Transcript: Tetris: Splitting the Iron Curtain

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Episode “Tetris: Splitting the iron curtain”

Dan: It is the summer of 1985 which in Moscow is still actually kind of cold, Alexey Pajitnov, a low level programmer is sitting around, and he puts together Tetris. The most simple puzzle game you can think of, stacking blocks, but there is something magical about it.
Libe: So you know you can’t sell the game. This is communist Russia after all. So instead he gives it away to his friends. And then you know it spread all through Moscow.
Jeff: You copied it from your friend. You copied it for his friend. You copied it for his friend, and soon it had spread al the way to the outer states. That’s what communism is, it means free Tetris.
Dan: Now the game finally ends up in Hungary, in Budapest, in Croatia. Some Hungarian guys have made an Apple version of it. And this guy Robert Stein comes in and he is almost like an opportunist who travels around trying to by up stuff cheap and sell it more expensively some where else. And he see’s the game. And he says this game is great. I am not even going to buy this game. I am just going to steal it.
Jeff: In Steins defense. What do you do? How do you break down that red curtain? You don’t get the rights to this game. Russia is a society, and they don’t even have private property, much less an abstract concept like intellectual property. How do you deal with that, you know? And it was probably easier to just steal it.
Dan: So this guy takes the game back to the west and starts selling the rights to all these other companies, because they don’t know any better. They think that he has actually, legitimately gotten the rights from the guy who created the game back in Russia. Now people don’t really remember Robert Maxell these days, but back in the eighties he was a huge media mogul. He was like Rupert Murdoch. So then Stein sells it to Robert Maxwell’s video game company called Mirrorsoft.
Josh: They are basically just creating fake contracts, fake deals with all sorts of companies from Mirrorsoft to Atari in the states, to Spectrum Holobyte. Basically he just went around selling it, trying to make as much cash as he could. Before the Soviets figured out he was selling their property.
Jeff: It was just this whole mess, because Robert Stein is selling rights. The people he is selling rights to are selling there rights. And they are not real, but there is just this whole web of deceit and just laziness that no ones checking up on it. And it is all just going to come crashing down on it.
Josh: Before anyone figured out who owned the rights. Tetris had already become the best selling PC game in the UK and America.
Jeff: Robert Stein never thought it was going to be a big deal, you know? He just thought he would sell a few hundred thousand copies at best, make a quick buck. No one in communist Russia is going to find out about this. But the thing is Tetris is really good. It is really good, and it just becomes almost this world wide phenomenon.
TJ: So the game gets so big that the Russian government takes notice. Now mind you, Russia at this time is Communist, so there is no owner in particular, other than mother Russia.
Jeff: The Russians are Communist, but there not stupid. They see what’s going on. And they create Elorg, this company to manage the rights for Tetris. Before there was never anybody to officially organize the rights. Now that this organization exists there is just rampant land grab.
Dan: You have got Maxwell, you have got Stein, and you have got Nintendo who are about to launch there Game Boy, all coming into Moscow at the same time, trying to snap up as many of the rights as they can for different platforms for this game.
Jeff: And there are a lot of sticky issues here. This is just a society that works in a completely different way so it wasn’t exactly clear how it was going to shake out.
Dan: Now Nintendo, they took the red eye and they got there first. When they got there they met with Russian officials, ad they say hey, we would love to get the rights for this kind of hand held version we are going to do. And we will show you how good job we did; we made a Nintendo cartridge, here check it out.
Josh: They pull out a cartridge and the Russians freaked. We haven’t been paid for this; we didn’t even know this existed.
Dan: And the Russians go, where did that come from, we didn’t give you the rights to that? Oh we bought the rights. No you didn’t. So the Nintendo guy says, I will tell you what, I will just right you a check for these rights too. We sold a bunch of these cartridges, just take this.
Josh: The Russians, who hadn’t been paid at all for any of the versions that were best seller in the west, took that check and said, finally someone is actually taking care of us, and immediately granted the rights to Nintendo.
Dan: Now the Stein guy, he has been selling this game left and right, it is the number one best selling computer game out there, and of course he has not paid the Russians a cent. So the Russia government is furious. But instead of giving Stein the old poison tipped umbrella in the middle of Trafalgar square, they say hey lets at least get some of this money. So they sign a contract with him to sell the computer version of the game.
Jeff: Now Stein thinks he is buying the rights for computers, and he is thinking bout the broad definition of computers. He thinks he is going to sell it on calculators, on Game Boy, on watches, on Nintendo’s, I mean things will come in the future, everything.
Shandi: So he figures nobody can say what is and what isn’t a computer. So I pretty much have everything I need to make money off of this. And the Russians realize this, so in the 11th hour they snuck something in to the contract, where they defined a computer as something with a keyboard and a monitor.
TJ: That one little sentence basically blocked Stein from making money on any other distribution of Tetris. Which means he collets nothing from the Game Boy, he collects nothing from any arcade rights. He collects nothing from any home console rights. He got the rights to anything has a monitor, which is basically at this point a PC, and you know what Tetris was already a he success on the PC, so its over. So now Stein is stuck with nothing.
Dan: Now Maxwell shows up later in the day, by the time he gets there all the good stuff is already gone, its like he was on the Russian bread line, you get to the front, and there is no bread left.
TJ: And so we all know what happens, Russia sells the rights to handhelds and consoles to none other than Nintendo, and we know how that story ends.
Dan: After all the dust settles, Nintendo releases the Game Boy with Tetris. And Tetris helps the Game Boy to go on to become a best seller. And the game boy helps Tetris to become the best selling game of all time. I think like 30 million Game Boy versions of that alone out on the marketplace.
Josh: If someone got screwed and maybe didn’t deserve it. Under there other banner Tengen, I think Atari got unfairly screwed in the whole Tetris debacle. Atari had bought the imaginary rights to the game and they thought they were buying something real, but they weren’t. And they produced and advertised there version of Tetris. Which a lot of people think is superior.
Dan: I mean Atari had actually made so many of these cartridges they couldn’t just throw them away. They actually had to put them out in the marketplace first, just to try and roll the dice. And then when they lost the case they had to recall them all. And that ended up costing them even more in the long run.
Jeff: And at this point there is a lot of bad blood between Atari and Nintendo. So Nintendo is only two happy to stop Atari from selling what they thought was going to be a hit game.
Dan: And of course back in Russia the Russian government made millions off of this, but Alexey Pajitnov, the programmer didn’t make any money at all, because of course the communist party system, you can’t make a lot of money.
Shandi: If Pajitnov would have been born in a different country the whole twisted crazy stories about all these companies fighting for all the rights. Yeah, it wouldn’t even exist.
Josh: It is kind of interesting actually; Tetris has probably appeared on more operating systems, consoles, handheld videogames, graphing calculators than probably any other game in history. The reason why Tetris is the number one selling game of all time is because it is not technology dependent.
TJ: You could put that game anywhere and it plays just as good as anywhere else. You can put that game on a cell phone and it is going to play just as good as it is going to play on the Xbox 360. Basically it is the solitaire of the next millennium.
Shandi: That is why it got so popular. And why Tetris spread so fast. Wherever you play it it’s the same feeling.
TJ: And a hundred years from now, Tetris will still be here. Just like solitaire just like chess, and all these new games they will be no where to be found.
Shandi: Yeah, Tetris is going to be around forever. It is going to outlive us all.