The Bizarre, Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris

Behind the beloved game lies a struggle over mathematical ideas, erased collaborators, offshore millions, and copyright power.Opening screen of the Atari-Tengen Tetris port. The designer made sure to highlight the Soviet origins of the game. Listen to this article 0:00 Earlier this month, the Trump administration released a politically charged clone of Tetris called Build the Wall. The Tetris Company (TTC), which owns the rights to the iconic video game, swiftly responded with a thinly veiled legal threat, writing on X: “We take copyright infringement very seriously.” Four days later, the White House took down the game without explanation.Whether TTC’s post prompted the removal is unknown. But the episode points to a broader and more dubious claim advanced by the company: that it holds exclusive rights to what it misleadingly refers to as “Tetris” pieces — and, more broadly, to any electronic puzzle that involves falling shapes. The claim relies on a flawed ruling rendered in 2012 in Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc., a case in which a federal judge decreed that geometric forms made of four equal-sized squares, each joined together with at least one other square along an edge, were copyrighted and belonged to Russian engineer Alexei Pajitnov and game designer and entrepreneur Henk Rogers, collectively organized as TTC.The problem: Pajitnov did not design these puzzle pieces, known as tetrominoes, and despite TTC’s relentless public-relations campaign to the contrary, they are not unique to Tetris. In fact, famed Caltech mathematician Solomon Golomb first described them in 1953 during a talk at the Harvard Mathematics Club, and they were later popularized in Scientific American.The Tetris pieces were disclosed in the mathematics literature by Solomon Golomb as early as 1953, and subsequently were popularized, here in Scientific American in 1959: notice, in the left column of the right page, the five core tetrominoes: the straight tetromino, the square tetromino, the T-tetromino, and the flippable L-and skew tetrominoes. Source: Martin Gardner, “The Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles & Diversions” (Simon & Schuster, 1959)But TTC’s false claim to originality is only one aspect of the game’s dark and bizarre history.Rewind to 1993. First Lady Hillary Clinton is pictured aboard an Air Force plane, absorbed in her Game Boy, playing Tetris. The black-and-white White House photograph doesn’t show the cartridge clearly enough to make out the details, but Clinton’s Staff Secretary, Robert Russo, confirmed to me that she was indeed playing the game.Hillary Rodham Clinton plays Game Boy Tetris on her flight from Austin, Texas, to Washington, DC, on April 6, 1993. Photo credit: Ralph Alswang / William J. Clinton Presidential Library and MuseumThe irony was great. The United States was boasting that it had just won the Cold War. A major instrument of that victory had been the spread of Western culture throughout the Eastern bloc through films, television, popular music, and other media. Yet the video game that had made it aboard the First Lady’s plane, and into a vast number of U.S. and Western-European households, was not an American product, but a Soviet one. What’s more, it had been designed and coded in a state artificial-intelligence research lab tightly controlled by the KGB, the dreaded secret police of the Russian dictatorship, at a time when U.S. President Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.” The story of the commercial success of Tetris is the poster child for two systems radically opposed in history, culture, economics, and politics. In fact, it arises out of this opposition.Ironically, Tetris’s success began because the totalitarian Soviet regime did not recognize what we take for granted in the West: the freedom to publish. After Pajitnov adapted Golomb’s geometric discoveries for the nascent digital world, he had no choice but to distribute his game as a samizdat, a self-published underground cultural good passed on the sly — except that rather than being mimeographed on paper like its illustrious sibling, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” Pajitnov’s samizdat got passed around on floppy disks.The game rapidly made its way through the Eastern bloc before reaching Hungary, where British software entrepreneur Robert Stein recognized its commercial potential. From there, its licensing history became notoriously tangled. Rights to various versions passed, under sometimes competing claims, through the Robert Maxwell group, Atari, Sega, and finally to Nintendo, which packaged Tetris as the Game Boy’s “killer app.” By then, the USSR had taken control of the game through its technology export agency, ELORG, run by a stern bureaucrat, Nikolai Belikov. The micro-computers, Nintendo, and coin-op versions sold in the West filled the Communist Party’s coffers handsomely.Screenshot of a 2019 emulated version