History of the genre

ELORG and the Most Confusing Licence in Games

A Soviet state agency, a chain of Western sublicences, and a fight over what the word "computer" means.

ELORG — Elektronorgtechnica — was the Soviet state organisation with authority over software crossing the country's borders. When Western publishers wanted the falling-blocks game, ELORG was who they ultimately had to deal with, whether or not they realised it.

The licensing agent who first took the game west sublicensed it onward through several publishers, each of whom sublicensed further into particular territories and platforms. Every link in that chain depended on the first one being sound. It was not clear that it was.

By the late 1980s versions were on sale for home computers across Europe and North America, produced by publishers who each believed they held valid rights, under agreements resting on a foundation nobody had examined closely.

The word that mattered

The crucial ambiguity was what a licence for "computer" versions actually covered. In the Western market of 1988 the distinction between a home computer, a games console and a handheld device felt self-evident. In the paperwork it was not defined with anything like that precision.

So when the game appeared on consoles and then on a handheld, the question became whether those rights had ever been granted — or whether they had simply been assumed, and were still sitting unsold with ELORG in Moscow.

They were still sitting with ELORG. Someone eventually flew there and asked.

What negotiating with a state agency was like

Western executives arriving in Moscow found a counterparty operating on different assumptions entirely. ELORG was not seeking to maximise a share price. Its officials were state employees, cautious about foreign contracts, and unimpressed by claims of prior agreements they had not signed.

The negotiations that followed produced clean, explicit rights for handheld and console versions — and left several publishers holding agreements that turned out to cover less than they had paid for.

The bill

The resulting disputes ran through the courts, cost enormous sums, and ended with recalled cartridges and a rewritten map of who could publish what. The author of the game, still on an institute salary, received none of it.

PLAY TETERI ALL ARTICLES