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.
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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.
And then, the Berlin Wall collapsed. The floodgates of capitalism—and, in Russia’s case, mayhem—opened. At the game of perestroika (Gorbachev) and privatization (Yeltsin), the rule of law and Russia lost. Out of the resulting confusion emerged two competing claims to ownership of Tetris: one advanced by Patjinov and the other by Nikolai Belikov.
Despite the fact that the USSR generally did not recognize private property, or the copyrightability of software for that matter, or the fact that he had designed the game on his work time using his work computer, Pajitnov, who by then had moved to the U.S., cast himself as the victim and claimed that the game’s copyright had been his all along. The appeal to pity was powerful and should not have survived reasonable legal scrutiny, but thanks to a few sympathetic judges, it did.
Meanwhile, the nomenklatura man in charge of exporting the game on behalf of the USSR pulled a rather bold trick: He created a corporation in Delaware, also conveniently named ELORG, and, as head of Soviet ELORG, assigned the Tetris rights to that American shell. This was most likely done through a backroom deal with Yeltsin’s people and the KGB, although specific details have not been documented.
What has been documented is that in exchange, Belikov owed Soviet generals and colonels, now organized as a mafia entangled with the nascent Russian state, 50 percent of the Tetris proceeds. In grand oligarch fashion, Belikov then crossed the Russians and hid the proceeds through a flurry of shell corporations and accounts in the U.S., Africa, the Grand Cayman Islands, and the Bahamas. Lest this sound too much like a spy movie to be true, years of litigation produced Belikov’s own testimony, along with detailed charts of the opaque setup.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, Belikov and Patjinov—who by then had teamed up with Nintendo’s fixer Henk Rogers — sued each other over the rights to the game in federal court in New York. Pajitnov had very little going for him. The USSR did not recognize software copyright, or any private property for that matter other than for household pots and pans. Further, he developed the game on his work computer during work hours, which under U.S. legal principles would make it his employer’s property.
Belikov, for his part, claimed that ELORG, a Soviet state agency, had miraculously morphed into the Delaware company he had formed, and that he therefore owned the rights. When the new Russian state, entangled in its own domestic mess, failed to react, Pajitnov, Rogers, and Belikov settled. The pair of friends would get the rights, while the bureaucrat received $15 million, which he quickly made disappear from his homeland’s sight through an elaborate web of offshore corporate shells and a Panamanian passport he bought for $200,000 for the occasion.
Pajitnov and Rogers also proceeded to erase anything that would come in the way of Pajitnov’s miraculous claim of original exclusive ownership. That included a young Soviet programmer named Vadim Gerasimov. In 1985, Gerasimov worked closely with Pajitnov to develop the game and single-handedly designed and coded the MS-DOS port (the original game had been coded by Pajitnov on an arcane Russian minicomputer, the Electronika 60). Although Pajitnov had originally credited Gerasimov for his work (including in an under-oath testimony in U.S. court), he later testified (also under oath) that he was the sole author. Rogers played his part in supporting his friend and changed the credits on the console port he developed for the Nintendo Famicom to erase any mention of Gerasimov. The before-and-after screenshots of the credits are telling.
By the mid-1990s, Pajitnov and Rogers seemed to have a firm grip on the Tetris intellectual property. But the World Wide Web changed the picture. The Web enabled a flurry of Tetris derivatives to flourish and be widely distributed as freeware. TTC would have none of it and aggressively unleashed its army of lawyers after what were often teenage amateur creators. It was ironic, since the early success of Tetris happened by virtue of it being distributed as freeware. TTC didn’t hesitate to overreach, going after any game that had falling shapes, such as Alphatris, which involves single-square blocks featuring letters. In these post-perestroika days, a symbol of the socialist republic had become a symbol of capitalist copywrongs.
TTC went one step further, falsely claiming in a court filing that the “seven Tetrimino playing pieces made up of four equally sized square [sic] joined at their sides,” and “the visual delineation of individual blocks that comprise each Tetrimino piece and the display of their borders” are “original and distinctive” and “were designed in the 1980s by Alexey Pajitnov.” As we saw, however, the tetrominoes are elementary geometric forms that Golomb had identified and described in the 1950s. And although U.S. copyright law does not protect geometric forms, the Xio court fell for TTC’s bait and effectively extended copyright protection to the tetrominoes themselves. Which is doubly flawed because if such shapes were copyrightable, then Golomb would be the copyright holder, and Pajitnov should have been found to be infringing!
Tetris is a story of contrasts. Contrasts between two systems: the oppressive Soviet communist dictatorship and the Western free-market capitalist economy, and the story of what happens when the two meet. Contrasts between the official corporate story and a more nuanced reality, which shows a darker side to the Tetris story: a pattern of internally contradictory statements by Pajitnov; blatant misstatements of facts, some of which were made under oath; a systematic erasure by TTC of important facts and characters; and the monopolization through copyright law of geometrical forms and mathematical concepts that should have remained in the public domain.
But Tetris is also a story of ambiguities caused by the murkiness of changing times in the East — first with Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and then amid the rise of oligarchs under Boris Yeltsin, from which Belikov benefited handsomely before fleeing and disappearing with his Tetris millions. In sum, Tetris is a story of tumultuous times.
This story was republished from the MIT Press Reader. Read the original article.
