But even if the legal system had allowed Pajitnov to sell Tetris, there was no one to buy it. While cheap mass-market computers could be found in homes in many industrialised democracies, such technology was only accessible to a small cabal of computer researchers in the USSR and the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. The few people who did have home computers usually obtained them at great expense and personal risk on the black market. The Hungarian authorities, for example, estimated that there were 30,000 home computers in Hungary by early 1985, 90 per cent of which arrived through unofficial channels. Czechoslovakian Marek Spanel got his introduction to computers thanks to the black market. His first computer, a Texas Instruments TI-99/4, was smuggled into the country and bought by his parents in 1985 – six years after the computer’s US lah and four years after it went out of production. “My brother Ondrej and I were probably the only users of that type of computer in the entire country at the time,” said Spanel, who went on to form Prague-based game developers Bohemia Interactive.
There were no shops to buy games from, so people had to rely on illegal copies of Western games shared among a clandestine network of home computer owners or, like Spanel, learn how to make their own. “In the mid-’80s computers were rare and people wrote games for fun and distributed them for free as selling them was forbidden,” recalled Serge Orlovsky, president of Nival Interactive, a Moscow-based game development studio that formed in 1996.
While home computers were rare, there were a few coin-op video games that had started to appear in the arcades of communist countries around the time that Pajitnov created Tetris. East Germany’s Poly Play was one of the earliest and is believed to have first appeared in 1985[2]. Poly Play was created by VEB Polytechnik, a state-owned electronics company based in Chemnitz, which was then known as Karl-Marx-Stadt. Encased in functional wood panelling, it looked more bookcase than an arcade game and offered players a choice of 10 games including slalom skiing game Abfahrtslauf, deer hunting title Hirschjagd and Hase und Wolf – a maze chase featuring the wolf and rabbit characters from the popular Soviet TV cartoon Nu, pogodi!. Poly Play was mainly seen in youth hostels and the exclusive holiday homes run by East Germany’s powerful trade union federation, the Freier Deutscher Gewerkschafsbund. It was often set up so it was free to play. Poly Play’s technology, however, was years behind that of the arcade games available across the border in West Germany. Its visuals looked closer to the first colour arcade games that appeared in the West in 1979.
The handful of arcade video games created in the USSR also reflected the technology gap with primitive offerings such as the overhead-view racing game Magistral.[3] Soviet coin-op games were also expensive, costing as much as 15 kopeks a go, enough to buy a small meal. The ideology of communism tended to influence every aspect of life behind the Iron Curtain and these Soviet arcade games were no exception. The operators’ manuals made it clear that these machines were not just entertainment, defining their purpose as “entertainment and active leisure, as well as the development of visual-estimation abilities”. Unlike US, Japanese and Western European games, there were no high scores, largely because such a feature would have been seen as encouraging a culture of competition rather than co-operation between players. Games involving the shooting of people rather than targets or animals were also shunned by the authorities.
When perestroika came into effect, the Eastern Bloc’s arcades began to catch up. Towards the end of the 1980s, the Vinnytsia-based Extrema-Ukraine teamed up with Ukrainian manufacturer Terminal to produce more advanced arcade games using its custom hardware. The most notable game these companies created was 1988’s Konek-Gorbunok, a platform game that echoed Activision’s VCS game Pitfall! and was based on Pyotr Pavlovich Yershov’s 1834 fairytale of the same name. Yershov’s fairytale was a satire of pre-communist Russia’s feudal government that told of an honest peasant boy who marries a princess after meeting the unreasonable demands of the evil tsar with the help of magical horse. The Russian government banned it for 20 years for making the tsar look foolish, a decision that turned it into a favourite of Soviet communists. Extrema-Ukraine’s involvement in games was, however, short lived: it abandoned arcade games in 1991 to concentrate on producing gambling and strip poker machines instead.
With no prospect of selling the game commercially, Pajitnov was happy to give Tetris away and get on with his artificial intelligence research. Then, out of the blue, he received a Telex message from a London businessman called Robert Stein.
