// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
The Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris
Earlier this month, the Trump administration released a politically charged clone of Tetris called Build the Wall. The Tetris Company (TTC), which owns the rights to the iconic video game, swiftly responded with a thinly veiled legal threat, writing on X: “We take copyright infringement very seriously.” Four days later, the White House took down the game without explanation.
Whether TTC’s post prompted the removal is unknown. But the episode points to a broader and more dubious claim advanced by the company: that it holds exclusive rights to what it misleadingly refers to as “Tetris” pieces — and, more broadly, to any electronic puzzle that involves falling shapes. The claim relies on a flawed ruling rendered in 2012 in Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc., a case in which a federal judge decreed that geometric forms made of four equal-sized squares, each joined together with at least one other square along an edge, were copyrighted and belonged to Russian engineer Alexei Pajitnov and game designer and entrepreneur Henk Rogers, collectively organized as TTC.
The problem: Pajitnov did not design these puzzle pieces, known as tetrominoes, and despite TTC’s relentless public-relations campaign to the contrary, they are not unique to Tetris. In fact, famed Caltech mathematician Solomon Golomb first described them in 1953 during a talk at the Harvard Mathematics Club, and they were later popularized in Scientific American.
But TTC’s false claim to originality is only one aspect of the game’s dark and bizarre history.
Rewind to 1993. First Lady Hillary Clinton is pictured aboard an Air Force plane, absorbed in her Game Boy, playing Tetris. The black-and-white White House photograph doesn’t show the cartridge clearly enough to make out the details, but Clinton’s Staff Secretary, Robert Russo, confirmed to me that she was indeed playing the game.
The irony was great. The United States was boasting that it had just won the Cold War. A major instrument of that victory had been the spread of Western culture throughout the Eastern bloc through films, television, popular music, and other media. Yet the video game that had made it aboard the First Lady’s plane, and into a vast number of U.S. and Western-European households, was not an American product, but a Soviet one. What’s more, it had been designed and coded in a state artificial-intelligence research lab tightly controlled by the KGB, the dreaded secret police of the Russian dictatorship, at a time when U.S. President Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.” The story of the commercial success of Tetris is the poster child for two systems radically opposed in history, culture, economics, and politics. In fact, it arises out of this opposition.
Ironically, Tetris’s success began because the totalitarian Soviet regime did not recognize what we take for granted in the West: the freedom to publish. After Pajitnov adapted Golomb’s geometric discoveries for the nascent digital world, he had no choice but to distribute his game as a samizdat, a self-published underground cultural good passed on the sly — except that rather than being mimeographed on paper like its illustrious sibling, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” Pajitnov’s samizdat got passed around on floppy disks.
The game rapidly made its way through the Eastern bloc before reaching Hungary, where British software entrepreneur Robert Stein recognized its commercial potential. From there, its licensing history became notoriously tangled. Rights to various versions passed, under sometimes competing claims, through the Robert Maxwell group, Atari, Sega, and finally to Nintendo, which packaged Tetris as the Game Boy’s “killer app.” By then, the USSR had taken control of the game through its technology export agency, ELORG, run by a stern bureaucrat, Nikolai Belikov. The micro-computers, Nintendo, and coin-op versions sold in the West filled the Communist Party’s coffers handsomely.