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TVTranscript
00:01It came from the unlikeliest of places.
00:04America kind of looked for us like another planet.
00:07We didn't have any bad feeling about it, but it was totally alien, you know?
00:13He came to realize he'd found the gold mine.
00:16What he didn't realize was that he'd found the haunted gold mine.
00:19And caused a puzzling international stir.
00:23Here I am, they're saying I'm a pirate, because they never gave those rights out.
00:27It was a game that was developed behind the Iron Curtain.
00:31It was unique and new, and we were dealing with Klasnos and Korbuchon.
00:36I'm in Soviet Union, they could just keep me here forever and send me to Siberia, you know?
00:41Who the hell knows what was going to happen? I certainly didn't.
00:45While addicting gamers and non-gamers alike.
00:48Tetris has got to be the ultimate every-person game.
00:51I mean, that's a game that your grandmother can pick up and start playing.
00:54It's a big achievement to create something which, you know, is known everywhere in the world.
00:58It's like everybody knows what is an Egyptian pyramid, and everybody knows what is a Tetris.
01:03This is the story of the most popular puzzle game of all time, Tetris.
01:30During the 1960s and 70s, at the height of the Cold War.
01:37At the time, the United States and the Soviet Union were the two powers in the world.
01:44You had two nations with two armies, and the sole existence of their armies were simply to annihilate each other.
01:50Alexey Pajanov grows up in the city of Moscow.
01:54It didn't look anything like American cities.
01:57No advertisement.
01:59Very, very modest kind of showcase.
02:03Everything made out of stone, more or less gray, without any bright colors at all.
02:09America kind of looked for us like another planet.
02:14We didn't have any bad feeling about it, but it was totally alien, you know.
02:19So, we just knew very well our life, but didn't care about the life of the rest of the world.
02:27What Pajanov does care about, however, is his passion for math and puzzles at an early age.
02:33I like all the mathematical puzzles and all the mathematics, and it was my kind of passion in school.
02:41And then I get to the special program, to the mathematical class, and I graduate the special mathematical school.
02:49After his university studies in 1979, Pajanov is hired by the Computer Center of the Moscow Academy of Science.
02:55And I was just a regular, well, researcher there, wrote some software for artificial intelligence,
03:04automatic speech recognition, CAD CAM system, all kind of stuff.
03:08But I still kept my patience and love to all small puzzles, games which I had since I was a
03:17schoolboy.
03:18So, every time when I had excuse to kind of study new hardware or get new software,
03:27I always tried to put some kind of game or puzzle on the computer.
03:32Alexei's early work is done on the Electronica 60, a Soviet terminal computer which predated the IBM PC.
03:39During his free time, he develops a computerized version of the Pentominos puzzle game.
03:43In his spare time, didn't even get paid for it, Alexei Pajanov, he just made a fun puzzle game while
03:50he was working in Russia.
03:52And at one moment, I had the idea to put the Pentominos puzzle on the computer.
03:57Pentominos is a very, very well-known puzzle, and I love this puzzle.
04:02With the help of a 16-year-old programmer, Pajanov finishes the game and calls it Tetris.
04:07We really didn't understand where Alexei had gotten the name Tetris,
04:14and later really found out that Tetra means four in Russian.
04:18So, all the squares were like a little T or an L, but they all contained four blocks.
04:24So, that was Tetra.
04:25When we met Alexei, we said, why Tetris?
04:28And he said, well, the only other game he really liked was tennis.
04:31So, he took the IS off the end of tennis and made it Tetris.
04:34And so, that's where he came up with Tetris.
04:37Tetris is distributed freely among Pajanov's comrades at the computer center.
04:41Because there was no any software market around,
04:44and the only way to distribute software was just to give it for coffee.
04:49That's what we did.
04:50And the game quickly spreads throughout Moscow.
04:52And we let it go.
04:55That was like a fire, like a forest fire.
05:00Because in two weeks, every computer, every PC in Moscow runs Tetris on it.
05:07This is one of the game that entertains you.
05:11If you had, you know, like a busy day, and you're back from the office, very tired,
05:16it's a game that you can play for five minutes, for 30 minutes, or even for 50.
05:21Just as long as you want to.
05:23I think why this game became so popular is probably,
05:27well, everything in your life is a combination of good idea, luck, and maybe good timing.
05:34You know, I didn't feel very good about my game,
05:37because many people playing instead of working.
05:40And my bosses in the computer center, well, they weren't upset,
05:45but they kind of look at me like a small kid which does something not very appropriate, you know.
05:52The popularity of Tetris soon catches on beyond the Soviet border.
05:57In two weeks or three weeks, we start receiving computers,
06:02the clone of PC computers from Bulgaria, from the other country,
06:07with Tetris on the hard drives.
06:09So the game steps over the borders.
