Alexey Pajitnov, creator of Tetris, didn’t receive a penny from his creation until 1996

In 1984, Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris while working for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center of the Soviet Academy of Science as a project to prove that he could do it, in other words, he developed it just for fun. He based it on a game called pentominoes.

He called it Tetris and passed it over to some of his coworkers, who loved it and started sharing it among themselves.

The game made its way to the hands of Robert Stein who tracked it down to Pajitnov and discovered that its distribution would be in charge of the Soviet agency known as Elorg that was in charge of administering every piece of software developed in the Soviet Union. After Stein won the distribution rights, he, in turn, licensed it in the U.S. and U.K.

At the same time, Bullet Proof Software intended to distribute the game for gaming consoles, and while in talkies with Elorg, they discovered that Stein had only the right to distribute the game on personal computers and not on handheld devices, coin-operated video games, and consoles.

Stein and Bullet Proof Software got into a legal battle for the rights, and eventually the latter won, securing the future of Tetris for Nintendo.

Pajotnov saw the success of his creation without reaping any of the benefits until 1996 when Elorg was dissolved and the rights of the game were returned to the creator, after more than a decade of people profiting from his creation

Firstly published for https://commonplaces.io/explore/post/5ffd0f1491d8c00017ca0b7d