Who invented Tetris?
The inventor of Tetris is Alexey Pajitnov, and his story is as unusual as the game itself: a Soviet researcher who made one of the world's most beloved games and was paid almost nothing for it at first.
Below you will find the short version first, then a fuller walkthrough with clear Tetris examples, a few closely related questions, and a link to try it yourself. Everything here is free to play right in your browser.
Alexey Pajitnov
Pajitnov worked at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where he programmed puzzles to test hardware. Inspired by a set of pentomino puzzle pieces he loved, he simplified the idea to four-cell shapes and built Tetris in 1985. The rest of his creation is traced in the history question.
Building the first version
The original ran on an Electronika 60, a text terminal so basic that the pieces were drawn from bracket characters rather than graphics. A young programmer named Vadim Gerasimov soon ported it to the IBM PC with color, and that PC version is what spread. Dmitry Pavlovsky was part of the small circle around its early development.
Getting paid, eventually
Because Pajitnov created the game on government equipment, the Soviet state held the rights and he earned nothing from its massive early success. Only in the 1990s, after emigrating and co-founding The Tetris Company, did he finally begin to profit from his own invention. His name is now permanently attached to one of gaming's true classics, as noted in the glossary.
People also ask
What is the history of Tetris?
Tetris was created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov on a computer at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. It spread out of the USSR informally, sparked tangled international licensing battles in the late 1980s, and became a worldwide phenomenon when Nintendo bundled it with the Game Boy in 1989. The Tetris Company has managed the brand since the 1990s.
Why is it called Tetris?
The name Tetris blends two words. The first is tetra, the Greek prefix for four, because every piece is made of exactly four cells. The second is tennis, the favorite sport of inventor Alexey Pajitnov. He combined the two into Tetris, and the four-based name has fit the game perfectly ever since.
What is a tetromino?
A tetromino is a geometric shape made of four squares joined edge to edge. Counting rotations as the same shape, there are five free tetrominoes, but Tetris treats mirror images as different, giving the seven pieces you play with. The word comes from tetra, the Greek for four.