06:13And captures the attention of a visiting entrepreneur named Robert Stein in 1986.
06:18Robert Stein has his own company called Andromeda Software.
06:22He did work with his former colleagues in Hungary,
06:26and probably they showed him this game, and he was very interested.
06:29Robert Stein has got to be considered one of the unfortunate victims of video games.
06:34He got and put many people in a lot of trouble.
06:39And the simple game of falling blocks soon finds itself in a complex situation.
06:55Immediately after Tetris first catches his eyes,
06:57Robert Stein introduces the game to prospective game publishers.
07:01In the case of Tetris, he came to realize he'd found a gold mine.
07:06What he didn't realize was that he'd found a haunted gold mine.
07:09Stein flies to Russia to secure the rights to Tetris from Alexey Pajanov.
07:13To a certain degree in the computer game business, it was still a fairly naive business.
07:18A lot of business done in the late 80s in what was still a very immature business, barely over 10
07:25years old,
07:26was contracts written on a napkin or a handshake.
07:30In 1986, Spectrum Holobytes' Gilman Louie and Phil Adams see a demo of the game
07:34and immediately strike a deal with Stein.
07:36There had never really been a product release that had been developed in the Soviet Union,
07:39so we wanted to make sure we got the proper rights to the proper people
07:43and we emphasized that to Robert Stein,
07:45and he is certainly animated that he had the ability to give those particular rights.
07:50First of all, wow, Stein pretended that I already agree on everything by replying to him.
07:58You know, I'm not sure what Stein could have done to save everything.
08:00Clearly he was overextending himself.
08:02He was promising people that he had all the rights even before he did have them.
08:07And that was a problem.
08:08Unaware that the rights were not secured by Stein,
08:11Spectrum Holobyte releases the game for the PC in 1988.
08:15It was a novelty. It was unique and new,
08:18and we were dealing with Glasnost and Korbachev and Reagan and that whole time period.
08:23ELORG, the Ministry for Import and Export,
08:26eventually takes over Tetris negotiations that same year.
08:29ELORG at that time was kind of a typical Soviet organization
08:32because they have a contact with foreigners and foreign companies and everything,
08:37I'm pretty sure that they had a very strong KGB influence.
08:42ELORG was this ministry that dealt with exportation.
08:46The guys at ELORG were hard hitters.
08:49To this day, if you go to the ELORG building in Moscow,
08:53there's a big gate in front of it.
08:55People warn you that you're getting photographed if you go to that gate.
08:58It was a big, shady organization, and the rumor always was that the people at the head of it were
09:04KGB.
09:05I don't know whether that's true or not, but what I do know is it was very secretive.
09:09And the trouble was just beginning.
09:11It was at one of those early CESs in January in Las Vegas that Gilman and I shared the product
09:17for the first time to Hank Rogers.
09:19That's kind of how the whole thing started.
09:21I played it and played it and played it until I put the high score on.
09:24I couldn't stop playing it.
09:25Tetris just kept me coming back.
09:27I kept coming back and playing more.
09:28And so that's when I got hooked on it.
09:31Fascinated by the game, Rogers approaches Gilman Louie of Spectrum Holobyte for rights to license the game in Japan.
09:36If you license a product from somebody, you rely on them to indemnify you and say that they have the
09:42rights.
09:42So he said they had the rights and that was good enough for me.
09:45Gilman and I then went to Japan because we knew of Hank's interest.
09:48We met with Hank and really kind of consummated a deal for him to do a Japanese version of the
09:55product on PC as well as a Nintendo version.
09:58Hank also wanted to do it in the United States and was interested in coin-op.
10:02And when we kind of called and talked to MirrorSoft about that, they said, look, we have a deal already
10:08in the works with Atari slash Tengen.
10:11What Spectrum Holobyte doesn't know is that their sister company, MirrorSoft, has already sold the rights for a Japanese version
10:17of Tetris to Tengen.
10:19I said, who the hell is Tengen? They have no share. They don't even exist in Japan.
10:26He says, yes, they traded Tetris for blasteroids.
10:30And I said, blasteroids? That sounds like a disease.
10:34I said, well, Gilman, you're just going to have to go back and talk to them because we have a
10:38deal.
10:39Unsatisfied with only the PC rights, an undeterred Rogers approaches Tengen for the console rights in Japan.
10:45I told my guys in Japan, I said, OK, I'm going to the States. You guys keep on working and
10:49not coming back until I have those rights.
10:51What I didn't know is the rest of the story. And the rest of the story is that, in fact,
10:55they didn't have those rights.
10:56They didn't have the rights that they licensed me or they didn't have the rights that they thought they got
10:59from MirrorSoft.
11:02Despite this, Tetris launches for the Famicom in December of 1988.
11:06Word of mouth slowly spreads in homes and offices everywhere.
