The game, "Tetris Ultimate," will come out this summer. There will be leagues and teams from cities or from colleges that compete," Rogers says. But the key to becoming a pro? For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation.
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Stay up to date with what you want to know. Loading Something is loading. 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. One of the biggest names in the battle for the rights to Tetris was Atari. It created an arcade version of Tetris in , and through its publishing arm Tengen, released a port of the game for the Nintendo Entertainment System in May the following year. Sega, having created its own version of Tetris for arcades in the late 80s, had also readied a port for its bit console, the Sega Mega Drive.
The real winner in the Tetris ownership battle was, of course, Nintendo. Bundled as a pack-in title with the Game Boy system in , Tetris quickly became one of the biggest-selling and most ubiquitous games on Earth. Handheld gaming would never be quite the same again.
Ranking alongside the theme to Super Mario Bros. And when he shared the game with his co-workers, they started playing it — and kept playing it and playing it. These early players copied and shared "Tetris" on floppy disks, and the game quickly spread across Moscow, Brown wrote. When Pajitnov sent a copy to a colleague in Hungary, it ended up on display in a software exhibit at the Hungarian Institute of Technology, where it came to the attention of Robert Stein, owner of Andromeda Software Ltd.
He tracked down Pajitnov in Moscow, but ultimately the game's fate lay in the hands of a new Soviet agency, Elektronorgtechnica Elorg , created to oversee foreign distribution of Soviet-made software. Elorg licensed the game to Stein, who then licensed it to distributors in the U. According to the Times, "Tetris" was the first software created in the Soviet Union to be sold in America.
Stein's agreement with Elorg covered "Tetris" licensing only for personal computers, not coin-operated machines or handheld devices. But Stein told U. BulletProof Software's Henk Rogers also had his eye on brokering "Tetris" deals in Japan, and secured rights for "Tetris" distribution on computers and consoles for Nintendo, through the U.
However, the legal owner of "Tetris," the Soviet agency Elorg, knew nothing of these deals, Brown wrote. The only contract the agency had signed was the deal with Stein covering computer rights, and nothing else.
The Soviets were outraged, but Rogers convinced them that if those rights were, in fact, up for grabs, licensing them to Nintendo — for both handheld and console devices — would be highly profitable.
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