Tetris: From Russia with Love

When the first programme version started to breathe, at that moment,

I realised I had something really good.

A game is a beautiful thing.

I hadn't met a person who touched that game and didn't get hooked.

The pieces look so simple, but then the game is so deep.

But it can be dangerous.

It was a very heroic experience.

I must assume that this was a deliberate attempt to frighten me.

IN RUSSIAN:

This is the story of four people

and the one game that brought them together and set them apart.

Moscow. January 1985.

The Cold War lingered on.

Gorbachev was months from power, and the world had yet to hear of Perestroika.

The economic system was near collapse,

and political freedom, a distant dream.

Yet in this repressive landscape, stood a scientific institute where the brightest minds gathered.

A place of intellectual freedom,

and creativity.

Here at Moscow's Computer Centre,

scientists pushed machines to the very edge of their capabilities.

I was an absolutely natural hacker

and computers really fascinated me.

You can make a computer do anything.

You just write an instruction and it follows it.

Alexey Pajitnov's predecessors had discovered the concept of the nuclear winter,

and calculated the trajectory of Sputnik satellites.

But Alexey's impact on history came in a very different form.

ELECTRONIC TUNE PLAYS

In the spring of 1985,

he had plans for his computer that extended far beyond its normal tasks.

ALEXEY: I always liked all kinds of games and puzzles.

When I was a schoolboy,

we didn't have too much entertainment those years.

But games were a big part of our leisure time.

Many people played chess and other games,

we really looked in the store for some kind of board games,

and spent quite a time on it.

That's a very well-known puzzle game,

called Pentomino. Basically it consists of 12 different shapes,

made out of five squares. You have to put them all in a box,

like a jigsaw puzzle.

It's a well-known puzzle and I love it very much.

I used to be pretty good at it.

Let me finish it. Oops!

I forget how to do it.

There we go.

This way, that way.

Alexey started to apply this favourite puzzle onto the computer.

Something began to evolve at his terminal,

but it was a painstaking process.

The five square Pentomino pieces become four square pieces that fell towards the bottom of the screen.

It was the player's job to rotate these shapes and fit them together.

A new game was born.

They called it Tetris, from the Greek for "fall".

When the very first programme version started to "breathe",

when the first pieces appeared on the screen and became controllable,

that was very nice.

Even without sound and only the most basic graphics,

this first version seemed to exert an unusual power.

I did play a lot with this kind of strange prototype and I couldn't stop myself.

Mikhail Kulagin and other people in my room asked, "What are you doing here all the time?"

Then I let people play,

and I realised it was not me who was cuckoo

and had something wrong in the brain!

Everybody who touched this game couldn't stop playing with it.

Tetris spread throughout the Computer Centre, infecting all in its path.

Tetris appeals to another side of the human psyche -

one bent on construction rather than destruction.

ALEXEY: When you play Tetris you have the impression that you are building something.

You have the chaos coming as the random pieces,

your job is to put them in order.

But just as you construct the perfect line,

it disappears.

All that remains is what you failed to complete.

What kind of gets to your eyes all the time, is your mistakes - your ugly holes!

And that drives you to fix it all the time.

The first colour version was developed in the summer of 1985 and it was this version

that Alexey handed out to friends outside the Computer Centre,

who in turn copied it to their friends.

After that, kind of, every place in Moscow -

like a wood fire, you know?

Tetris, in two weeks, was on every single computer in Moscow.

The game took hold and spread.

First through Moscow,

then through the Soviet Union and finally, out into the Soviet Block countries.

As it travelled, it did so freely,

copied from disk to disk, unhindered by commercial constraint.

Here, there was no notion of intellectual property rights.

Individual ideas were owned by the state -

to be shared among everyone.

We didn't have the idea that the software could be considered as a product

and sold or protected or whatever.

It made no sense for us at all.

For now, the only thing that contained the spreading game

was the Iron Curtain.

Which left Tetris a cult hit, and its inventor with recognition but no reward.

But Tetris was born into a changing world that had opened up a chink in the Iron Curtain.

In the mid-80s, Hungary was successfully exporting puzzles and computer technology

to the West.

Robert Stein made his money buying software from Hungary

and selling it on in Britain.

