<FONT COLOR=#000FFF><H1>Tetris skapare</H1></FONTcolor>
Before there was glasnost, before there was perestroika, there was Tetris.
This deceptively simple, completely addictive puzzle game and its progeny continue to captivate millions around the world.
Tetris creator, Alexey Pajitnov, was inspired to become a mathematician by a lifelong love of puzzles.
In 1985, Pajitnov was a specialist in computer sciences at the Computer Center of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
While at the Computer Center (also known as AcademySoft), Alexey still played with puzzles, but in a far different context.
While working as a programmer in the field of speech recognition and artificial intelligence, Pajitov often programmed games as simple tasks to test new equipment. On this occasion, he chose the traditional puzzle Pentamino which required placement of 12 different-shaped pieces formed out of five squares to be arranged in a certain order in a box.
Pajitnov remembers the moment he knew he had a hit game.
"When I wrote the program for rotation of pieces and I saw how it worked, poomph! I knew it would be great in real time," he reminisces.
He also realized the 12-5 combination was too much for real time, so he reduced the program to seven shapes of four square blocks. Thus the name Tetris, taken from tetra, the Greek word for "four." It took him only two weeks to program the prototype.
Pajitnov, however, was programming on an old Russian computer without graphics, in Pascal.
While his colleagues were rabid about the game, Pajitnov realized he would reach a wider audience if the game could be converted to run on the IBM PC.
Since he had little experience with the Western machine, he enlisted the help of his friend, Vadim Gerasimov, a 16 year old "hacker" ; who mastered the PC in a month. Soon after, a PC version of Tetris was introduced and spread like wildfire throughout Moscow. Pajitnov recalls , "At that time there was no software market in Russia, only the distribution of unauthorized copies. Within weeks, the game was being played on every PC in Moscow!"
It took much longer for Tetris to arrive in America.
A Hungarian programming consortium, via their London agent, Andromeda Software Ltd., sold the U.S. Tetris PC rights to Spectrum Holobyte in Alameda, California. For Tetris, Spectrum added rich, color graphics and music based on traditional Russian themes.
At the 1989 Software Publishers Association Awards, the "Oscars" for the software industry, Tetris set records when it won an unprecedented four Excellence in Software Awards.
However, Tetris experienced perhaps it's greatest success on Nintendo's Game Boy system, selling well over 30 million copies on this system alone.
The man responsible for heading to Russia and tracking down Alexey Pajitnov and the console system rights to Tetris was entrepreneur Henk Rogers.
Rogers and his company Bullet-Proof Software were also responsible for several important game innovations, including the Soft Drop and Line Clearing Bonuses. Alexey and Henk have remained lifelong friends
While Tetris made Pajitnov a sort of folk hero, the phenomenally successful game did not make him rich. The royalties for the original Tetris went to the Academy and the Soviet Ministry of Commerce. Comments Pajitnov, "I said, if you can't give me money, thats OK. Just help to get this game to the West. And they did."
In 1996, with the help of entrepreneur Henk Rogers, The Tetris Company, LLC. was organized.
Under this new structure, Alexey would now receive a royalty on sales of all Tetris products. Blue Planet Software, Inc., San Francisco, California, is charged with development, licensing and marketing for all Tetris products.
The company protects the Tetris brand and insures Alexey's creation remains popular for years to come.
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