Tetris () is a puzzle video game created by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer, in the mid-1980s. In Tetris, falling pieces consisting of four connected blocks, known as tetrominoes, must be sorted into a pile. Once a horizontal line of the playfield is filled with blocks, the line disappears, granting points and preventing the pile from reaching the top. This gameplay has been used in approximately 220 versions across at least 70 platforms. Newer versions frequently add game mechanics, some of which have become standard.
In the mid-1980s, Pajitnov created Tetris in his spare time while working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences. He initially programmed it in Pascal for the Elektronika 60 in about three weeks, then spent over two months porting it to the IBM PC using Turbo Pascal with help from Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov. Floppy disk copies were distributed freely throughout Moscow before spreading to Eastern Europe. Robert Stein of Andromeda Software saw Tetris in Hungary and contacted the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center to secure a license to release it commercially. Stein sublicensed it to Mirrorsoft in the UK and Spectrum HoloByte in the US. Both companies released Tetris in 1988 to commercial success and sublicensed to additional companies, including Henk Rogers' Bullet-Proof Software. Rogers negotiated with Elektronorgtechnica, the state-owned organization in charge of licensing Soviet software, to license Tetris to Nintendo for the Game Boy and Nintendo Entertainment System (NES); both versions were released in 1989.
With 35 million sales as of June 2024, the Game Boy version is the highest-selling version. It contributed to the Game Boy's success and popularized Tetris. At the end of 1995, Dorodnitsyn Computing Center's rights to Tetris, arranged ten years prior, reverted to Pajitnov. The Tetris Company was established to manage rights and licensing. It created guidelines and a minimum specification for licensed Tetris games. Certain features not in the original games became standardized over time. Versions of Tetris were released on mobile devices starting in the 2000s, with Electronic Arts holding a license on such ports from 2006 to 2020, to commercial success. The popularity of Tetris was renewed with the critically successful Tetris Effect (2018) and Tetris 99 (2019).
Tetris is the best-selling video game of all time, having sold 520 million copies as of December 2024. It is frequently cited as one of the greatest and most influential games, and was among the inaugural class inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2015. Its gameplay has been influential in the genre of puzzle video games, being cited as an early example of casual gaming. Furthermore, Tetris has been represented in a vast array of media such as architecture and art and been the subject of academic research, including studies of its potential for psychological intervention. A competitive culture has formed around Tetris, particularly the NES version, with playerstypically adolescentscompeting at the annual Classic Tetris World Championship. A film dramatization of its development was released in 2023.
Gameplay
Across its numerous versions, Tetris generally has a consistent puzzle video game design. Gameplay consists of a rectangular field in which pieces consisting of four connected blocks, called tetrominoes, descend one at a time from the top-center. During the descent, the player can move the piece horizontally and rotate it until it touches the bottom of the field or another piece. The player's goal is to stack the pieces in the field to create horizontal lines of blocks. When a line is completed, it disappears and the blocks placed above fall by one row. The speed of the descending pieces increases as lines are cleared. The game ends if the accumulated pieces in the field block other pieces from entering the field, a process known as "topping out". Common mechanics among Tetris versions include the queue (viewing the pieces that are next to appear), soft drop (increasing the descent of the piece), hard drop (instantly placing the piece as far down as it can go), and holding (reserving a piece for later use).
The objective of Tetris is to collect as many points as possible during a gameplay session by clearing lines. Tetris scoring system has remained mostly consistent since Tetris DS (2006) with some exceptions. Points gained during gameplay increase with the descent speed. The more lines cleared at once, the higher the score for a line clear. Completing four horizontal lines at once by placing an I-shaped tetromino into a single-column gap is referred to as a "Tetris"; most versions award the highest score for it. The player can also gain points by using hard drops or soft drops. Advanced techniques, often used in competitive play, include T-spins (spinning a T-shaped tetromino into a blocked gap), perfect clears (emptying the field following a line clear), and combos (clearing lines consecutively).
History
Creation (1984–1985)
Alexey Pajitnov was a speech recognition and artificial intelligence researcher at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences. While at the center, he developed more than twenty types of games in his spare time on the Elektronika 60, a Russian clone of the PDP-11 computer. He became inspired to convert pentomino tiling puzzles to the computer after he bought a pentomino puzzle set from a store and played with it in his office. Sources vary on the exact timing: certain sources indicate June 1984, while the BBC documentary Tetris: From Russia with Love (2004) suggests spring 1985.
