I found all those matryoshka dolls and churches a bit tacky, but they helped sales. They chose Korobeiniki, a 19th-century Russian folk song, for the music ; and Nintendo later included Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker theme. It was very embarrassing for me: when kids of the world hear these pieces of music, they start screaming: "Tetris! I didn't make much money at first, but I was happy, because my main priority was to see people enjoying my game. 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.
But the fact that something so simple and beautiful could appear on screen destroyed that barrier. My job in the 80s was acquiring games for the Japanese market. I licensed every version on every system I could through Spectrum HoloByte. But it turned out their parent company, Mirrorsoft [owned by Robert Maxwell], had already given some of the Japanese rights I thought I owned to Atari.
It was a total mess, so when it came to securing the Game Boy rights, I went straight to Moscow to speak to Elorg , the bureau handling the export of software. I didn't know anyone in the capital, or where the ministry was. The Muscovites were completely unfriendly: nobody spoke English, and they weren't allowed to talk to me anyway. I'd planned to get a fur coat when I arrived, but I found it impossible to buy anything, so I was freezing my ass off.
I play the board game Go, so I tried to find a local Go association, thinking I could make a friend. I ended up playing the third strongest player in the Soviet Union — and I beat him. But he spoke no English.
Finally, I hired an interpreter from a booth in the lobby of my hotel. They were all KGB, but she was beautiful and very perky, when everybody else was doom and gloom. She took me to Elorg, but she wouldn't take me in because I hadn't been officially invited. 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.
And he was certain Tetris was a perfect fit for Nintendo's upcoming Game Boy system. To get the rights, he had to fly to Moscow, where using a tourist visa he managed to get a meeting with Elektronorgtechnica Elorg , the state-owned bureau in charge of importing and exporting software.
Read More 10 best-selling video games so far of So when I knocked on the door, it was a big surprise to them. He said he eventually got the meeting, which consisted of nine people, including Pajitnov and some "KGB types," who grilled him for two hours before agreeing.
Today, Tetris and the Game Boy are inseparable in people's minds, but Nintendo originally planned to bundle a Mario game with the system, since it owned the IP. Rogers strenuously argued with Minoru Arakawa, founder and then-president of Nintendo of America, to include Tetris. Pajitnov says he wasn't just testing the capabilities of computers with Tetris, but also was trying to show people that they had uses beyond business.
Read More New consoles don't spark retail run on game sales. It was important for people to feel better about the computer. That was very important role for Tetris at that time. Rogers loved the game from the first time he played it, but noted the beginning, tutorial levels were slow—and could bore some players. To add excitement, he suggested to Pajitnov that bonuses be given for completing two and three lines at a time, something that became a beloved part of the game.
Tetris has been included in more than 30 scientific studies over the years. A study found that playing the game helped the brain operate more efficiently. The tale is rife with handshake deals, game industry rivalries, and tense negotiations between Western executives and Soviet officials during the last decade of the Cold War , when relations between the USSR and countries in the West were anything but friendly.
It all began with a puzzle-loving software engineer named Alexey Pajitnov, who created "Tetris" in while working for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a research and development center in Moscow created by the government.
Pajitnov didn't intend to make money from his creation; he designed the game "for fun," Brown told Live Science. Pajitnov was inspired by a puzzle game called "pentominoes," in which different wooden shapes made of five equal squares are assembled in a box.
Brown wrote that Pajitnov imagined the shapes falling from above into a glass, with players controlling the shapes and guiding them into place. Pajitnov adapted the shapes to four squares each and programmed the game in his spare time, dubbing it "Tetris. And when he shared the game with his co-workers, they started playing it — and kept playing it and playing it. These early players copied and shared "Tetris" on floppy disks, and the game quickly spread across Moscow, Brown wrote.
When Pajitnov sent a copy to a colleague in Hungary, it ended up on display in a software exhibit at the Hungarian Institute of Technology, where it came to the attention of Robert Stein, owner of Andromeda Software Ltd. He tracked down Pajitnov in Moscow, but ultimately the game's fate lay in the hands of a new Soviet agency, Elektronorgtechnica Elorg , created to oversee foreign distribution of Soviet-made software.
Elorg licensed the game to Stein, who then licensed it to distributors in the U. According to the Times, "Tetris" was the first software created in the Soviet Union to be sold in America.
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