From the Soviet Union to the United States
For the generation of Ukrainian children born in the post-Soviet 90s, the Tetris game was as popular as Love is… chewing gum, Rama butter, Invite+ drink, or the teen TV series Ellen and Friends. But not only children, but also adults were happy and, in some cases, maniacally excited to play the fascinating puzzle. Did you know that the game is based on a development by Soviet programmer Oleksii Pazhytnov, and there was a real struggle for the technology.
Pazhitnov’s research interests included artificial intelligence and speech recognition, and in 1984 he worked at the USSR Academy of Sciences’ computer center. Coincidentally, at that time, the young and little-known programmer’s hobby was the Pentomino Puzzle game (not a computer game, by the way). The game, invented by the American mathematician and engineer Solomon Wolfe Golomb, was a board on which you had to correctly place figures consisting of five squares (that’s why it was called “Pentomino” – from the Greek words “penta” (five) and “dominoes”). Pazhitnov, who was fond of the game, wanted to improve the puzzle and create an electronic version of it – he worked on making sure that the pieces could turn over as they fell.
Alexey Pazhitnov created Tetris with the help of Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov in 1984, and the first device for the game appeared on July 18, 1985. A convenient gadget with keys and an intuitive game interface immediately fell in love with the first players. Two weeks later, the entire Soviet youth went crazy for Tetris, and later the game began to spread around the world. The game appeared in the West only in 1986.
Tetris was licensed and operated by the Soviet company ELORG, which was created specifically for this purpose, and was even advertised. However, since Pazhytnov was an employee of the Soviet government, he did not receive royalties from sales.
After the collapse of the USSR, in 1991, Alexei Pazhitnov and Vladimir Pokhilko moved to the United States, and later, in 1996, founded The Tetris Company with Hank Rogers.
Tetris syndrome
It is worth saying that the first version of the game was not impressive in terms of visual effects. It was written in the Pascal programming language for the Soviet computer Electronika-60, whose display could only show textual information. Therefore, the blocks that made up the figures looked something like this: [], that is, they were a combination of left and right square brackets.
Only a few months later, the game was transferred to the American IBM PC computer, and only then did it acquire its classic look.
In 1997, an American researcher Heidi Burgelo published an article called “How to lose at Tetris”. It turns out that even if a player had a perfect reaction and always made only the best moves, he or she would still lose sooner or later. The problem is in the figures in the form of the letters S and Z.
If too many S-shaped pieces fall out, it will force the player to leave a hole in the lower right corner. And if after that a lot of Z-shaped pieces fall out, the player will leave a hole in the left corner of the next row without filling the previous one. Imagine that this situation is repeated several times – and then the entire playing field will be filled.
If you play Tetris for too long, you may encounter a rather unpleasant effect that psychologists call “Tetris syndrome.” People who have been playing Tetris for a long time may suddenly find themselves constantly thinking about how to compactly stack a wide variety of objects they encounter in the real world. For example, boxes on a shelf in a store or buildings on the street. When they close their eyes, they can see colorful images of figures from the game, and falling blocks can follow them even in their sleep.
Researchers say that this effect arises because after performing the same actions for a long time, our consciousness tends to continue them even against our will. So, for example, a programmer who has been working on a code for a long time may see fragments of his program in a dream, and a person who has spent a long time at sea may feel unsteady even after he has come ashore.
But Tetris can also be useful for our brains. In 2009, a group of researchers led by Professor Richard Hyer from the University of California conducted an unusual experiment. They selected two groups of volunteers, one of which played Tetris for 30 minutes every day, and the other did not. After that, the researchers conducted an MRI scan of the participants’ brains. It turned out that those who spent time playing increased glucose metabolism in gray matter, and brain performance increased. And while the consumption of glucose, and thus energy, by the brain decreased over time, its performance remained at a high level, with improved memory and cognitive abilities.
Claim over the movie “Tetris”
The game quickly became popular, and Robert Stein of Andromeda Software, the company that imported the software, became interested in the development. While Stein was unsuccessfully trying to negotiate with the developers to acquire the rights, he decided to cheat: he sold the unlicensed game to British media mogul Robert Maxwell. Thus, even before the rights were acquired, the game became popular in the world. It was accompanied by a screensaver with Yuri Gagarin and Matthias Rust landing a plane on Red Square, and the American version of the game featured the Russian folk song “Boxers” as its musical accompaniment. The struggle for the rights to Tetris lasted for several years, and up to a dozen companies claimed the rights – this struggle formed the basis of the movie Tetris.
On March 31, 2023, the feature film Tetris, a bibliographic thriller directed by John S. Baird and written by Noah Pink, was released on Apple TV+, based on the story of the struggle for the rights to the game. However, the film was caught up in a scandal related to the claim filed by Dan Ackerman, an American journalist and writer, editor-in-chief of the famous technology portal Gizmodo. He is the author of the book “The Tetris Effect: The Game that Hypnotized the World, published in 2016,
According to Ackerman, before publishing his book, he sent an advance copy of his creation to The Tetris Company. But the company refused to license its intellectual property for projects related to his book. The Tetris Company also denied producers the opportunity to adapt Ackerman’s book into a movie and sent the author a “harsh rejection letter.”
The author claims that Maya Roger, the CEO of The Tetris Company, and screenwriter Noah Pink began writing the screenplay for the Tetris movie in 2017, using his book as a basis, meaning that they copied the atmosphere, tone, approach and scenes from the book, especially the author’s presentation of the game as a “Cold War spy thriller.” Although the Tetris movie is based on the real story of the struggle for licensing and patenting the game in the USSR, it makes some creative departures to create a more engaging story. Instead, Ackerman’s book offers the story as a “cold war thriller with political intrigue,” as stated in the claim..
Ackerman adds that he went to court after the release of the Tetris trailer and unsuccessfully asked Apple and other defendants to resolve the legal issues before the movie was released.
The claim was filed in Manhattan federal court against Apple and The Tetris Company. In the lawsuit, Dan Ackerman accuses Apple and The Tetris Company of unfair competition, copyright infringement, and unlawful interference with Ackerman’s business relations. He also demands compensation for damages, which amount to at least 6% of the film’s $80 million budget (at least $4.8 million).
Representatives of Apple and The Tetris Company have not yet commented on the current situation. We expect further information on this matter and emphasize the importance of protecting your intellectual property rights in advance and taking the support of professional lawyers.
