Tetris198515 factsAlexey Pajitnov · ELORGGame page →Pajitnov earned nothing from Tetris for about ten years. As a Soviet state employee the rights belonged to his institute, and he only began receiving royalties after founding The Tetris Company in 1996, once that ten-year hold expired.en.wikipedia.orgThe original ran on an Elektronika 60, a Soviet PDP-11 clone with no graphics capability at all — the falling pieces were drawn out of text brackets. It had no music, no score and no levels.en.wikipedia.orgThe pieces were meant to have five squares, not four. Pajitnov wanted to computerise the pentomino puzzle he had loved as a child, found the machine too weak to solve the placements, and cut the shapes down to four squares — which is also where the name comes from: 'tetra' for four, plus tennis, his favourite sport.en.wikipedia.orgThe IBM PC port that carried Tetris out of the Soviet Union was written with a 16-year-old intern, Vadim Gerasimov, who added the colour. It spread on floppy disks across Moscow and then Eastern Europe with nobody licensing anything.en.wikipedia.orgHenk Rogers flew to Moscow uninvited in February 1989 and walked into ELORG's offices carrying a Famicom cartridge — which proved that console versions were already being sold without Soviet permission. He paid over $40,000 to settle the breach and left with the handheld rights for Nintendo.en.wikipedia.orgRobert Maxwell reportedly took the rights dispute to Mikhail Gorbachev, and was reassured he need not worry about the Japanese company. He did need to worry: Nintendo won the console rights in court that June.en.wikipedia.orgThe court case turned on a single word. A US judge ruled that the original contract's reference to 'computers' did not extend to consoles, and Atari's unauthorised NES cartridges were pulled from shelves. Surviving unsold copies later became collector's items worth around $300.en.wikipedia.orgThe theme is a 19th-century Russian folk song, not a game composition. 'Korobeiniki' is based on an 1861 Nekrasov poem about a pedlar; Hirokazu Tanaka's 1989 Game Boy arrangement is the version that made it famous, and The Tetris Company now holds a sound trademark on it.en.wikipedia.orgThe 'Tetris effect' — seeing falling shapes in unrelated scenes or dreams after long play — is a documented research subject, not just a saying. A 2000 study in Science found amnesiac patients experienced Tetris imagery while falling asleep despite having no memory of having played.en.wikipedia.orgIt has been studied as a clinical intervention: research found that playing Tetris shortly after a traumatic car accident reduced the frequency of intrusive flashbacks, and separate work found it reduced food and substance cravings.en.wikipedia.orgFinding the optimal Tetris strategy is NP-complete — proven in a 2003 academic paper. More than 130 scholarly papers had been published on the game by 2014.en.wikipedia.orgOn 21 December 2023, thirteen-year-old Willis Gibson became the first person to push NES Tetris until it broke, reaching level 157 before the game crashed on an internal overflow. His reaction — 'I'm going to pass out, I can't feel my fingers' — ran as the New York Times Quote of the Day.en.wikipedia.orgA 1992 Eurodance novelty cover of Korobeiniki, credited to Doctor Spin and titled simply 'Tetris', reached number six on the UK singles chart.en.wikipedia.orgGuinness World Records credits Tetris as the most-ported video game ever — more than 70 platforms and around 220 distinct official versions.en.wikipedia.orgThe licensing battle was filmed: Apple TV+ released a dramatised feature, Tetris, in 2023, with Taron Egerton as Henk Rogers.en.wikipedia.orgRead 13 more facts
