alt Hacker News>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.
Replies
> Samizdat very specifically refers to censored texts.
No, samizdat was not just about censored texts. The larger point of samizdat is specifically about viable ways to distribute your stuff even if it was not seen even by a single censor. It was even used for cooking recipes and fanzines.
The point is that in USSR it was not possible for an ordinary person to publish anything because the equipment and how to use it was a state secret tightly controlled by KGB. If you wanted to publish something you made and didn't have a cozy relationship with the communist party, samizdat was the only option.
did not make it fast enough
The parent comment already removed the part about vinyl recordings, but I still really want to point out that people in the USSR had to be creative (have to be even now) to bypass censorship.
This created things like roentgenizdat or "ribs" (gramophone recordings made from polyester X-ray films)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribs_(recordings)