On a trip to the Hungarian Institute of Technology in 1986,

he saw the game that would prove both a blessing and a curse.

We were wandering round in a room with all kinds of computers going, all kinds of software going.

Suddenly, in a corner,

I have seen a game which consisted of bricks

coming down, or some kind of shapes. It was tucked away in a corner and I asked "What is this?"

They said, "Ignore it."

So we wandered around but I kept coming back to that.

After some reluctance,

the Hungarians revealed this wasn't their game and gave Stein the name of the Moscow Computer Centre.

He wasted no time in making contact

but found them rather indifferent to his requests to licence the game.

Nobody gave a shit about the stuff! A small, little game...

The Computer Centre were very busy

with the serious kind of physical, differential equation of the...

entire outer space or nuclear war!

Games were something absolutely alien for their nature!

Alexey ended up dealing with Stein's requests on their behalf.

He proposed something like £10,000 for it as advance payment.

I replied that we were interested in his proposal,

and ready to continue, kind of...talk...talk about this.

He interpreted this fax as an agreement on everything!

Casual agreements like this were normal among the gaming fraternity.

But this was Russia.

And this informal arrangement would soon bring Stein head-to-head with the might of the Soviet state.

He set about peddling his new-found acquisition

around British game producers.

One of his favourites was Mirrorsoft, the software arm of the Maxwell Corporation.

In 1986, this was a giant entertainment empire.

It owned newspapers, magazines, and even leading football clubs.

If they bought Tetris, Stein would have a real heavyweight player behind the game.

I looked at it for a few minutes

and passed it to the technical department downstairs.

Then, a couple of weeks later I wandered down at lunchtime. They were all playing the game!

So, I said, "Well, this is... OK, I'd better play it myself."

So... I took it home.

It was only a matter of time before Britain caught the Tetris bug.

My wife accuses me of ruining the family Christmas

because I found it addictive.

But my wife found it addictive and so did my two young kids!

While Mirrorsoft signed a deal to produce the game in Britain,

Maxwell also had a software company in California which paved the way for the Tetris invasion of the US.

We were over there looking at different game titles

that we could publish, market, sell. Jim said, "You'll like this,"

so I sat and I played Tetris for...

oh, a couple of hours. We went off and got a bite to eat.

Everyone was ready to go home but I wanted to go back and play Tetris.

Phil came back the next day saying "This is great.

"It's a great product."

The problem was, what techniques could we use,

to fly against the run, as it was going,

of what the market was wanting for computer games.

For inspiration of how to sell this simple game, they returned to its roots.

The emergence of Gorbachev created the opportunity to manipulate

both the fear and fascination of that land behind the Iron Curtain.

The curiosity of having anything from behind the Iron Curtain

was kind of like memorabilia or something people wanted to have.

We put it in red packaging, and for the first box,

we actually set up the spelling of Tetris in Russian.

We used the Soviet symbol as part of the Tetris name.

The marketing worked and with great press behind it, Tetris was set to be a big hit.

But all the attention had an unforeseen consequence

that was about to jeopardise everything.

As we are about to launch the thing,

we get a telex from a company called Elorg,

never heard of...in Russia, stating that we are illegally...

trying to launch Tetris,

cos that belongs to them and they never gave us permission to do it.

Elorg, short for Electronorgtechnika,

was a government department dealing with the foreign trade of software.

Gorbachev was keen to create an export market to the West,

but strictly under the control of the state.

Russian bureaucracy loves to have control of everything.

If it is ours, we want to... we want to have everything

properly...and qui... and kind of perfectly done.

Robert Stein was summoned to Moscow.

There was always a long corridor.

First of all, they keep you waiting in the reception,

nobody talks to you, and then they lead you up.

They usher you into a room with a very long conference table.

It was like...

you being questioned... in a court.

Because they showed an absolute distrust

of whatever I was saying.

Why did we do what we'd done without their permission?

I explained that I didn't know they existed, never mind about permission.

Stein used all his powers of persuasion to get the Russians to sign a contract,

and Tetris was cleared for sale.

Within weeks, it catapulted into the best-seller lists,

and in its first year sold over 100,000 copies

in America alone.

