Before and After Tetris

Note: I have this blog posted on screwattack.com under the name MisterBo, so if this looks familiar that's probably why. If you want to see blog posts before I post them on blog spot, they will be on screwattack.com.

Probably the only good thing to come out of Russia since Yakov Smirnoff, Tetris is probably the most popular puzzle game ever. There are two notable games I want to talk about, the Tengen version and the Game Boy version. As a quick note, I had to restart this from the ground up because my computer crashed trying to upload this blog, so if it seems rushed, this is why.

Before:
There isn't much of a before to Tetris. While Working at the Soviet Academy of Science, Alexey Pajitnov created a game called Tetris on an Elektronika 60.

"In all its Soviet glory."

After:
The game was eventually ported to the IBM computer and because Alexey couldn't sell the game for himself in Soviet Russia, he gave it away. The game was so widespread it eventually made its way to Budapest, Hungary where Robert Stein "discovered" (I can't even begin to show you how many sarcastic quotation marks I can put around that.) the game and decided to steal the rights and sell them illegally for profit instead of cutting through all the red tape. These "imaginary" rights were sold to Tengen, a side company of Atari, and Spectrum HoloByte. Tengen produced copies of their own version of Tetris for the NES and it was released in May of 1989. The game didn't last on the market for long because of court battles saying that Nintendo had the rights to the game (I'll talk about that in a little bit). The Tengen version of Tetris for the NES is considered the superior version of Tetris when compaired to Nintendo's version for the NES.

"Which one looks better to you?"

Nintendo decided that they wanted to get on the Tetris bandwagon, so they originally approached Robert Stein to give them rights to produce Tetris on the Game Boy. After several months, Nintendo never got their rights, so they went to Russia to visit the company ELORG, a company set up in Soviet Russia to sell the rights of Tetris, and Nintendo showed ELORG the game they made and they had not approved this. To make it up, Nintendo gave ELORG the royalties and in return ELORG gave Nintendo rights to produce the game. When Robert Stein showed up at ELORG he was only given rights to produce Tetris on computers, computers being anything with a monitor and keyboard. This screwed Robert in the ass because already sold those rights to Spectrum HoloByte and the game was widely popular.

- Are you bored?
+ Yeah. Got any ideas?
- Wanna play Tetris?
+ TETRIS! I LOVE TETRIS! YAAAAAAAY!!!!!!!

Later after the Cold War, all the rights of Tetris were given back to Alexey Pajitnov and he founded The Tetris Company in 1996 in the US. This allows Alexey Pajitnov to distribute the rights of Tetris in the US.

"Three cheers for beard man!"