The Tetris Company

And so therefore, he would never have had the rights to the game to begin with.

And so this kind of sanitized version that the Tetris company pushed just didn't make sense to me at all.

And so I wanted to know more about it.

And I started kind of this investigative research about what actually happened at the time of the Soviet Union collapse and what happened to these rights.

and then it goes to the West and it clashes with this kind of like Western free market capitalist economy, right? And it happens basically exactly at the time that the Soviet Union is collapsing and becoming, you know, engaging with capitalist markets, right? which creates a lot of tensions.

So there's the story of this contrast.

There's a second contrast, I think, in the story that is fascinating, which is the contrast between the official corporate story of a very nice narrative of this innocent Russian guy who designs this game and is very innocent, and he owns it the whole time, And then a much, much darker side to the story, the fact, for example, that despite what the Tetris company, which currently owns the right, has claimed, Alex Pachitnov did not actually design these pieces.

What they call tetriminos are actually tetrominos, and these are geometrical forms that are made of four squares of equal size joined together by one edge.

Uh, and so therefore, he could never have had the rights to the game to begin with.

And so this kind of sanitized version that the Tetris company pushed just didn't make sense to me at all.

And so I wanted to know more about it, and I started kind of this investigative, uh, research about what actually happened at the time the Soviet Union collapsed, uh, and what happened to these rights.

Yeah, excellent bridge to my next question then, because your book's so interesting because it tells this story of how Tetris, a game designed in a Soviet computer lab monitored by the KGB, jumped the wall to become a global blockbuster, global phenomenon.

Um, so there's the story of this contrast.

There's a second contrast, I think, in the story that is fascinating, which is the contrast between the official corporate story of a very nice narrative of this innocent Russian guy who designs this game and is, you know, very innocent and he owns it the whole time, um, and then a much, much darker side to the story.

Uh, the fact, for example, that despite what the Tetris company, which currently owns the right, has claimed, Alex Pajitnov did not actually design these pieces.

Uh, the, what they call tetriminós are actually tetraominós, and these are, um, geometrical forms that are made of four squares of equal size joined together by one edge, and there's only five of them if you flip two of them and make seven.