It’s the mid-’80s in Moscow. The communists have been in power for nearly 70 years. The Cold War is rumbling on, the threat of nuclear apocalypse feels very real. At the Moscow Medical Institute, they have a productivity problem – which, in a society where the state owns the means of production, is skating close to treason. Staff keep downing tools to play a game on the institute’s computers. It features falling blocks and is extremely addictive. Its creator, Alexey Pajitnov, calls it Tetris. And he already knows how compelling his creation is.
Inspired by a life-long love of puzzles, Pajitnov designed Tetris in his spare time from his real job at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. For weeks he pretended to himself that he was playing his prototype to check it for any niggling bugs. “But there’s nothing to debug any more,” he remembers. “So I’m just enjoying playing and can’t stop myself. At this moment, I realised there was something really charming in the game, and that is a reason to invest more time and more efforts.”
It’s safe to say the Russian authorities do not understand Tetris. It is soon blocked from government computers; comrades go back to their patriotic duty.
Skip forward half a decade to the start of the ’90s and Tetris is among the most played games on the planet. Bundled in with Nintendo’s brand-new handheld gaming device,