11:10End of January, everybody was sold out everywhere.
11:13We ended up selling two million of that particular product in Japan over about a year.
11:19Driven by the success of Tetris on the Famicom, Rogers tries to obtain handheld rights for the game on Nintendo's
11:26new portable system, the Game Boy.
11:29When I looked at all the contracts, none of the contracts included handheld rights.
11:33So I went as far upstream as I could go, which was Robert Stein.
11:38The problem that he was having is that he had never properly gotten the deals for the rights that he
11:44already had or that he'd given to MirrorSoft.
11:47And so he had to clean that up. And the Russians were running him through the ringer saying, unless we
11:51clean this up, we're not giving you any new rights.
11:53When the Tetris rights were negotiated, we were part of a Maxwell corporation in MirrorSoft.
12:00So MirrorSoft actually signed the contract with Robert Stein.
12:04Kevin Maxwell, who was one of the Maxwell sons, eventually went back over to the Soviet Union to kind of
12:11do a more conclusive deal at that point from a rights standpoint.
12:16A scramble for Tetris rights ensues as Hank Rogers, Robert Stein and Kevin Maxwell of MirrorSoft coincidentally fly to Moscow
12:24at the same time.
12:26I got on the next plane to Moscow and went to track down the Russian agency or the Soviet agency
12:32that has the right to Tetris.
12:34Hank then went to Russia on his own and tracked down Alexei.
12:38That was a total adventure game. I was there and didn't know anything and I was asking people in the
12:45hotel or information or whatever to try to find out this in Russia or in the Soviet Union.
12:51Nobody gives you information. It was a very, very strange place.
12:55That's where the confusion came in of what rights had the Soviet Union granted to Stein, who then granted those
13:02to us.
13:03Maxwell went in and tried to tie up the rights. And I think Hank was playing with something that he
13:08knew was bigger.
13:09I was having meetings with the Russians and then they were having meetings with the Russians.
13:13We were all having, taking turns having meetings. And he says, well, why should we choose you over Kevin Maxwell?
13:20I said, well, I'm not somebody from a very rich family and I don't have a huge amount of money
13:24behind me.
13:25So I probably, I can't make an offer that as big as the offer that he can make you, but
13:31I can give you an honest share of the money.
13:34The Russians decide to give handheld rights to Hank Rogers.
13:37Oh, it was, it was absolutely high adventure. It was great. Sitting in a room with a bunch of Russians
13:42giving me the third degrees.
13:43However, the controversy continues after the Russians see a copy of Tetris for the Famicom.
13:48I said, this is my game in Japan. They said, well, we never licensed those rights to anybody.
13:54I said, oh my God, here I am. They're saying I'm a pirate because I never got, they never gave
14:00those rights out.
14:01And I'm, I'm in Soviet Union. They could just keep me here forever and send me to Siberia, you know.
14:06Who the hell knows what was going to happen? I, I, I certainly didn't.
14:11Roger soon discovers that Mirrorsoft and Tengen do not have the rights for the console version of Tetris.
14:16Well, at the end of the week, they're saying, you know, uh, Mr. Rogers, so would you like to license
14:21from us the console rights?
14:23And I said, hot potato.
14:27I knew for a fact that Atari was a huge litigious company.
14:30So I thought, oh my God, this is going to be a huge lawsuit.
14:34If I now go license the rights behind their back, how they'll interpret it.
14:39There's no way I can do this. I cannot fight this fight. So I need an ally.
14:42And the ally he finds is none other than Nintendo.
14:55By 1989, console rights to Tetris are up for grabs.
14:59With Hank Rogers, Robert Stein and Kevin Maxwell in Moscow vying for control, Rogers approaches game giant Nintendo for help.
15:06Well, at this time, Hank didn't feel that he could afford the war, but he brought Nintendo for next visit.
15:15A month later, I was in Moscow with Mr. Arakawa and Howard Lincoln, and they were doing a deal.
15:23Angered by what they think is double dealing, Mirrorsoft owner Robert Maxwell steps in and enlists the aid of Soviet
15:30President Mikhail Gorbachev.
15:32So they were buddies, and so when Gorbachev went to England to visit whatever, he had a meeting scheduled with
15:38Robert Maxwell.
15:39At this meeting, Maxwell was going to say, my son went to Moscow to get the Tetris rights, and some
15:45upstart from Japan got the rights instead.
15:48Do something about it. So he was going to apply the pressure, but we were saved by an earthquake in
15:52Armenia.
15:53And Gorbachev had to cut his trip short. So he never had that meeting with Maxwell. So there was a
16:00little bit of divine intervention that happened there.
16:04Nintendo eventually secures the rights and battles Tengen in court.
16:08These companies hated each other. They just did. So when it came to Tetris, Tengen was all about challenging Nintendo's
16:14hold on it.
