In an age where games are forgotten as fast as then can be released, this month Tetris celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary. This simple game’s complicated tale is the history of the industry in microcosm.
Tetris was developed by Russian Alexey Pajitnov, and others, in the government controlled Soviet Academy of Sciences as a part of a larger suite of games and productive software for MS DOS. Not meeting with immediate success in the business-unfriendly climate of the USSR, the game, ported onto IBM compatible PCs, spread across Eastern-Bloc computer enthusiasts in a mid-eighties version of viral fashion: floppy disks and handed to friends, then friends of friends.
In 1988, non-fiction CD-ROM software developer Robert Stein noticed Tetris playing on a personal computer in Hungary1. Seeing potential, Stein sought to license the game for Western PCs, and published the game for PC from Spectrum HoloByte. Later that same year, game designer Henk Rogers saw the same promise that Tetris held during that year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. With the blessings of Nintendo, he touched off a landmark gaming intellectual property battle.
Due to the Soviet Union’s dim view of IP rights and the fact that Pajitnov developed the game at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the rights to Tetris were deemed never to have been officially sold. Instead, full power belonged to the Soviet Ministry of Software and Hardware Export (Electronorgtechnica or ELORG for short). This ruling made the license now held by Atari spin-off Tengen invalid and a well-timed trip to Moscow by Rogers allowed Nintendo to outmaneuver their competitors and secure the license from ELORG directly. The gaming industry learned from this the importance of having a sound legal footing in the new global gaming community.
What did Henk Rogers see in Tetris? As we now know, a killer pack-in title for Nintendo’s upcoming Game Boy portable console. In negotiations with Nintendo of America head Minoru Arakawa, who was initially in favor of Super Mario Land as the pack-in, Rogers was credited as suggesting Tetris instead. Noting that while Super Mario Land would bring in the current gaming market, Tetris’ simple and addictive gameplay could attract everyone. (Sound familiar?) Thirty-five million units sold later, the Game Boy and Tetris, a game by then six years old and enjoyed by the cloistered world of PC gaming, gave birth to the casual gaming market. Casual gaming became a key plank in Nintendo’s platform, and the revenue generated by it funded both new software and hardware, keeping the portable industry going to this date.
Alexey Pajitnov who saw an industry grow up and around his creation, didn’t see any money off of it until the Soviet Union’s collapse. Intellectual property and licensing arrangements not only seen now as part of the cost of doing business, but to this day are a point of friction between all segments of the gaming industry from hardware development to user-created game mods. Casual gaming brought millions of people and billions of dollars into the industry, but the lure of that ‘easier’ money that simple games bring threatens the level of quality that is key to retaining loyalty. Tetris wasn’t the first video game, but its story is gaming’s story.
1 (2009, July) Interview with Alexey Pajitnov. Game Informer, p. 28
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