Stein was the founder of Andromeda, a company specialising in selling Hungarian-made software to western publishers. Stein grew up in Hungary but fled the country aged 22 in the wake of the failed 1956 uprising against communist rule. He eventually claimed asylum in the UK. After spending the 1970s selling pocket calculators and digital watches he realised there was money to make in home computer software and formed Andromeda.
While most of the Eastern Bloc was strictly opposed to capitalism in any form, the 1956 revolt had prompted Hungarian leader János Kádár to try and quell discontent with limited economic and social reforms that allowed people to form businesses that exported goods to the West and granted some additional human rights. Kádár’s fusion of communism, free enterprise and human rights was nicknamed Goulash Communism by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in reference to the Hungarian national dish. By the time Stein formed Andromeda in 1982, Kádár’s reforms had already allowed Ernö Rubik to export his Rubik’s Cube puzzle toy to the West, where it became a phenomenon and a pop culture icon of the ’80s. Stein saw Hungary’s willingness to trade as an opportunity to access a supply of cheap software to sell on to western publishers. He teamed up with two Budapest companies – the state-funded Novotrade and a small private business called Mikromatix – and started bringing their creations to the West.[4]
“Communism was pretty soft by that time, though the really visible falling apart was a few years later,” said Pál Balog, the Novotrade programmer who worked on 1984’s Bird Mother, a Commodore 64 game where players played a bird raising a family of chicks. “Business was not forbidden with the West, it was just restricted by several factors. Trade with a net income of hard currency was quite welcome and what Novotrade did clearly fit that description.”
Stein sold Novotrade and Mikromatix’s games to a number of UK publishers. Media mogul Robert Maxwell’s game compan Mirrorsoft chose Mikromatix’s mouse-catching game Caesar the Cat to be one of its earliest releases and Eureka!, a text adventure designed by Fighting Fantasy author Ian Livingstone and programmed by Novotrade, became the debut release of UK publisher Domark. As well as Hungary’s embryonic game industry, Stein had links with a Budapest computer science research centre called SZKI.
In early 1986 he paid a visit to SZKI to see if there was anything new he could take back to the UK. While there he saw someone playing Tetris. Stein was no fan of video games but he too found Pajitnov’s game a compulsive experience and asked to buy the rights to it. SZKI gave him Pajitnov’s details and, on his return to London, Stein sent the Russian computer scientist a Telex message in English expressing his interest in buying the rights. “My English wasn’t very good,” said Pajitnov. “He sent the proposal of the licence and I tried to answer him that I’m very glad he is interested and I like his proposal and we need to start negotiation, which I assumed was a necessary stage for any agreement. But somehow he interprets my answer as an agreement to his terms.”
Taking Pajitnov’s response as a yes, Stein began selling the rights to Tetris to game publishers across the world. First in line were Mirrorsoft and its US sister company Spectrum Holobyte who bought the rights to the computer versions of Pajitnov’s game. The Maxwell-owned firms were keen to push it as the first game from behind the Iron Curtain, conveniently ignoring the Hungarian titles that had already made that journey. They sought to emphasise the Soviet connection by packaging the game in a red box adorned with a illustration of St Basil’s Cathedral, a hammer and sickle, and a logo that spelt Te
tris with a backwards r.
And when Stein indicated he could also get the home console and coin-op game rights, Mirrorsoft bought them and promptly sold them on. Soon five companies spread across the world were developing versions of Tetris. All thought they owned the rights, but Stein had yet to get a contract signed. By December 1987 Stein was getting worried but could not get an answer to his enquiries out of Moscow. In January 1988, with the rights situation still murky, Mirrorsoft and Spectrum Holobyte launched their computer version of Tetris. Pajitnov’s hypnotic game became a sensation made all the more exciting by the exotic novelty of being video game that originated in the Soviet Union. Around 100,000 copies were sold in 1988 alone.
