barely afford anything from the toy store. Born in 1955, Alexey Pajitnov was the son of two writers, and when his parents divorced, he spent his teen years with his mother in a one-bedroom, state-owned flat.
Pajitnov and his mother lived, like the majority of Soviet Russians, under constant surveillance and scrutiny, but the pair would occasionally bend the rules of this strict society. Through her work, his mother would secure tickets to the Moscow International Film Festival, where Pajitnov got a rare glimpse at global cinema and fell in love with James Bond movies.
Life in the Soviet Union
Pajitnov’s early life was often monotonous, with very limited access to the latest media or technology. In the 60s and 70s, he was living through the so-called ‘Era of Stagnation’ in the Soviet Union. Consumer goods were often bland and outdated.
“The life of the Soviet Union was very stable,” Pajitnov has said. “We didn’t have any change for decades. The same street, the same stores, the same everything, the same price, the same leaders in the government.” In contrast, foreign cinema offered him a look into the fast-changing Western world.
A broken ankle took him out of school for months
At the age of 15, Pajitnov was taking every opportunity he could to slip into foreign cinema screenings, and school was not a particular priority. One snowy day, as he was playing truant from school, he slipped and fell while running to catch a trolley bus.
He broke his ankle and twisted his knee in this accident. However, as medical resources were very limited, this straightforward injury meant that he ended up in a cast, with a frustrating three-month stretch of bed rest ahead of him.
Maths became his new obsession
While waiting to recover from his injuries, Pajitnov became extremely bored. A friend brought him a set of maths puzzle books to keep him entertained while he recuperated. Pajitnov discovered that he was not only talented at mathematics – he found it greatly entertaining.
Problem-solving and logic puzzles took over the long hours, and in particular, Pajitnov became hooked on a tile puzzle game called pentominoes. Although he and his friends couldn’t afford much from local toy stores, a set of three pentominoes cost only one rouble.
Pentominoes were an early inspiration for Tetris
The simple game of pentominoes later inspired Pajitnov to create Tetris. In particular, he noticed with amusement how difficult it was to pack away the puzzle pieces once the game was over. The teenage Pajitnov also started to wonder why games are so entertaining.
He was curious to learn more about humanity’s competitive and playful nature. However, while Pajitnov and his friends experimented with board and puzzle games in Moscow, the idea of a computer-based video game like Tetris was still completely beyond anyone’s imagination.
Maths and the Space Race
Pajitnov grew up during the Space Race, and by the time he was ready to pursue higher education, the Soviet Union was attempting to drive as many young people towards science and technology degrees as possible. The obvious choice for Pajitnov was mathematics.
However, at the age of 17, he came face-to-face with an early computer for the first time and was enchanted. He first studied at the Moscow Mathematical School no. 91, followed by a job at the prestigious Moscow Aviation Institute, where he learned how to program.
Early programming
The talented young programmer was soon offered an internship and then a job at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre, which was part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. His focus was on speech recognition in computers, and he was required to create many small programs to test the centre’s new equipment.
Pajitnov spent nine full years working in this programming job before he completed Tetris. He started out working on the BESM-6, a Soviet-made, transistor-based computer. He was later moved to the Electronika 60, which seemed incredibly smooth and modern by comparison.
Too addictive for the workplace
In the early 80s, Pajitnov started using his program-writing assignments as an excuse to develop little games. Thinking back to pentominoes of his childhood, he devised Tetris in June 1984. Since the Electronika 60 lacked complex graphics, he instead used letters to form the game’s shapes.
In just three weeks, Pajitnov had made an incredibly addictive game. When he introduced it to his colleagues and friends, they couldn’t stop playing it either. The game was eventually banned from the Moscow Medical Institute for wasting company time.
One sixteen-year-old prodigy helped to finalise Tetris
Pajitnov’s prototypes of Tetris didn’t have any sound, score-keeping or even separate levels. To finish the game and port it to the IBM PC, he recruited 16-year-old Vadim Gerasimov. This teenager was something of a prodigy whom Pajitnov met through a friend.
