The Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris

For a decent documentary tracing the creation of Tetris, and the machinations that eventually brought it to the west (taking out part of Maxwell's Mirror empire along the way), find BBC4's "From Russia With Love". Last I checked it was available in full on Youtube, those of us in the UK can no doubt get it on iPlayer.

>Ironically, Tetris’s success began because the totalitarian Soviet regime did not recognize what we take for granted in the West: the freedom to publish. After Pajitnov adapted Golomb’s geometric discoveries for the nascent digital world, he had no choice but to distribute his game as a samizdat

Samizdat very specifically refers to censored texts. Yeah sure various versions of Tetris informally circulated around on floppies/tapes just like all other games and software, but that's not samizdat and had nothing to do with freedom to publish or censorship, there just weren't many viable ways to distribute the software to private users (and not many of those to begin with). It was way too long ago and I don't remember if any Soviet magazines like Radio had actual listings, but Tetris was a popular game in them.

"Good Old" Tetris online https://www.goodoldtetris.com/

> What’s more, it had been designed and coded in a state artificial-intelligence research lab tightly controlled by the KGB

Hmm, according to Wikipedia this happened in the Computational Centre for the USSR Science Academy. As far as I know it was never a "closed" institute, so the article is over dramatising it at least.

A sort of oddly opinionated article despite having little citation to it and being rather vague on events and timelines compared to some other pieces out there. I’d love to know why for example, the author finds it so clear that Pajitnov should not have won a copyright. I don’t have any stake in it myself, the claim just isn’t supported in the article. I think this is the 4th or 5th retelling of this story I’ve come across now.

It is weird how they use the letter Я ("ya") as a "Russian" version of R. The Russian (actually Cyrillic) version of R is "P". So I read the name with flipped "R" as "Tetyais" and it makes no sense.

Also I wonder how Vadim Gerasimov managed to obtain an IBM PC-compatible computer: where he got the money and what store would be selling that. This shows how unequal and unfair the society became when reforms began at the late USSR. In earlier USSR, everybody would equally and fairly have no computer.

> the Trump administration released a politically charged clone of Tetris called Build the Wall.

Knowing that the principle of Tetris is to destroy the walls that form when the shapes land, I start to wonder what was the winning condition of this version

Tetris: The Games People Play 2016 graphic novel by Box Brown is pretty good too.

> A major instrument of that victory had been the spread of Western culture

That's the political fluff. The important thing was the spread of capitalism and its accompanying legal institutions such as trademark and copyright - which Tetris definitely represented.