Tetris

There was no budget in any commercial sense. Alexey Pajitnov built Tetris in his spare time as a salaried researcher at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences, justified internally as testing new hardware. Under Soviet rules any rights belonged to the state and the institute, not to him, and he arranged a ten-year hold with the Centre to navigate that. He earned nothing from the game for roughly a decade. The rights history that followed is genuinely tangled and worth stating in order. In 1986 Robert Stein encountered a Commodore 64 port in Budapest and telexed Moscow for rights; the noncommittal reply was treated as a licence and he began selling it on. By 1988 he had sold European rights to Mirrorsoft and US rights to Spectrum HoloByte for GBP 3,000 plus royalties, before Soviet approval was actually settled. ELORG, the Soviet software export monopoly, discovered the unauthorised sublicensing and forced a narrower contract covering computers only — by which point Atari's Tengen had already picked up arcade and disputed console rights further down the chain. In February 1989 Henk Rogers flew to Moscow uninvited, showed ELORG a Famicom cartridge that exposed the unauthorised console releases in circulation, paid over $40,000 to remedy the breach, and won the handheld rights for Nintendo. Nintendo sued; in June 1989 a US court ruled that the original contract's reference to 'computers' did not cover consoles, and Tengen's cartridges were withdrawn. The institute's hold lapsed at the end of 1995, rights reverted to Pajitnov, and in 1996 he and Rogers founded The Tetris Company — the point at which he began earning royalties, about a decade after creating the game. Rogers acquired ELORG's residual stake around 2005, forming Tetris Holding. On sales: the Game Boy version alone passed 35 million copies by 2009, and the NES version about 8 million by 2004. The often-quoted 520 million total is The Tetris Company's own self-reported aggregate across every version and platform, and the 'best-selling game ever' claim it supports is explicitly rejected by Guinness World Records, the BBC and others, who decline to aggregate separate products. Guinness does credit Tetris as the most-ported game ever, across more than 70 platforms and roughly 220 official versions.