But sales were limited to those that owned a personal computer.

The real mass market

lay elsewhere.

Home video games played through console machines that plugged directly into the TV,

and operated by a remote controller.

In 1988, this was a multi-billion dollar industry.

Maxwell's company Mirrorsoft saw an opportunity and approached publisher Atari

about creating a home video version of Tetris.

They held the rights to the games,

as far as I knew at that moment.

They approached me to publish it for game consoles.

So I took it to committee at Atari,

and everybody was crazy about it.

The PC version of Tetris was ideally suited to adapting for a video game.

Atari struck a deal and set about enhancing its visual appeal.

I felt that puzzle pieces should be 3-D.

Our engineers turned them into 3-D shaded things.

I thought it looked much more polished and much less PC game-ish.

The way things are laid out on the screen made the game more exciting.

From a commercial point of view, the profit potential was enormous.

By the middle of 1988, Alexey Pajitnov's simple game

was an extremely valuable asset,

set to make millions for companies in Europe and North America.

But one important market remained untapped.

Japan not only had a burgeoning consumer electronics industry,

but also a long tradition of puzzle games.

Henk Rogers was an entrepreneur who searched the world for games to produce for the Japanese market.

I'd work out how much money I could make on a title.

I'd make a decision right there,

make somebody an offer.

At a US trade show Henk met Atari's Randy Broweleit and first saw the game that would make his fortune.

HENK ROGERS: Tetris was probably the quietest game at the show.

Even then, products were graphically exciting and audio exciting.

Tetris was different. I wanted to play not because it was those things,

but because it struck some basic chord and I couldn't stop playing.

Henk secured both PC and video game rights for Japan

and returned home to create his own versions of Tetris.

Tetris was expanding and evolving into three major world markets

and everyone was cashing in.

Everyone that is, apart from the Russians.

We'd sent our money to Mirrorsoft.

Was Stein getting paid? Somewhere in the chain, somebody wasn't paying.

Elorg drafted in a new broom from Communist Party headquarters to sort things out.

Nikolai Belikov's first job was to examine the agreement with Robert Stein's company, Andromeda Software.

As Belikov pondered this problem,

other developments were about to change his fortune.

Industry giants Nintendo were about to launch a game playing device

and wanted to sell Tetris as part of the package.

But first, they needed someone to discreetly secure them the rights.

We showed Henk Rogers a prototype of Game Boy

and a prototype of Tetris playing on Game Boy.

So he immediately moved very quickly.

Henk went straight to the top of the chain -

to the one man who'd been dealing directly with the Russians.

I contacted Robert Stein and said,

"Robert, you need to represent me to get the rights to Tetris for Game Boy from Russia."

And he agreed.

And I sent him 25,000.

Little did he know that Stein had been discussing the same rights with Mirrorsoft.

'He was trying to muscle in'

on something which was spoken for - the Tetris.

On the other hand, I wasn't going to be dismissive of him,

because I saw him as a potential licensee of products

which we could use or develop in Hungary.

We were exchanging faxes on a weekly basis for three months.

I started getting nervous, because it seemed to be taking so long.

He said he was going to go to Russia

and he kept on saying that and he wasn't going,

so I became really suspicious.

Robert Stein's negotiations with the Russians had reached an impasse over the money he owed them.

By February 1989,

Henk Rogers was tired of waiting and increasingly suspicious that Stein was working for someone else.

I said, "Get me on a plane - he's getting rights for someone else.

"I need those rights." I was on a plane two days later going to Moscow.

But Henk Rogers wasn't the only one flying into Moscow that week.

Robert Stein was finally making the trip himself.

To complete the set, Mirrorsoft had secretly sent Kevin Maxwell to move negotiations on for their interests.

Both Stein and Maxwell had meetings set for the same day.

Henk had no such meeting arranged.

He didn't even have an address for Elorg.

'I knew I was going behind the Iron Curtain for the first time, but I had no idea what I was getting into.'

I kind of knew how to deal with people who weren't from my culture,

so I expected to get off that plane and make friends.

That's not what happened.

I guess this is just the beginning of my trip and I'm in for a lot more.

Henk recorded his adventure to take back to Japan.

Take a look outside here. This is Moscow.