Pajitnov programmed Tetris using Pascal for the RT-11 operating system on the Elektronika 60 and experimented with different versions. Because the Elektronika 60 had no graphical interface, Pajitnov modeled the field and pieces using spaces and brackets. He felt that the game would be needlessly complicated with the twelve different shapes of pentominoes, so he scaled the concept down to tetrominoes, of which there are only seven shapes. Afterward, he programmed the basic mechanics, including the ability to flip tetrominoes as they fell in a vertical screen and the clearing of lines. The name Tetris was a combination of "tetra" (meaning "four") and Pajitnov's favorite sport, tennis.
Pajitnov completed the first version of Tetris, though sources differ on the timeline. In a 1993 interview with the Japanese magazine The Super Famicom, he recalled that the game was finished in 1985 and said it took about three weeks to develop due to its simplicity, while Henk Rogers reported in 2024 that Pajitnov recalled first developing it on the Elektronika 60 in 1984. This version had no scoring system and no levels, but it nonetheless captivated Pajitnov's peers, some of whom obtained copies of the completed code to run on their compatible work computers.
Pajitnov sought to port Tetris to the IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC), which had a higher-quality display than the Elektronika 60. He recruited his colleague Dmitry Pavlovsky and the 16-year-old computer prodigy Vadim Gerasimov. Using Turbo Pascal, the three adapted Tetris to the IBM PC over two months, with Gerasimov incorporating color and Pavlovsky incorporating a scoreboard. Floppy disk copies of this version were distributed freely throughout the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center, before spreading quickly among Moscow computer circles. Pajitnov kept note of second-hand accounts of Tetris spread during this time. Tetris reportedly won second place in a Zelenodolsk computer game competition in November 1985, and by 1986, nearly everyone with an IBM computer in Moscow and several major cities had played Tetris.
Spread beyond the Soviet Union (1985–1988)
Under Soviet copyright law, intellectual rights were not well protected, and the state-run organization Elektronorgtechnica (Elorg) had a monopoly on the import and export of software. Around this time, Pajitnov arranged for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center to have the rights to Tetris for ten years to ease potential legal troubles. As a result, Pajitnov could not sell Tetris for profit. Nonetheless, Pajitnov's manager Victor Brjabrin liked Tetris and sought opportunities for success beyond the Soviet Union. In early 1986, Brjabrin sent a copy of Tetris to the SZKI Institute of Computer Studies in Budapest. Robert Stein, founder of Andromeda Software who profited by licensing software from Hungary to UK companies, encountered Tetris during a visit to the SZKI Institute and found its gameplay compelling. Stein learned from the SZKI Institute director that a researcher there, Gábor Bolgár, had ported Tetris to the Commodore 64. Stein returned to London and contacted Dorodnitsyn Computing Center by telex to obtain the license rights, believing he could sell those rights to a larger UK publisher.
Brjabrin received the telex and, after translating it from English to Russian, disclosed it to Pajitnov, who spent days attempting to compose, translate to English, and send a favorable yet noncommittal response by telex to Stein. Despite this attempt, Stein interpreted the response as granting him the license and proceeded to find a publisher for Tetris. Stein pitched Tetris to Jim Mackonochie of Mirrorsoft, a UK software company founded by business magnate Robert Maxwell and Mackonochie. Though Mackonochie was skeptical about the commercial potential of Tetris, he consulted Phil Adam, president of US sister company Spectrum HoloByte, for his input. During his overseas visit to Mirrorsoft, Adam played Tetris for hours and then encouraged Mackonochie to accept Stein's offer. Though still cautious, Mackonochie agreed to allow himself the licensing rights for Europe and Adam the rights for the United States and Japan. Stein sold the rights to the two companies for £3,000 and royalties of 7.5–15% of sales, even though negotiations with the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center were at a standstill, with the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center being resistant to selling Tetris in the West.
Gilman Louie, CEO of Spectrum HoloByte, sought to exoticize the game's Soviet origins, marketing it as the first Soviet product to be sold in North America, alongside implementing Soviet folk music and imagery during gameplay and using red packaging adorned with an illustration of Saint Basil's Cathedral. Tetris was first commercially released in the West for the IBM PC, with ports to other computer systems planned for release in the following weeks. Mirrorsoft released the game in the United Kingdom on January 27, 1988, and Spectrum HoloByte released it in the United States on January 29, 1988. Gábor Bolgár sold his Commodore 64 port to Stein's Andromeda Software, who polished it with additional sound work before licensing it to Mirrorsoft. Mirrorsoft rewrote the code of the original IBM release for systems such as the Amiga and Atari ST. Boosted by word of mouth and positive reviews, this Tetris release was commercially successful, selling 100 thousand copies within a year. At the Software Publishers Association's Excellence in Software Awards ceremony in 1989, Tetris won across three categories.