Gerasimov adapted the game for the IBM system within the space of weeks and added a colour system and scoreboard. He used the software system Turbo Pascal to achieve this. Gerasimov later studied at Moscow State University and MIT, and he is currently an engineer for Google.
Pajitnov’s dilemma
Once Pajitnov had finalised his game, he knew that he would have to sign it away to his employers under the laws of the Soviet Union. He would never earn royalties for his own creation. Rebelling against the system could have ended in disaster.
“As soon as I realized that this is a good game and I have a kind of obligation to try to publish it, I realized that if I seek money, I will lose for sure,” Pajitnov has said. “Because in the Soviet Union, no such stuff as intellectual property existed at that time. Because the game was developed on state-owned hardware and so on, it will be the end of it.”
Foreign companies were a non-starter
If Pajitnov had ever pursued foreign investors with his new game, rather than signing it away to his employers, he would have risked serious legal action. “I would have been in prison for sure had I gone directly to Nintendo,' he reflected in 1996.
“I would have had to be a dissident and possibly be cheated for everything anyway,” he elaborated. So it wasn't worth it.” Instead, he handed Tetris over to ELORG, the Soviet company with a monopoly on the country’s hardware and software.
An award-winning game
Pajitnov wasn’t disheartened by his lack of power over his creation. “I realized that it’s not my last game,” he later reflected. “I was pretty sure that I could compensate myself in future using the publicity of Tetris. And that was a strategically very right decision.”
He started to think about how to ensure his name, if not his wallet, was protected in the global market. He promptly entered the newly-made Tetris into a computer game contest, in order to attach his name to the brand and notify other developers of his copyright. He won second prize in the contest.
"Consider yourself warned"
Pajitnov submitted the game to his boss, Victor Brjabrin, who sent it on to the Hungarian company Novotrade. As Tetris started reaching the European market, businessman Robert Stein struck a 1988 deal with ELORG and sold the rights of the game to companies in the USA and Europe. At first, it was doubtful whether Western audiences would accept a Soviet game.
But hundreds of thousands of Tetris units sold within the first year of publication. One reviewer described it as "one of the most addictive computer games this side of the Berlin Wall... [it] is not the game to start if you have work to do or an appointment to keep. Consider yourself warned."
The music choices ended up embarrassing Pajitnov
Pajitnov had relinquished creative control of the game to ELORG and foreign companies, and he cringed to see their stylistic and musical additions. The US producer, Spectrum HoloByte, paired Tetris with red packaging, Cyrillic text and a soundtrack of Russian folk music.
When Nintendo later published the game, they added Tchaikovsky’s famous Nutcracker theme. “It was very embarrassing for me: when kids of the world hear these pieces of music, they start screaming: 'Tetris! Tetris!',” Pajitnov has recalled. “That's not very good for Russian culture.”
Tetris changed how people felt about computers
It was only through interviews with foreign journalists that Pajitnov realised how widespread his game had become. He was proud of his creation, describing it as "an electronic ambassador of benevolence". However, the barriers that Tetris smashed were more than interpersonal.
“Tetris came along early and had a very important role in breaking down ordinary people's inhibitions in front of computers, which were scary objects to non-professionals used to pen and paper,” Pajitnov later commented. “But the fact that something so simple and beautiful could appear on screen destroyed that barrier.”
Becoming a games designer was a reward in itself
Although Pajitnov was unable to earn anything from his game, he was invited to various licensing meetings by ELORG, and he was promoted as the brains behind the world-famous game. This change was very emotionally rewarding for the young man.
“Instead of being a programmer and mathematician as I was supposed to be, I became a game designer,” he has reflected. "It’s a totally different kind of attitude and approach to life. I was supposed to make a tool, to make a tool, to make a tool, to make a tool, to make money, to make a tool, to go to the office, and so on. And now I was able to deliver pleasure and happiness directly from the screen.”
Tetris’ other pioneer was a ‘devil-may-care cavalier’
Born and raised in Amsterdam, Henk Rogers is just one year older than Pajitnov. He immigrated with his family to the United States at the age of 11, and he graduated first in his class at high school. He then studied Computer Science at the University of Hawaii.
