The Story Behind 'Tetris' Is WAY More Dramatic Than You'd Think

The '80s were defined by three things: terrible fashion sense, grunge-y music and Tetris.

The game was simple enough and it literally went VIRAL all over the world. BUT the story of how it came to be is ACTUALLY insane. 

They should be making a movie about THIS rather than the game itself.

If you've been living under a rock since World War 2... 

This is Tetris. The game is pretty simple, falling four-clock pieces fall and you have to stack them RIGHT to get rid of them as long as you can.

We'll get to why it's called Tetris that in a sec.

But the story actually involves lots of ACTUAL Russian Presidents, the Soviet Union and the KGB.

Seriously.

It started in 1984 Soviet Russia when a computer engineer named Alexey Pajitnov came up with it while working on a giant "proto-computer" called Elektronika 60.

He made his Rubles (dough, moolah) at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. "The program wasn't complicated," Pajitnov told the Guardian in 2009. "There was no scoring, no levels. But I started playing and I couldn't stop. That was it."

But the problem was private business was ILLEGAL and if he got caught... INSTA-GULAG. (Probably)

So he secretly started meeting with another colleague (Dmitry Pavlovsky) and a 16-year-old kid who could computer program and...

They took the game and ported it from the bulky Elektronika 60 to the PC that everyone was using. Bill Gates, thanks bro.

Plus color is kinda cool so having a system that had color graphics made the game THAT much better.

So the Tetris creators started SECRETLY sharing the PC version of the game with people they could trust who wouldn't rat them out.

The game went freakin' viral. 

Tetris was SMUGGLED out of the Soviet Union and made it's way into Hungary and boom: It was all over EUROPE.

But that's when the KGB stepped in...

Mirrorsoft (NOT Microsoft) was a British software company that published the game but it'd bought the licence to do that from ANOTHER company that shouldn't have been doing that...

You see, that other company (Andromeda) TECHNICALLY didn't have a proper deal with either the game's creator or the Soviet government.

For a while, there was MASSIVE fight over who owned the rights: was it UK's Mirrorsoft? Or Russia's Elorg AKA the Russian Government, which was where the game was first developed?

But then there was a RANDOM new challenger appeared!

In 1988, Henk Rogers (guy covered in arrows) was a dutch video game designer developed a Tetris game that could be played on the Game Boy so he FLEW to Moscow ILLEGALLY to get the rights from the Russians.

And that led to the KGB stepping in...

You see, Rogers went there on a tourist visa instead of a business one. But he still got to make his CASE directly with the Russian government's company to make a deal.

 But he wasn't the only company doing the same thing! Mirrorsoft and Andromeda went to Russia to do the EXACT same thing.

At the end of it all Rogers was trapped in a two-hour interview with the KGB, businessmen and lawyers and WON them over.

The legal fight wouldn't be over but Rogers had won most of the marbles.

PS turns out that the owner of Mirrorsoft went to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbochev DIRECTLY to try and destroy the deal but no dice.

Plus, years later, the FBI suggests that the now-deceased Mirrorsoft owner may have been a Russian Spy. So there's that.

COMMENT and tell us how this story is NUTS. And if you appreciate Tetristhat much more!