The Business Of Tetris

The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World,

- Laura W. Geller

Decades before you lost your first few hours to Candy Crush, Tetris had cast its spell over video game players worldwide. The concept of Tetris, which originated deep behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, is deceptively simple: You manipulate different shapes of bricks, or tetronimoes, as they fall at an increasingly fast pace, to form rows of horizontal lines. A Russian folk tune plays in the background. But the game can quickly turn on you — one wrong move and the pieces start to pile up. The game ends, and then you play again, and again, and again.

Unlike many modern addictive games, Tetris has no plot, no cute animals, and no lifelike animation. And yet Tetris is one of the most popular video games of all time. It has been downloaded more than 500 million times on mobile devices, and authorized copies have earned close to US$1 billion in total sales. Not bad for a piece of code that traces its origins to the waning days of the Soviet Union.

Tetris was the brainchild of a Soviet engineer, Alexey Pajitnov, working on an outdated desktop computer at the Russian Academy of Sciences. When he invented the game in 1984, Pajitnov and his colleagues knew it was special — it spread quickly throughout the academy by word of mouth and floppy disk, like a piece of samizdat. But pre-glasnost and pre-perestroika, the notion of taking Tetris outside the country, let alone commercializing it, was difficult even to imagine.