Rogers soon founded his own company: Bullet-Proof Software. He was passionate about video games and was willing to go to extreme lengths to discover new works. “Henk is this sort of incredibly appealing, devil-may-care cavalier,” described Taron Egerton, the actor who later portrayed Rogers in a movie.
Rogers expanded the game's reach further
In the 80s, Rogers played the Spectrum HoloByte version of Tetris at a Las Vegas roadshow and became one of the game’s many superfans. “I was hooked instantly, which was unusual,” he later recalled. “I licensed every version on every system I could through Spectrum HoloByte.”
He realised that Tetris had huge untapped potential and deserved an even broader platform, especially in the USA and Japan. Rogers had spent years in Japan building his industry contacts, and his company eventually released Tetris for Nintendo Famicom and PCs in the country.
Changing the history of the Game Boy
When Nintendo was planning the release of their new Game Boy system, Rogers met with executives and insisted that it should be bundled with the original Tetris game, instead of a Mario offering as intended. “Rogers introduced the chairman of Nintendo of America and Nintendo’s founder Mr. Arakawa to Tetris and highly recommended for them to pair this game for Game Boy,” Pajitnov later relayed.
“They asked, ‘Why not Mario?’,” he recalled. “Henk’s response to that was if they want kids to play Game Boy, it should be Mario. But if they want everyone to play Game Boy, it should be Tetris. And the right decision has been made.” Henk was so certain of his success that he invested in 200,000 game cartridges and listed his in-laws’ home as collateral.
The KGB interpreter
The next step was for Rogers to secure the rights to Tetris on hand-held devices. In order to do this, he decided to travel directly to Russia, to strike a deal with ELORG. Rogers travelled into the secretive nation on a tourist visa, with no permission to meet ELORG – an extremely bold and unusual move.
He spoke no Russian and didn’t even bring a warm coat. But he found himself an interpreter in his hotel lobby, one of the few people who would engage with him. “They were all KGB, but she was beautiful and very perky, when everybody else was doom and gloom,” he later recalled. “She took me to Elorg, but she wouldn't take me in because I hadn't been officially invited.”
Breaking a cardinal rule
“I was breaking a cardinal rule – trying to do business on a tourist visa – but I told her I hadn't come all this way for nothing,” Rogers elaborated. He found his way into the right offices and began telling ELORG executives about how valuable he could make Tetris in the global market.
He was in competition with two other Western bidders: Robert Stein and Kevin Maxwell. To get the edge on them, he realised that he needed to befriend Pajitnov, the quiet figure behind the game. Pajitnov had some sway with ELORG and could be the golden ticket to the handheld Tetris rights.
Befriending Pajitnov
Rogers was unnerved by the cold and suspicious reception he received on the streets of Russia. “It felt like everybody was watching me,” he has recalled. “It was creepy.” However, when he made contact with Pajitnov, he was pleasantly surprised. Pajitnov was charmed by Roger’s straightforward language and invited him round to his house.
Pajitnov and Rogers became firm friends, though they were forced to keep their conversations secret to avoid KGB spies. “He was my first colleague I ever met, because the profession of game designer didn’t exist in my country,” Pajitnov said.
Victory was in their hands
Thanks to Pajitnov’s support, Rogers was back in the running to win the handheld game rights. ELORG put him through a gruelling two-hour interview with ten people, including KGB spies. The company even sent KGB spies to his Tokyo offices, to the horror of his colleagues.
Yet Rogers cleared ELORG’s tests, and he was granted the rights. His rival Kevin Maxwell – son of the media tycoon Robert Maxwell and brother of Ghislaine Maxwell - was reportedly furious. In retaliation, Robert Maxwell started pressurizing Soviet leader Gorbachev himself to cancel the Tetris deal in favour of Kevin, but to no avail.
Game Boy Tetris was a huge success
The ported version of Tetris for Game Boy came out in 1989, to unprecedented critical and commercial success. It became Game Boy’s second-best selling game of all time, beaten only by Pokemon Red / Green / Blue / Yellow in 1996. The puzzle game sold an astonishing 35 million units.
