A 13-year-old boy accomplished in 2023 what no human had managed to do before him on the NES version of Tetris. His feat brought back into the spotlight a game born forty years earlier, in a Soviet laboratory, on hardware no one would have imagined capable of giving rise to such a global phenomenon.
- Alexeï Pajitnov coded Tetris in 1984 using the Pascal language on an Elektronika 60, a Soviet computer dedicated to scientific calculation
- For ten years, the rights to Tetris belonged to the government agency ELORG before being acquired in 2005 by The Tetris Company
- In December 2023, Willis Gibson, 13 years old, became the first human to reach the kill screen at level 157 on the NES version
- A Soviet researcher tinkers with a game on an obsolete computer
- How a simple pastime slipped from its creator’s control for years
- From the USSR to consoles around the world: the record-breaking success story
A Soviet researcher tinkers with a game on an obsolete computer
In 1984, Alexeï Pajitnov works at the Dorodnitsyne Computing Center, affiliated with the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. His workstation is the Elektronika 60, a Soviet clone of the PDP-11 from Digital Equipment Corporation. On paper, nothing extraordinary: this machine is used primarily for austere scientific calculations, far from entertainment.
Yet it is on this graphics-poor machine that Pajitnov encodes his idea in the Pascal language. No vivid colors, no catchy sound: the early game of Tetris runs with text characters that stack on the screen, like a simple word game on a black background.
The initial concept is astonishingly simple. Geometric shapes made of four blocks, called tetrominoes, fall from the top of the display. The player must rotate and stack them to form complete lines, which vanish instantly. A straightforward principle, almost childish, but one that hides a ruthlessly effective addictive mechanic.
No one at the time could imagine that this pastime, conceived between two administrative tasks, would one day become a worldwide reference. Created in 1984 by Soviet developer Alexeï Pajitnov on an Electronika 60, Tetris would go on to become the best-selling video game in the world, with more than 520 million copies sold across all platforms.
How a simple pastime slipped from its creator’s control for years
In 1980s USSR, private intellectual property rights did not really exist. Pajitnov and his fellow programmers were state employees, and the Academy of Sciences was barred from any commercial activity. As a result, all global rights to Tetris were entrusted to a government agency, ELORG, tasked with negotiating licenses abroad.
Pajitnov recalls signing, at the time, a document transferring the game’s rights to the computing center for a period of ten years. In other words, for an entire decade, the game’s creator had almost no say over how his creation was exploited worldwide, even as Tetris began to conquer personal computers and then home consoles.
It wasn’t until 1996 that the situation began to change meaningfully. Pajitnov joined forces with Henk Rogers, a central figure in the game’s commercial history, to found The Tetris Company. This organization aimed to reclaim global licenses, long scattered among numerous publishers and platforms.
The decisive milestone came in January 2005, when ELORG was acquired by The Tetris Company for 15 million dollars. Twenty years after its creation in a Moscow office, Tetris finally found a single owner capable of centralizing its management, far from the bureaucratic Soviet machinery that had long kept it distant from its creator.
From the USSR to consoles around the world: the record-breaking success story
The figure of 520 million copies sold, often cited to label Tetris as the best-selling video game of all time, deserves a closer look. It aggregates sales across all platforms, from arcade cabinets to modern smartphones, including home consoles and personal computers.
A substantial portion of this total comes from the Game Boy. On Nintendo’s handheld, Tetris was bundled with the device, which alone accounts for 35 million copies tied to this iconic pairing. It’s hard to imagine a stronger marketing argument than a simple game, packaged with the machine itself.
The game’s longevity continues to surprise, even forty years after its creation. In December 2023, American Willis Gibson, then 13 years old, became the first human to reach the famous kill screen of the NES version, at level 157, in under 39 minutes. Before him, only an artificial intelligence had been credited with the feat.
The term kill screen designates a precise technical plateau. On the NES, from level 29 onward, the pieces fall one square per frame, a pace deemed too fast for almost all players. Henk Rogers, head of The Tetris Company, personally congratulated Gibson during a video call, saying he had shared the news with Pajitnov himself.
From this recent anecdote emerges one clear truth: four decades after its creation on a now-forgotten Soviet-era computer, Tetris continues to generate records, emotions, and communities of passionate players. Few creations born from a bit of computer tinkering can boast such a lasting legacy.
Sources : A 13-year-old in Oklahoma may have just become the 1st person to ever beat Tetris (npr.org) | ‘I can’t feel my fingers’: 13-year-old is first gamer ever to beat Tetris (pbs.org)
Article prepared with the help of AI · Our method