of Electronika 60 Tetris (the original version). All of the gameplay, as in the original, is rendered using text symbols such as periods and brackets. Source: Old Classic Retro Gaming, 2019. Note that there exist other emulations. In particular, in 2024, Digital Eclipse released Tetris Forever, under license from The Tetris Company. The above screenshot is not from that release.And then, the Berlin Wall collapsed. The floodgates of capitalism — and, in Russia’s case, mayhem — opened. At the game of perestroika (Gorbachev) and privatization (Yeltsin), the rule of law and Russia lost. Out of the resulting confusion emerged two competing claims to ownership of Tetris: one advanced by Patjinov and the other by Nikolai Belikov.Despite the fact that the USSR generally did not recognize private property, or the copyrightability of software for that matter, or the fact that he had designed the game on his work time using his work computer, Pajitnov, who by then had moved to the U.S., cast himself as the victim and claimed that the game’s copyright had been his all along. The appeal to pity was powerful and should not have survived reasonable legal scrutiny, but thanks to a few sympathetic judges, it did.In 1988, U.S. company Spectrum HoloByte capitalized on Cold War tensions to market the game.Meanwhile, the nomenklatura man in charge of exporting the game on behalf of the USSR pulled a rather bold trick: He created a corporation in Delaware, also conveniently named ELORG, and, as head of Soviet ELORG, assigned the Tetris rights to that American shell. This was most likely done through a backroom deal with Yeltsin’s people and the KGB, although specific details have not been documented.What has been documented is that in exchange, Belikov owed Soviet generals and colonels, now organized as a mafia entangled with the nascent Russian state, 50 percent of the Tetris proceeds. In grand oligarch fashion, Belikov then crossed the Russians and hid the proceeds through a flurry of shell corporations and accounts in the U.S., Africa, the Grand Cayman Islands, and the Bahamas. Lest this sound too much like a spy movie to be true, years of litigation produced Belikov’s own testimony, along with detailed charts of the opaque setup.A chart prepared as part of a litigation document. Notice that ELORG, the Delaware company, is owned by an opaque Cayman Islands trust, itself controlled by Belikov. Source: Nikolay Belikov, Techno-TM Zao v. Maryann Huhs and Roy Huhs, R-Amtech International, Inc., Techno-TM LLC, Suncadia Properties LLC, 12-2-23972-0 SEA, Superior Court of the State of Washington, County of King (2014).After the Soviet Union collapsed, Belikov and Patjinov — who by then had teamed up with Nintendo’s fixer Henk Rogers — sued each other over the rights to the game in federal court in New York. Pajitnov had very little going for him. The USSR did not recognize software copyright, or any private property for that matter other than for household pots and pans. Further, he developed the game on his work computer during work hours, which under U.S. legal principles would make it his employer’s property.Belikov, for his part, claimed that ELORG, a Soviet state agency, had miraculously morphed into the Delaware company he had formed, and that he therefore owned the rights. When the new Russian state, entangled in its own domestic mess, failed to react, Pajitnov, Rogers, and Belikov settled. The pair of friends would get the rights, while the bureaucrat received $15 million, which he quickly made disappear from his homeland’s sight through an elaborate web of offshore corporate shells and a Panamanian passport he bought for $200,000 for the occasion.Pajitnov and Rogers also proceeded to erase anything that would come in the way of Pajitnov’s miraculous claim of original exclusive ownership. That included a young Soviet programmer named Vadim Gerasimov. In 1985, Gerasimov worked closely with Pajitnov to develop the game and single-handedly designed and coded the MS-DOS port (the original game had been coded by Pajitnov on an arcane Russian minicomputer, the Electronika 60). Although Pajitnov had originally credited Gerasimov for his work (including in an under-oath testimony in U.S. court), he later testified (also under oath) that he was the sole author. Rogers played his part in supporting his friend and changed the credits on the console port he developed for the Nintendo Famicom to erase any mention of Gerasimov. The before-and-after screenshots of the credits are telling.Pajitnov (seated) and Gerasimov, with Gerasimov’s Version 3.12 of Tetris for MS-DOS on the screen. Source: Vadim GerasimovCopyright notice of the first Japanese Famicom release. Gerasimov is credited for the Original Design and Program. Photo credit: Julien MaillandThe copyright notice for the Japanese Famicom version was subsequently changed. Gerasimov was erased. Photo credit: Julien MaillandBy the mid-1990s, Pajitnov and Rogers seemed to have a firm grip on the Tetris intellectual property.