As Rogers predicted, Tetris made Game Boy into a console for all ages. Pajitnov and Rogers remained close friends and rejoiced in their shared successes. “We are testament that people from both sides of that Iron Curtain can be friends and that kinship is stronger than ideology,” Rogers later said.
Pajitnov continued suffering in Russia
A long-time resident of Moscow, Pajitnov was very familiar with the hardships of life under the Soviet Union. He has recalled queuing for meat and rarer groceries. “I spent a good half an hour in the line for meat or for some kind of exotic stuff like sweets or good fruits or whatever,” he has said.
Conditions worsened over time, and by the late 80s, the situation was dire. “There was a deficit from time to time and it became worse and worse with the years,” he has described. “To the end of the 80s, it became really nasty.”
Pajitnov started a new life in the USA
In 1991, the leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, and a few months later, the Soviet Union collapsed. Amid hyperinflation and widespread poverty, huge numbers of Russian scientists and engineers chose to leave Russia. Pajitnov was one of them.
The United States was their top destination. 20,000 Russian scientists had relocated to the USA by 2003, while Russian software engineers were behind 30% of Microsoft products by 2002. Pajitnov left behind his homeland and eventually settled in Clyde Hill, Washington.
Pajitnov’s friend and colleague relocated with him
Among Pajitnov’s colleagues in Moscow was Vladimir Pokhilko, a scientist one year his junior. Pokhilko was a psychologist and an expert in human-computer interactions. He carried out psychological experiments to work out why Tetris was so addictive to players of all ages.
His research heavily influenced the game’s final development and marketing, and Forbes Magazine even credited him as a “co-inventor” of Tetris. The pair later created a company named AnimaTek together. When Pajitnov relocated to the USA in 1991, Pokhilko went with him and set up an office in California.
A tragic end for Pokhilko
When AnimaTek ran into financial difficulties in the 90s, Pokhilko reportedly bore the brunt of the stress. In September 1998, he, his wife Yelena Fedotova and his preteen son Peter were all tragically found dead in their home in Palo Alto.
Yelena and Peter had been killed with two different hammers, while Pokhilko had been stabbed in the neck. Police reportedly found a suicide note and determined that Pokhilko had taken the lives of his family and himself due to stress.
A mysterious crime
Sandra Brown, a crime scene investigator with the Palo Alto Police, would later reflect: “I always felt that we didn't get a clear answer to this crime from day one. I did not think that Vladimir Pokhilko killed his family."
“I remember walking into that room when I slid past the sliding doors, which were already opened. And I looked at Vladimir laying on the ground,. I looked at the knife in his hand and I said to myself, 'There's no way this man cut his own throat'” Brown continued.
The Tetris Murders
Many of Pokhilko’s friends and family found the accompanying note to be suspicious and could not believe Pokhilko would commit such a violent act. The note was written in broken English and referred to “The Davil”. His friend Grigoriy Shapirshteyn found this especially strange, as Pokhilko was not a religious man.
These unusual circumstances, combined with the strange nature of Pokhilko’s supposedly self-inflicted wounds, drew the FBI to launch an investigation. Some have speculated that organised criminals may have been involved in his death – a theory covered by the 2022 documentary The Tetris Murders.
Tetris went to space
In 1993, Tetris became the first ever video game played in space. Aleksandr Serebrov, a Russian cosmonaut, took a Game Boy to the MIR Space Station, along with his personal copy of Tetris. He enjoyed this game from his home nation during his free time on the mission.
"Like all cosmonauts, I love sport,” he later wrote, in a note to go with the game as he sold it at a 2011 auction. “My particular favorites are football and swimming. During flight, in rare minutes of leisure, I enjoyed playing Game Boy.”
The creation of the Tetris Company
Pajitnov signed away the licence to the Tetris game to ELORG in 1985. ELORG ended up weathering the fall of the Soviet Union and became a private company. However, the Tetris license lasted only ten years, expiring in 1996 while Pajitnov was living in the USA.
Pajitnov and Rogers, who had remained friends throughout the years, promptly formed The Tetris Company. They created a partnership with ELORG, but then bought ELORG’s remaining rights in 2005 and became the sole powers behind the beloved brand they had so painstakingly won.
