&#;Tetris&#; Creator Alexey Pajitnov and Company Co-Founder Henk Rogers Celebrate Game&#;s 40th Anniversary at Lucca Comic and Games Convention
As “Tetris” celebrates 40 years of falling blocks at the Lucca Comic and Games convention in Italy, Variety sat down with its creator Alexey Pajitnov and the Tetris company’s co-founder Henk Rogers to discuss the beginnings of the most successful computer game in the world.
Despite the difference in their appearance, Pajitnov, pale with a white beard, and Rogers, tan with a colorful trilby, make a formidable team who overcame great odds to bring their puzzle game – in which players pair and eliminate a series of multicolored falling blocks – to the world in
Such were the adventures, there’s even an Apple+ film “Tetris,” starring Taron Egerton and directed by Jon Baird. Pajitnov smiles at the memory: “Noah Pink [the screenwriter] was very attentive to our notes, but it was still a long and difficult fight with them, because they desperately need all this Hollywoodish bullshit.”
Rogers understands the compromises necessary: “Their job was to take a
Alexey Pajitnov
Russian-American computer engineer (born )
In this name that follows Eastern Slavic naming customs, the patronymic is Leonidovich and the family name is Pajitnov.
Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov[a] (born April 16, )[1] is a Russian and American computer engineer and video game designer.[2] He is best known for creating, designing, and developing Tetris in while working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre under the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (now the Russian Academy of Sciences).[3] After Tetris was released internationally in , he released a sequel in , entitled Welltris.
In , he moved to the United States and later became a U.S. citizen.[2] In , Pajitnov founded The Tetris Company alongside Dutch video game designer Henk Rogers. Despite the game's high popularity, Pajitnov did not receive royalties from Tetris prior to this time. (Soviet Union had disintegrated by ).[4]
Early life
[edit]Pajitnov was born to Russian parents, who were both writers, his father was an art critic, his mother was a journalist who wrote for both newspapers and a film magazine. It was thr
The Birth of Tetris and Its Early History
On June 6, , a pivotal moment in the history of video gaming occurred with the publication of Tetris. Created by Alexey Pajitnov, a software engineer at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Tetris was initially an innovative experiment that quickly evolved into a gaming phenomenon. Pajitnov, inspired by the classic Russian puzzle game &#;Pentominoes,&#; sought to create a digital version that would challenge players to arrange falling blocks, or tetrominoes, in complete lines without gaps. This simple yet addictive premise formed the cornerstone of Tetris&#;s unique appeal.
Pajitnov&#;s background as a Soviet software engineer was instrumental in the game&#;s creation. At the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre, he had access to the Electronika 60, a Soviet computer which, despite its limitations, served as the initial platform for Tetris. The game’s early development was a collaborative effort, with key contributions from Vadim Gerasimov, a young programmer who helped port Tetris to the IBM PC, thus facilitating its spread beyond the Soviet Union.
The initial reception of Tetris in the Soviet Union was promisi
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