It looks pretty grey.

That's because it's pretty grey.

'Everybody that I met was unfriendly and unhappy and grumpy.

'There was an information desk in the hotel.

'I asked them "Elorg?" and they said, "No, I can't find it."

'No attempt at going any further.'

Here I am waiting for a phone call from Japan,

watching video of Hawaii.

Cos the TV doesn't work.

The radio doesn't work.

I've read everything I could read.

Henk spent his first night in the Intourist Hotel, overlooking Red Square,

right at the heart of a seemingly impenetrable Soviet state.

I got smart the next day and hired an interpreter, which I'd never considered doing.

I figured they have to be able to help me.

I've a very lovely interpreter. WOMAN LAUGHS

-Her name is...

-My name is Ulla.

Your name is Ulla.

OK, Ulla's located Elorg for us.

So this afternoon, we should get a lot of things done.

'A big impression I got from Moscow is there's no colour anywhere.

'There's no advertisements.

'Nobody's trying to sell you anything.

'So the whole place is kind of bland.

'It's like all the colour has been sucked out of the city.'

You don't walk into a place like that uninvited.

You have to have an invitation and that has to be cleared with the KGB.

They make sure you're above board - they do your background check first. I just walked in.

A meeting was hastily convened for the next day,

the same day Belikov was due to meet Maxwell and Stein.

The following day would prove crucial for the future of Tetris.

All would hinge on the communists' ability to play the capitalists

at their own game. They understood the capitalist mantra of divide and rule.

The first to arrive at Belikov's office

was Henk Rogers, proudly clutching the game he was producing in Japan.

I said, "We're publishing Tetris in Japan. We're the biggest publisher of Tetris in the world right now."

I said, "You did." I turned it round. "See, the rights go from Elorg

"to Mirrorsoft, to Tengen

"and to my company, Bullet-Proof Software."

So, that's how I got the rights. "We never gave these rights to anybody." I thought, "Gosh, something's wrong."

Far from picking up the additional rights he'd hoped for,

Henk faced the prospect that his existing rights were worthless.

They were asking me really probing questions.

"Mr Rogers, how did you... Why did you think you'd got these rights?"

The sort of thing you'd hear in court. It wasn't a friendly chat.

I thought, "Either I'm gonna come out of this with the rights to Tetris or I'm gonna be in some gulag.

Narrowly missing Henk,

Robert Stein entered the corridors of Elorg with his own proposals,

unaware of what had transpired in the hours previously.

I didn't know Henk Rogers appeared on the scene. I didn't know

until I came back to England that Kevin Maxwell was out there.

Robert Stein thought he had come to negotiate extra rights for himself.

Elorg had different ideas

and instead, Belikov confronted him with his original contract.

I must assume that this was a deliberate attempt to, uh...

frighten me or put me in a difficult situation,

but this mob across the conference table was anything but friendly.

Stein was dismissed and told to come back the next day,

buying Belikov time to discover what Kevin Maxwell had to offer.

Kevin's father had good connections within the Russian government.

After discussing the hand-held rights, Belikov tentatively mentioned Henk's cartridge,

which also carried the name of Mirrorsoft.

This was an innocent mistake from Maxwell, who was unaware

that Mirrorsoft had sold video game console rights to Atari,

but it was a costly one.

The day provided the Russians with a valuable lesson in capitalism

and they proved quick learners.

They understood that they could maximise profits from this one game

by selling different rights to different companies.

For those on the other side, there was everything to play for,

although one was already working an advantage.

Finally, out of all these dressed in suit businessman

which kind of tried to make some licenses,

I've seen the guy who really likes and understands the game

and we like each other almost immediately.

-ROGERS:

-This is Mr Alexey Pajitnov.

He's the author of, uh...of Tetris.

-Play Tetris...

-Play Tetris.

-..my friends.

OK. He-he.

I made friends with him immediately. He was the friend I was looking for.

We got together and started talking game design.

We immediately jumped into, "What are we gonna do for Tetris 2?"

We had stuff to talk about.

The next morning, Elorg's Nikolai Belikov hatched a plan that would leave no ambiguity

as to the rights the Russians had already negotiated away.