Pajitnov and Rogers remain fiercely protective of the brand
The Tetris Company now licenses the Tetris trademark and provides any would-be licensees with an exacting list of expectations. Rogers has said that he tells all licensees that they must “beat all the other versions of Tetris that have come out so far.”
Pajitnov has commented that he is still waiting for a licensee to discover the next great thing in Tetris. “I do expect to have something much deeper in [terms of a] two-player version,” he has said. “There are lots of them, lots of variations, but I kind of have the feeling that we are not there yet.”
The pair chased down imitators
From the earliest days of the Tetris Company, Pajitnov started winning back his hard-earned game profits. This task involved tracking down various imitators and copies and ensuring they were shut down. “If it’s obviously stealing, we pursue the people and we are very successful,” Pajitnov has established.
In the 1990s, they started sending cease-and-desist notices to the creators of various Tetris clones. A copy named Tris was removed from the Apple App Store in 2008. Other imitations that have been removed include Blockles, Mino, Tetrada and Playtris.
Pajitnov finally earned a fortune
Thanks to his patience and determination, Pajitnov was finally able to reap the rewards of his creation over the past few decades. Although he has always kept his financial successes private, he has reportedly amassed a fortune of around $20 million thanks to Tetris.
His personal favourite version of the game is Tetris 99, which came out in 2019 and has amassed 2 million players worldwide. Awarded nine different gaming awards, Tetris 99 brings a Battle Royale twist to the original game, with 99 players competing against each other.
Tetris went to Burning Man
Outside of video games, Henk Rogers is a passionate fan of Burning Man, a week-long arts event held in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Thanks to Rogers, Tetris-inspired installations have featured at the event in the past. He has even proposed engineering solutions to some of the festival’s environmental effects.
However, Rogers failed to anticipate that Pajitnov might not be such a fan. When Rogers took Pajitnov to Burning Man for the first time, the more reticent Pajitnov has said that he had a miserable experience as his vehicle was parked too close to the speakers.
Rogers’ trip to Moscow was made into a movie
The adventures of Rogers and Pajitnov were finally made into a film in 2023, with Taron Egerton cast as Rogers and the Mocow-born actor Nikita Yefremov cast as Pajitnov. The real-life creators of Tetris were consulted during the making of this film.
Rogers is the film’s main character, and his exploits in Russia were recreated for filming in Glasgow and Aberdeen. The film was well received, with one reviewer commenting: "While it's nowhere near as addictive or fast-paced as the game, Tetris offers a fun, fizzy account of the story behind an 8-bit classic.”
Henk Rogers cried when he saw the film
When Henk Rogers saw the movie for the first time, he had a very emotional reaction. "For me, I remember I cried several times during the movie, and I don't cry easily, but I was moved, you know?" he said.
He has acknowledged that the film glamorized and heightened elements of his tale. “I was blown away by the movie,” he added. “It's a movie! It's not a documentary, it's a movie. It's a story, and you want to call it a thriller on steroids, whatever you want to call it, it's a movie. It's a real movie."
Pajitnov didn’t begrudge Rogers
The film saw Henk Rogers as the action hero, whereas Pajitnov was portrayed as a more minor character. But Pajitnov has expressed his hearty approval of the film, and he stated that he wasn’t offended that it focused less on his role in Tetris’ creation.
“[Rogers] was the main character in this period of the life of the game,” he reflected. “I did my business before that and I participated later on. … [Writer Noah Pink] took the most interesting moment of the life of the game, [and] Henk was the real hero at that point.”
A lasting friendship
Rogers and Pajitnov, now aged 69 and 68 respectively, remain the best of friends to this day. They have now known each other for nearly four decades. “In real life, even today, if we're in the same city every other day, we are having a bottle of wine,” Rogers has noted.
“This is our tradition,” he added. “And I lived in Seattle [where Pajitnov lives] for a year, so that was a lot of wine.” The pair have said they have never grown tired of promoting Tetris. “Would you ever get bored with the goose that lays the golden eggs?” Rogers has commented on the game. “Are you kidding me?”