Seven shapes, endless clears: Pajitnov’s Soviet puzzle conquered screens
Tetris drops four-block tetrominoes into a well; complete a horizontal line and it vanishes. Alexey Pajitnov built it in his spare time at a Moscow computing center. Across versions it has sold about 520 million copies—the best-selling video game ever as of late 2024.
Gameplay stays recognisable: pieces fall one by one; players shift and rotate until they lock. Filling a row clears it, awards points, and stops the stack from topping out. Speed rises as lines disappear. Common extras include a next-piece queue, soft and hard drops, and a hold slot. Clearing four lines at once with an I-piece is a “Tetris,” usually the richest single clear; advanced play adds T-spins, perfect clears, and combos. Roughly 220 versions span at least seventy platforms.
Pajitnov, a speech and AI researcher at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center, adapted pentomino puzzles down to seven tetrominoes—naming the game from “tetra” plus tennis—on an Elektronika 60, then ported to IBM PC with Dmitry Pavlovsky and teenager Vadim Gerasimov. Sources place first work around June 1984 or spring 1985. Free floppy copies swept Moscow. Robert Stein of Andromeda saw it in Hungary and sublicensed to Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte, who shipped commercially in January 1988. Henk Rogers later secured Nintendo rights; the 1989 Game Boy edition sold thirty-five million by mid-2024 and helped define handheld play.
Soviet copyright quirks left export control with Elorg; Pajitnov parked rights at the Computing Center for ten years and could not profit at first. Those rights reverted to him at the end of 1995; The Tetris Company then set licensing standards. Inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s inaugural 2015 class, Tetris shaped casual puzzle design, academic studies, and the Classic Tetris World Championship scene built around the NES version.
Source: Tetris
