The Soviet Computing World the Game Came From

No software industry, no home market, no way to sell a program — and a culture of copying that let one escape.

To understand how the game spread, it helps to know what software was in the Soviet Union in 1984, because almost none of the assumptions a Western reader brings apply.

No industry to speak of

There was no commercial software market. Programs were written at institutes, ministries and enterprises, by salaried staff, for internal use. Nobody sold software to individuals because there were essentially no individuals with computers to sell it to.

Consequently there was no concept of software as personal property. A program you wrote at work belonged to the institution, in the same uncontroversial way that a report you wrote belonged to it.

Hardware

Much of it was domestically produced and modelled on Western designs — the Elektronika 60, on which the game was written, is broadly comparable to a DEC PDP-11. These were institutional machines: shared, scheduled, kept in rooms with other institutional machines.

The idea of a personal computer as a household object, already established in the West by 1984, was years away.

A culture of copying

With no market, sharing was the only distribution mechanism there was. If you wrote something useful or entertaining, you gave it to colleagues. They gave it to theirs. Nobody was losing revenue because there was no revenue.

That culture is exactly why the game travelled as fast as it did. In a Western context, a program that good would have been packaged and sold, with copying actively discouraged. Here, copying was simply how software moved — and it moved through institutes, then across borders into Hungary, then west.

The collision

What made the subsequent legal mess possible was two systems meeting with no shared vocabulary. Western publishers arrived asking who owned it, expecting an answer in the form of a rights holder with a signature. The answer was a state agency operating on entirely different premises about what was being asked.

Neither side was being unreasonable. They had no common ground on which the question made the same sense.

What it produced

A program written for fun, given away freely because that was the norm, which escaped through informal copying, and then had a Western commercial apparatus assemble itself around it retroactively — complete with litigation over rights nobody had thought to define, because in the place it came from the question had never needed asking.

Read next

• Who Invented Tetris?Alexey Pajitnov wrote the original in 1984 at a Soviet research institute, on a computer that could not draw graphics.
• Where the Name "Tetris" Comes FromA Greek numeral prefix welded to the name of a racquet sport, because the author liked both.
• The First Version Ran on a Computer That Could Not DrawThe Elektronika 60 had no graphics mode, so the original pieces were built out of punctuation marks.
• How the Game Escaped the Soviet UnionIt spread by informal copying, reached Hungary, and was picked up by a Western agent before anyone had signed anything.
• Combo Pressure: Why Small Attacks Can Beat Big OnesContinuous garbage denies your opponent the quiet piece they need to survive.
• Playing Offline and Installing ItA service worker caches the whole game, so it runs with no connection and can be added to your home screen.