This hinged on a definition of "computer", which he had to ensure

couldn't include products like video game consoles,

so, he added a clause to Stein's original contract.

Belikov was a son of a bitch.

The clause...resulted in the exclusion

of some of the products for Tetris.

It was on and I didn't notice it,

which I will never forgive myself, so there we go.

But they made it so...matter of fact.

"We would like you for the sake of bureaucracy..." And I agreed.

Because I was so focused in getting what I wanted,

that I forgot about watching what they wanted.

Belikov despatched Stein, bereft of rights he thought he already had

and with two weeks to pay them what he owed.

He now faced the arrival of Henk Rogers

and a decision about who to grant the hand-held rights.

I'm on my way to a ten o'clock appointment with Elorg.

Last night I composed a proposal to them

about gaining the rights to hand-held Tetris.

We shall see.

Under the old system, the decision would have been a political one,

but capitalism is about taking risks.

I said, "Kevin Maxwell's the son of a very rich man,

"so I can't match his money,

"but I can give you an honest business.

"I'll tell you exactly how much I'm making and you'll get your share."

Henk shows himself very, very honest in many respects

and very reliable as he keep his word...he kept his word all the time.

Henk's direct approach paid off.

Elorg told him the hand-held rights were his.

We signed and the big boss came out and shook my hand with his iron fist,

iron grip, whatever.

It was all done and they said, "Mr Rogers, there's something else we'd like to talk to you about.

"We would like you also to make us an offer on the console rights."

Henk Rogers left Russia with the hand-held rights to Tetris

and the prospect of holding on to his precious console rights.

But, there would be a battle ahead.

Atari Games were already busy manufacturing their own Tetris game

under an agreement with Mirrorsoft.

We built half a million units for our day one launch.

We put a major investment,

in terms of our best human resources.

The engineers assigned to the game at Atari were without peer.

They were our best guys.

Such was their confidence in Tetris, they also invested heavily

-in marketing.

-We had a huge party for the media

and rolled it out with all kinds of fanfare.

We also had a...

We took a full page of USA Today to announce the programme.

But Atari were in for a surprise.

Henk Rogers was visiting his contacts at Nintendo to offer them

exclusive console rights.

Their Nintendo Entertainment System was the biggest selling video game console in the world.

As soon as we found out

that the home video game rights were available

and that Henk had cut a deal for the hand-held rights,

we were absolutely delighted.

For Howard Lincoln and Minoru Arakawa,

this provided the ideal opportunity to get back at arch rivals, Atari.

They said, "We will help you, so...

"go back and if you think you've got it in the bag,

"call us. We'll come and clinch the deal."

Atari were not the only complication.

In Britain, Robert Maxwell found out that his son had lost out on the hand-held rights.

He was furious and began contacting senior ministers within The Kremlin.

The Kremlin began to exert pressure on Belikov and his position was under threat.

Henk sensed it was imperative

-he get his deal signed as soon as possible.

-I went back to Moscow

and I asked, "Would it clinch the deal if I brought Mr Arakawa and Mr Lincoln?" "Absolutely."

Nintendo needed to move quickly and quietly

to avoid alerting either Maxwell

or Atari who were about to have the video game console rights snatched

from under their noses.

We told all our employees we were going to Japan. Only one employee

was aware of where we were actually going.

In Moscow, they signed a deal worth half a million dollars in guaranteed royalties

and 50 cents on every cartridge,

over 30 times what Stein had first offered them,

but a fraction of what the game was worth to Nintendo.

When we flew back across to Seattle,

every time I looked at Arakawa, we just started laughing,

because we knew we had not only the hand-held rights,

but also the home video game rights.

And at the same time, we'd found a way to really, uh...give it back to Atari Games.

Back in Moscow, the pressure was piling onto Belikov.

It was, uh...two very, very powerful sides or organisations

fight for my small game.

We'd got in a very sharp and hot place.

But Belikov had history on his side.

Gorbachev's reforms meant that the state machine

was losing its grip on power.

In America, the battle for Tetris was only just beginning.

A jubilant Nintendo plunged the knife in.

The first thing we did was to send a notice to Atari Games

advising them that we had

the sole video game rights to Tetris and putting them on notice of that

and directing them to cease from any marketing or production of Tetris,

knowing full well that they'd go nuts.

