When was tetris invented

Follow Twitter Instagram Facebook. What is the Tetris Effect? Wonder What's Next? KICK off your day the right way tomorrow with a visit to Wonderopolis!

Try It Out Find an adult who can help you keep learning with the activities below: Have you ever played Tetris? Give it a try today! Grab an adult to help you and play Tetris online. Do you like this game? Can you see why people spend so much time playing it? Discuss with a friend or family member. Are you interested in designing video games? Get started with code. If you enjoyed this activity, ask a grown-up to help you find more ways to build games for free on the code.

Spend more time learning about video games today. Did you get it? Test your knowledge. Wonder Words combat trauma popular organize engineer platforms hallucinations cognitive horizontal Take the Wonder Word Challenge. Join the Discussion. The game was first programmed for the Electronika 60, which was an imitation of the west's PDP Unfortunately, this computer was already outdated by the time it was cloned and brought to the Soviet Union.

On the bright side, it did not take a lot of processing power to make Tetris run, which is a part of its genius. Getting Tetris published in the west was a huge issue. Rights became a headache with huge legal ramifications when Robert Stein sold the publishing rights before actually securing the rights.

In , the issues were smoothed out, but this did not secure consoles or arcade machines. Henk Rogers eventually secured the rights for consoles for Nintendo , which led to its iconic release alongside the Game Boy , a version that includes multiplayer.

As Tetris was made during company time in the Soviet Union, Alexey Pajitnov did not receive any financial compensation for creating one of the most legendary games of all time. He almost got in some serious trouble when it was found out he was potentially negotiating business transactions with Robert Stein. Only in did the creator eventually start receiving royalties. While Tetris is the game everybody talks about, sequels actually came to fruition.

The first of these was Welltris , which retains the same concept but adds a three-dimensional angle. The perspective is shown from the top looking down instead of from the side. Style Origins View All. Read more unknown and curious design origin stories here. Like many of history's greatest ideas, Tetris came about quite unintentionally. Alexey Pajitnov was a software engineer at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, tasked with testing a new type of computer, the Electronika To do so, he wrote a simple game based on a puzzle from his childhood.

It would help assess how powerful the computer was -- and provide a bit of fun. Little did he know that the resulting game would go on to become one of the greatest, most addictive and most successful of all time. It was June 6, , and Tetris had just started its journey from behind the Iron Curtain. The original version of Tetris. Tetris is a puzzle game in which geometric shapes called "tetrominoes" fall down onto a playing field, and the player has to arrange them to form gapless lines.

Pajitnov took inspiration from pentomino, a classic puzzle game consisting of all the different shapes that can be made by combining five squares -- 12 in total -- with the goal of arranging them in a wooden box like a jigsaw puzzle. To simplify things, he knocked that down to four squares, thus reducing the number of shapes from 12 to seven. He called the game Tetris, combining the Greek numeral "tetra" meaning four and tennis, his favorite sport.

Pajitnov himself was immediately hooked. Tetris was inspired by pentomino, a classic board game. Credit: Shutterstock. But creating a video game in Soviet Russia at the height of the Cold War was far from easy. It was only through the sheer brilliance of its design that Tetris was transformed from a quirky test program into a worldwide phenomenon.

Like a virus, Tetris was spreading its addictive properties from computer to computer. Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Mirrorsoft was one of many computer software companies started up in the British computer boom of the s.

Its founder members were Jim Mackonochie and Robert Maxwell, the latter being the flamboyant publishing tycoon whose empire collapsed following his death in Nevertheless, Tetris was an immediate hit, earning ecstatic reviews and selling in healthy quantities. The problem was, so did several other influential industry figures across America, Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union.

Behind the iron curtain, a state-owned company called Elektronorgtechnica or Elorg for short had taken over the responsibility of selling the rights to Tetris overseas. Because Pajitnov and his colleagues had created Tetris while working for the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Tetris effectively belonged to the state, and by extension, Elorg. But first, Rogers had to get the rights to a handheld version of Tetris from Elorg. Rogers headed to Moscow to make a deal with Elorg face to face, without the correct permission from the Soviet government he was traveling on a tourist visa rather than a business visa, which could have landed him in serious trouble.

Ultimately, Rogers used his charm and won the console rights to Tetris — despite the best efforts of Robert Maxwell, who even made a direct appeal to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in an attempt to change the deal.

The huge legal tussle over the game would continue to rage — quite publically — for several years to come.