Who Invented Tetris?

Alexey Pajitnov wrote the original in 1984 at a Soviet research institute, on a computer that could not draw graphics.

The game was written by Alexey Pajitnov, a researcher at the Computer Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, in 1984. He was working on speech recognition and artificial intelligence; the falling-blocks program was made in his own time, on institute hardware, as an experiment in what made a puzzle compelling.

The puzzle that came before it

Pajitnov's starting point was pentominoes — the twelve shapes you can make from five squares, a staple of recreational mathematics. He wanted to build something interactive around them, but twelve five-square pieces proved too much for a computer of that era to handle at speed and too much for a player to track. Cutting down to four squares gave seven shapes, which turned out to be the right number: enough variety to stay interesting, few enough to hold in your head.

Adding gravity was the decisive move. A static puzzle about fitting shapes is a pleasant diversion. The same puzzle with a clock attached becomes something you cannot put down.

Two collaborators

Pajitnov was not working entirely alone. Dmitry Pavlovsky, a colleague, was involved in the early development, and Vadim Gerasimov, a sixteen-year- old attached to the centre, wrote the port that let the game spread — the version for the IBM PC, with colour, that could be copied onto a floppy disk and carried out of the building.

That distinction matters. Pajitnov designed the game; Gerasimov's port is what made it portable, and portability is the whole story of what happened next.

What he did not get

For roughly the first decade of the game's commercial life, Pajitnov earned nothing from it. He had written it on state equipment as a state employee, and under Soviet arrangements the rights sat with the state. Companies fought expensive legal battles over a property whose author was drawing an institutional salary. He did not begin to earn from his own work until the mid-1990s, when the rights reverted to him and he co-founded a company to manage them.

Why the story keeps being retold

It is an unusually good story: a program made for fun, in a country with no software industry to speak of, that escaped through informal copying, became one of the most commercially valuable ideas in entertainment, and left its author out of the proceeds for years. The details are genuinely contested in places — several people have a claim to part of the narrative, and their accounts do not always agree.

Common questions

When was Tetris created?

Alexey Pajitnov wrote the original version in 1984 at the Computer Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

Did Alexey Pajitnov get paid for Tetris?

Not for roughly the first decade. He wrote it as a state employee on state equipment, so the rights sat with the Soviet state. He began earning from the game in the mid-1990s after the rights reverted to him.

What inspired Tetris?

Pentominoes — the twelve shapes made from five squares, a classic recreational-mathematics puzzle. Pajitnov reduced them to four-square shapes, giving seven pieces, and added gravity.