Atari Games were not about to take this lying down.

They had already invested millions preparing Tetris for market.

One of my associates called to say that we had just been sued by Atari.

They sued us and claimed that they had the exclusive rights to Tetris.

All of our experts,

our legal counsel were all saying, "Full speed ahead."

There was no inkling we were wrong.

The trial between Nintendo and Atari was set to commence

in November 1989.

Nintendo had prepared Elorg's Nikolai Belikov as their key witness.

Belikov joined Henk Rogers in San Francisco where they waited to testify.

Both had a lot resting on the outcome.

In the end, they were spared the witness stand.

The judge made a summary judgment which granted all video game rights to Nintendo.

It made both Mr Arakawa and I feel wonderful.

Just great.

There was jubilation, of course.

On my part, I got to keep the rights. It had a lot riding on it.

At that point in time,

Atari Games had several hundred thousand Tetris cartridges for play on the NES

that were now worthless.

We were in absolute shock.

We had cartridges ready to ship, and firm orders

and we were suddenly enjoined from shipping them.

We were shocked and dismayed.

RADIO PLAYS: "Holiday" by Madonna

MAN: This is the Golden Gate Bridge.

LOUD MUSIC PLAYS

The real winners were Nintendo.

To date, Nintendo dealers across the world have sold 8 million Tetris cartridges

on the Nintendo entertainment system.

The people at Mirrorsoft and Atari Games were simply incompetent.

They didn't do their homework, didn't do what they should have done

and, far from taking advantage of them,

it was just competent people taking advantage of incompetent businessmen.

By the time Atari figured out who to blame, it was too late.

On 5th November, 1991, Robert Maxwell disappeared over the side of his yacht,

leaving a company ridden in debt,

and £440 million missing from the corporation's pension fund.

After Mr Maxwell disappeared, it was like a house of cards

that just crumbled to the ground.

Everything that we thought we were looking to as indemnification and safety

was basically non-existent.

As Atari's fortunes continued to wane,

Nintendo went from strength to strength.

Tetris was key to the success of Game Boy,

which has sold 70 million worldwide.

But despite all that happened to his game,

as the '80s drew to a close, Alexey Pajitnov was yet to receive anything from Tetris.

He was still working at the computer centre.

But the fame that Tetris had brought Alexey

meant that he could aspire to life beyond the computer centre.

After the Tetris success, I don't want to be much involved in pure scientific stuff.

I realised that games is...

Might be a big part of my activity as well.

In 1991, with help from his friend Henk Rogers,

Alexey was offered the opportunity to move with his family to the United States.

Here lay the promise of taking control of his own destiny,

and that of the games he developed.

His wife had been to the States before.

When she came back, they asked her, and she tried to explain,

and she could do nothing except cry.

She just couldn't find the words to describe the difference, what they were missing in this culture.

Alexey settled in Seattle,

where he established a company to develop games and technology.

But his American dream was not all he'd hoped for.

Basically, I need to make money to support my family.

I wasn't that rich to just sit there and do nothing.

So I could say that the first couple of years were very challenging in the United States.

In 1996, Alexey gave up working for himself

and joined that great American institution, Microsoft,

where he now has a staff job.

They hired me just to make games.

I feel, myself, a really strong and experienced games designer at this point.

I don't have any, kind of, internal contradictions or tendencies.

I understand that I am staying in my place and doing my job,

and fulfil my mission in life.

When the original set of rights expired in 1996,

Alexey began to receive some royalties from Tetris,

if only a fraction of what he could have made, if born into a different system.

You always could make a little bit more than you make.

But you know, I never seriously think about this stuff.

I live as I live.

Alexey regularly returns to Moscow,

and thinks about moving back for good.

But the city that gave birth to his game is no longer the place it was.

Global capitalism has come to town.

The same forces that enabled Tetris to conquer the free world

have left the institute where it was nurtured, far behind.

The average monthly wage of 200, deemed respectable in Soviet times,

can't compete with private institutions and foreign firms.

In 2003, Tetris is set to conquer the world once again.

This time, on the mobile phone.

Subtitles by BBC Broadcast - 2004

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