THE HISTORY OF TETRIS:

THE SOVIET MIND GAME

Tetris may be a simple, innocent little puzzle game, but its history reads like a bizarre Cold War thriller – a story of secret deals and corporate intrigue spanning both sides of the Iron Curtain. 

The man who made Tetris 

It was in the summer of 1984 that Alexey Pajitnov, a young software engineer at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, had a brainwave. While dreaming up puzzle games to test the capabilities of the Soviet Electronika 60 computer, he remembered a childhood pastime involving pentominoes. 

These were differently shaped blocks, made up of five squares each, which had to be correctly fitted inside a box. Pajitnov decided to create a computer game variation, simplifying it by reducing the number of squares in each block to four, and ramping up the excitement by having the shapes drop down the screen one at a time. 

Pajitnov called the game Tetris, combining ‘tetra’ (meaning four) and his favourite sport, tennis.

Crossing the Iron Curtain 

The original Electronika 60 version of Tetris was so rudimentary that it used keyboard characters in place of actual blocks. One of Pajitnov’s colleagues helpfully created an IBM version, which not only utilised real graphics but also made the game accessible to an international audience. Pretty soon it was being copied and played throughout the Academy and beyond.