16:15They get into it in court in San Francisco. They're in court not only for that lawsuit, but for patent
16:22infringement and copyright infringement.
16:24And now they're saying, okay, well, you don't have the right to sell this game.
16:28They had created several hundred thousand copies that I don't believe ever got distributed or got distributed for just a
16:33few days.
16:34As far as I know, some of the Tengen cartridges did get out to the market, but most of them
16:38ended up as landfill.
16:40After the dust settles, Tetris Fever continues to spread around the world, selling about three million copies on the NES
16:47in 1989.
16:49Tetris has got to be the ultimate every person game. That's the game that your grandmother can pick up and
16:54start playing.
16:54And I think that's what made Tetris really the game that it is today.
16:59In 1989, Tetris is bundled with the Game Boy, putting Tetris in the hands of eager players everywhere.
17:04I convinced Mr. Arakawa that Tetris should be the game packed in with Game Boy because everybody can play Tetris.
17:15And so they were smart about it and included Tetris.
17:18We sold over 30 million Tetris that way on Game Boy.
17:25It just went to a much broader, wider mass media market when it hit the Game Boy.
17:30The Game Boy brought it to a whole new crowd.
17:33Tetris became a household item.
17:35Looking to capitalize on the heels of Tetris' success, multiple sequels and offshoots spawned.
17:41There was Wordtress.
17:43There was Hattress.
17:47Probably the best Tetris lookalike, my favorite Tetris, was from Capcom.
17:53It was Super Puzzle Fighter.
17:59You're late!
18:00Ripping off Tetris became a thing of magic.
18:03Tetris became a genre unto itself.
18:06Maybe the most significant Tetris ripoff was Dr. Mario.
18:10Tetris sells over 65 million units worldwide.
18:15Yet creator Alexey Pajanov sees little of the early profits.
18:19Unfortunately, at the time when they were able to give some bonuses, I was out of computer center.
18:27And lots of people in computer center got some kind of goods like refrigerators, kind of microwaves and whatever.
18:36So he didn't get anything, and that bothered me. That really bothered me.
18:40Because, you know, I come from doing business here, and if somebody creates an intellectual property, they should benefit somehow.
18:46As the old Soviet Union collapses, Pajanov eventually moves to the US.
18:52I brought him to the States, got him his green card, and he worked for me.
18:55Now he works for Microsoft. He's got his citizenship.
18:58The rights reverted back to him in 1996.
19:01So this is the big change that happened.
19:04In 1996, all rights to Tetris were supposed to revert back to Alexey Pajanov.
19:08In addition to his Tetris titles, Pajanov continues to design puzzle games at Microsoft.
19:13Michael Jordan probably is a pretty good baseball player. Seriously.
19:18But he was so good at basketball that no one will ever notice that.
19:23Alexey Pajanov has done good games since Tetris.
19:27I worked on the very big title, which was very important for my internal kind of growing up.
19:37That was the title called Pandora's Box.
19:40Pandora's Box was a really wonderful game. No one will ever notice, because Tetris was so amazing.
19:48Tetris was the all-consuming game.
19:52Hexic and Mazzaki Blocks are his latest releases for MSN Games, a casual online gaming site.
19:58Hexic is a traditional puzzle game when you have hexagon pieces, and you kind of rotate them trying to put
20:06together some kind of blocks.
20:07The other game is Mazzaki Blocks. And the game is very relaxing.
20:16To date, Tetris remains one of the best-selling and most-played games. It is on over 60 platforms, with
20:21no end in sight.
20:23Tetris is in a wonderful position with mobile games, because Tetris is perfect for mobile games. It's a very simple
20:29game.
20:30Tetris is the number one game on mobile phones in North America.
20:32And its status only continues to grow.
20:36Sometimes I read science fiction or some novels. They use the word Tetris. It's a normal Russian word now. That's
20:45something I should be proud of.
20:47It's a big achievement to create something which, you know, is known everywhere in the world.
20:51Everybody knows what is an Egyptian pyramid, and everybody knows what is a Tetris.
20:55It's a part of the history. It's definitely part of our industry.
21:00I think it will still live and live, and I'm very glad about it.
21:11It all started with Easter eggs. Before you know it, I couldn't get enough of God mode.
21:15When I don't punch them in, I get a little weak.
21:18I thought you were supposed to go backwards in Pip-Fall.
21:20I can't even make it through two levels without infinite ammo.
21:22I can't remember a time when I didn't use codes.
21:24They made up the codes, I just used them.
21:26No one's gonna find out.
21:28Get the latest cheat codes and walk-through strategies for Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.
21:33Write the hominess give you got with a chance.
21:37Cheat season premiere, Tuesday night at 10 Eastern, 7 Pacific.
21:41I'll see you next time.
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