Back in Moscow, Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms were starting to take hold and Pajitnov had decided to see if his latest creation, a psychological assessment program called Biographer, could be sold commercially. He arranged a meeting with Electronorgtechnica, a recently formed government agency responsible for software exports that was known as Elorg for short. The meeting was going well until Pajitnov mentioned that Tetris was on sale in the West. Suddenly the atmosphere turneosty. The agency’s director Alexander Alexinko informed Pajitnov that only Elorg had the authority to make such deals. Elorg immediately set out to regain control of the situation. The agency contacted Stein and told him the deal was off. Stein’s panicked objections eventually managed to persuade Elorg not to cancel the home computer rights deal, but Stein knew that getting the console and arcade rights he had already sold was now going to be tricky.
To add to the pressure on Stein, an American called Henk Rogers who ran the Japan-based game publisher Bullet-Proof Software was nagging him for the handheld rights. Rogers had already bought the Japanese computer, console and arcade rights for Tetris. He had sold the coin-op rights to Sega and was making a fortune with his Famicom version of Pajitnov’s game. Rogers now hoped to secure the handheld rights for Tetris as he thought it would be perfect for the Game Boy, Nintendo’s soon-to-be-released portable games console.
The Game Boy was the latest invention of Gunpei Yokoi, the Nintendo engineer who designed the company’s Game & Watch line of handheld games. The Game Boy was pure Yokoi, designed around his design philosophy of the ‘lateral thinking of withered technology’. While Nintendo’s competitors focused on engineering flashy handheld consoles with colour graphics and impressive sound capabilities such as the Atari Lynx and Sega’s Game Gear, Yokoi opted for a monochrome screen and a tinny speaker. But what the Game Boy lacked in hi-tech oomph it made up for with its unrivalled 10-hour battery life and lower retail price. Nintendo had planned to make Super Mario Land, a Game Boy spin-off of its popular Super Mario Bros series, the lead game for the machine when Rogers suggested Tetris as an alternative.
“The Game Boy was just getting started and I thought Tetris was the perfect product for it,” said Rogers. “I spoke to Nintendo of America’s president Minoru Arakawa and said ‘I can get the perfect game for you to pack in with the Game Boy’. I had already released it in Japan and the game was starting to make waves within Nintendo. He said: ‘Well, we’re going to pack in Mario’. I said: ‘Well if you want little boys to buy your machine then pack in Mario, but if you want everybody to play your game, pack in Tetris’. I convinced him.”
With Nintendo on side, Rogers contacted Mirrorsoft and asked to buy the rights. Mirrorsoft, however, was evasive so Rogers decided to skip the middleman and went straight to Stein, who said he would strike a deal with the Russians on his behalf. Weeks passed with no word from Stein, who was desperately trying to get Elorg to sell him the rights he had already sold on. Eventually Stein informed an increasingly suspicious Rogers that he was going to Moscow and suggested he joined him there in a week’s time. Rogers decided it was time to bypass Stein entirely and deal with Elorg directly. “Two days later I was on a plane to Moscow,” said Rogers.
Rogers and Stein were not the only people in Moscow hoping to strike a deal with Elorg that week. Unknown to Rogers and Stein, Kevin Maxwell, the son obert and the ultimate boss of Mirrorsoft, had also decided to deal with the Russians directly rather than wait for Stein to confirm the deal.
Rogers arrived in a cold, drab and paranoid Moscow with no idea where to find Elorg and no prior appointment with the agency. “It was the tail end, but it was still communism,” he recalled. “Moscow was like being in a prison. No colour, no advertising. People didn’t seem to smile. I tried to win people over with my personality and smile but people thought I was crazy. The first night I couldn’t get any food. I’d ask and they said sorry the restaurant’s just closed. I said ok, where can I get food? They’d go I don’t know. I went to the hotel room, turned on the TV and sparks flew out. I had to unplug it from the wall to get it to stop. Maybe 12 little squares of toilet tissue in the bathroom. Everything about it was strange.”
Rogers spent two days hunting for Elorg’s offices only to find, after hiring an interpreter, it was just around the corner from his hotel. On the 21st February 1989, the day before Maxwell and Stein’s appointments, Rogers strolled into the Elorg offices.
