A puzzling phenomenon

Everyone has played it, or one of its manifold variations and rip-offs. Blocks of different shapes fall from the sky; you have to rotate and shunt them around so they fit perfectly together at the bottom, and then that horizontal line of blocks vanishes. This is Tetris, and it was created in 1984 by a Soviet mathematician called Alexei Pajitnov. But how it came to the West is a remarkably complicated cloak-and-dagger story, here given its first book-length treatment.

The narrative opens with all the bad bravado of a Dan Brown novel, as one of the several businessmen chasing the rights to the game flies into Moscow for a meeting with Elorg, a department of the Soviet trade ministry. Or, if you will, the ‘secretive trade group’ housed in a ‘sparse communist-era workplace’ somewhere in the ‘sprawling city’. Soon, however, the prose settles down, and we are led readably through potted biographies of Pajitnov himself and the other players.

One is an American named Henk Rogers, who moved to Japan and — with the release of his own game The Black Onyx — popularised the Dungeons-and-Dragons-style role-playing game in that country. Another is Robert Stein, a Brit of Hungarian extraction who specialised in software-licensing deals between East and West. There are the big beasts of the Japanese corporation Nintendo. And then there is Robert Maxwell. Cap’n Bob’s software subsidiary, Mirrorsoft, had been sold Tetris rights by Stein before Stein had got a signed contract from the Russians. When Pajitnov’s handlers eventually sold the most lucrative rights to Rogers and Nintendo instead, Maxwell complained personally to his friend Mikhail Gorbachev. But the supreme leader had a few more important things on his mind in 1989, and gave Maxwell the brush-off.