History of TETRIS

Tetris was first created in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, along with Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov. “Tetris” was supposed to be a combination of ‘tetra’(the Greek prefix for four) and ‘tennis’.  He created the wonderful game while working for the Soviet Academy of Science on an Elektronika 60, which was a computer used by the Soviets.  It was made to be ported to the IBM PC.  From there the game made its way to Hungry where it was then discovered by a British software house by the name of Andromeda.  When they assumed they would secure the rights for the PC version from Pajitnov, they sold the rights to Spectrum HoloByte, who in 1986 released the game to the United States. It’s clear why everyone wanted a piece of this enormously popular game., Electronic Gaming Monthly’s 100^th issue awarded Tetris first place as the “Greatest Game of All Time”! In IGN’s “100 Greatest Video Games of All Time” gave Tetris second place twenty years after the game was released here in the US.  By 1987 Andromeda obtained the copyright license for the IBM PC version and any other home computer system.  Just one year later the Soviet government began to fight for the rights to Tetris through an organization they created dubbed Elektronorgtechnica aka Elorg. Andromeda continued to license and sub-license rights that they themselves didn’t own, and Elorg had yet to see a dime. And one year after that the rights to Tetris had been claimed by half a dozen companies.  Elorg maintained that they were the only one that could legally produce the game and signed the rights over to Atari Games and Nintendo for all non-Japanese console and handheld rights . Nintendo claimed Atari Games had stolen the rights. Atari Games sued Nintendo believing they had the rights. After about a month on the market the courts ruled in favor of Nintendo, but the lawsuits continued until 1993. In 1996 however the rights to the game were given back to the original creator Pajitnov from the Russian state. He founded The Tetris Company and claimed to hold copyrights for all Tetris products worldwide. It can be said that this is a game of epic porportions, in fact the largest recorded fully funtional game of Tetris came in 1995 some Dutch student at Delft University of Technology  that stood 15 stories high on the Electrical Engineering department.