“My interpreter wouldn’t come in with me because she hadn’t been invited. In their mind if you’re not invited you cannot go in – it’s unthinkable,” said Rogers. The first person he encountered was Elorg’s new director Evgeni Nikolaevich Belikov, who joined the agency after working at the Communist Party’s headquarters. “I didn’t know he was the important guy and said I’d like to talk to someone tomorrow about the rights to Tetris," said Rogers. Seeing his unexpected appearance as a further leverage to use in his talks with Maxwell and Stein, Belikov arranged a meeting with Rogers. The next day all three would convene on the Elorg headquarters hoping to leave with the rights to Pajitnov’s lucrative game. Rogers was first through the door. He was shown into Elorg’s large conference room, a gigantic space with 15-foot high ceilings, long drapes hanging off the walls and an enormous table. “It was like a mansion they had converted into a ministry,” said Rogers. “Some of the meetings we had were in dining rooms that would fit comfortably 40 people on these long tables. They sat on opposite sides on this long table.”
Amid the army of Elorg bureaucrats at the table was Pajitnov. Rogers explained he wanted the handheld rights and then showed them one of the Tetris Famicom cartridges his company were selling in Japan. Belikov said no console rights had been granted and demanded to know what Rogers was doing selling their game without permission. Suddenly Rogers realised Stein did not have the rights in the first place and envisaged his whole business imploding: “I was thinking ‘oh my god’ because I had 200,000 cartridges in production and that involved hawking all the money from my in-laws. Everything was on the line and here I am in another country with someone telling me I don’t have the rights.”
Rogers explained the web of Tetris deals to Belikov, who then showed him the contract agreed with Stein that gave him only the rights to the home computer versions. “It was a horrible contract,” said Rogers. “It was like spanking a baby or something like that. Elorg was getting a percentage of a percentage of a percentage, so by the time it got to Moscow it was nothing.”
Rogers sensed an opportunity and told Belikov he wanted to put things right. He handed Elorg a $40,712 royalty cheque for the 130,000 Tetris cartridges already sold in Japan and said he wanted to buy the console rights. Expecting legal action from Mirrorsoft and Atari Games if he got the deal, Rogers asked Belikov to hold off from making any deals until he returned with backing from Nintendo.
While Rogers got on with bringing in Nintendo, Stein faced an angry reception at Elorg. Belikov shoved an amended version of the home computer contract under his nose and told him if he did not sign it immediately, the arcade rights deal was off. Desperate to get the coin-op deal, Stein homed in on a clause about fines for late royalty payments and negotiated on that. After signing it, Belikov sold him the coin-op rights. Only later did Stein notice the crucial change that the late payments clause was designed to dis
tract him from: a clause defining a home computer in such a way that it was completely clear he did not have the home console rights.
Maxwell, meanwhile, was hoping to use the influence of the Maxwell Communications empire to win all the rights to Tetris. But when Belikov handed him Rogers’ Japanese Tetris cartridge and demanded to know what it was, Maxwell stumbled. Unfamiliar with the details of Mirrorsoft’s dealings, Maxwell said it must be an illegal copy. Eventually Elorg offered Mirrorsoft the option to bid for home console rights in return for the rights to publish Maxwell Communications’ reference books in the USSR.
Keen to get the lucrative Tetris rights, Maxwell agreed and signed over the reference book rights. And when Rogers and Nintendo returned with their offer for the console rights, Belikov gave Mirrorsoft 24 hours to make a better offer. Mirrorsoft couldn’t respond fast enough and the next day Nintendo and Rogers walked away with the deal. Atari Games, which thought it had the US home console rights and was about to release its NES version of Tetris, suddenly found itself served with a court injunction and left with a warehouse full of games it was barred from selling much to Nintendo’s delight.[5]
Pajitnov’s game proved crucial to the success of the Game Boy. It became the must-have game that drove the handheld’s massive sales across the world. More than 40 million Game Boys with copies of Tetris were sold worldwide. It made Rogers rich and let Nintendo gain a level of dominance in the handheld games market that was even greater than its hold on the home console business.
Replay: The History of Video Games Page 28