How Did Tetris Get Made? | A Review of The Tetris Effect by Dan Ackerman
Most gamers, and most people in general, realize Tetris is an important game. Especially, Fractal Tetris Huracan, who wants to marry the game. Many of us probably attribute importance to the game’s cross demographic appeal. Tetris was getting grandma to play video games way before WII Sports. Some of us might even be nerdy enough to credit the game’s importance to its inclusion as the Game Boy pack-in title, a decision that lead to the Game Boy being the highest selling handheld console for years until the DS line.
The Tetris Effect: The Game that Hypnotized the World by Dan Ackerman tells a story that positions Tetris as much more than just mass appeal and big sales. Tetris reflects the delicate intersection between Cold War Soviet Union Communism and American Capitalism. If you’re thinking spies and subterfuge, you’re not far off. In fact, the subtitle of the paperback version of this book is “The Cold War Battle for the World’s Most Addictive Game.”
During the 1980s, Russia, then referred to as the Soviet Union, and the West had a relationship that was…deteriorating, to put it mildly. To the west, the Soviet Union was shrouded in mystery. This was a time before Twitter, before 24-hour news cycles, and well before the Soviet Union engaged in any sort of meaningful domestic export, meaning those of us in the West were limited to cartoon villains and non-cartoon villains to teach us about Soviet life. I imagine it must have felt similar to the way North Korea is perceived today.
And out of this mysterious land of cartoon villains, Bond antagonists, and boxers came a game called Tetris. But who made the game? How did it find an audience outside of the Soviet Union, and how did this strange puzzle game inform the world’s perception of the secretive Eastern European continent?
The first part of the book chronicles the difficult creation of Tetris. The level of difficulty we’re talking here seems laughable today, in the time of incredibly powerful and incredibly accessible game engines like Unity3D and the Unreal Engine, both of which can be downloaded by almost anyone for free. It’s just Tetris, right. But in the 1980s Soviet Union personal computers were essentially non-existent and those that did find their way into the hands of a capable programer like Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov were archaic by standards of computers found outside the Soviet Union.
But Pajitnov was an island within an island within an island. Once Pajitnov created Tetris, very few of the already very few computers in his homeland were capable of reading the code Pajitnov used. With the help of a small group of professional friends the game managed find its way into the hands of a few, then a few more, then to a few outside of the country by way of Hungary, until eventually it caught the attention of a few distributors willing to risk doing business with the notoriously cloistered Soviet Union. Those initial transactions that would seed Tetris’ eventual success may seem like lucky breaks, and lesser authors might have been satisfied with such a simple narrative. But Ackerman dives deep into every one of those hurdles, helping the reader to understand just how complicated and uncharted the success was.
In a way, we can think of Tetris’ success as inevitable, really. It took a game as great as Tetris for so many people to risk their livelihoods to help it find a worldwide audience. Every circumnavigated roadblock, every carefully articulated negotiation, was a battle every person involved knew was worth fighting. I’m sure there were games developed in the Soviet Union under similar dire circumstances, but we’ve never heard of those games. Those games weren’t worth the risks that Tetris was worth. This book makes me realize that despite all the contemporary conversations about games being blamed for violence, games being attacked by concerned citizens, games being demonized in so many ways, these contemporary hurdles are part of a long tradition of passionate game developers and publishers risking welfare, reputation, and sometimes their lives because they believe in a good game.
The primary conflict that underlines all of these risks that people took to give Tetris a worldwide audience is that the distribution rights to Tetris were, well, non-existent during much of the game’s early life. Cultural and language barriers lead to misunderstandings which lead to Robert Stein–one of the rights negotiators–operating without the legal authority to do so. Here’s where the book capitalizes on the Cold War, spy-vs-spy lens many of us in the West still view Russia through today.
It seems every narrative involving the Soviet Union comes dressed in the garb of spies and subterfuge, and I think perhaps Ackerman played up this angle because of that existing association. He took our conceptions–correct or not–and leveraged them to frame the story of Tetris. It works. The book often reads like a spy novel.
The second half of the book deals with the rights negotiations and the Soviet Union’s response to learning how successful the game had become. Remember that in Communist Soviet Union, intellectual property is the property of the government. Realizing that Tetris is making a ton of money isn’t a problem for Pajitnov, the game’s creator, as he never stood to make money from it at all. It’s a problem for the government of the Soviet Union because they weren’t seeing a cut of that tons of money.
I know it can be hard to believe that Tetris warrants an entire book dedicated to its cultural impact. I get it. Prior to reading this book I feared I’d be subjected to just a few interesting pieces of trivia and some anecdotes stretched thin into a narrative with more concern for page count than content. But Tetris deserves this biography. When you consider that video games, at the time of Tetris’ release were limited to non-puzzle genres–aliens, dragons, guns, and magic–and that the developer worked on ancient technology, amid a populous that didn’t have the means to play games anyway, with a government incapable of commerce outside itself, it’s a wonder this book isn’t three times as long.
Side note about Pajitnov, he is absolutely the loveable heart of this book. He’s largely silent, modest, and seems to get screwed over a lot, at least through the lens of Capitalist America. Even if you end up not liking this book, stick around to read the scene toward the end where Pajitnov isn’t allowed into a restaurant. It’s heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time.
The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World by Dan Ackerman is great. A definite must-read for video game historians, both armchair and professional. By the end of if, you too will want to marry Tetris. But you’ll have to fight Fractal Tetris Huracan over it. Challenge accepted.
Credits
- The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World (book link)
- Dan Ackerman (author)
- Fractal Tetris Hurricane: https://twitter.com/mathmathfractal
- Original Tetris footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0gAgQQHFcQ
- Bear and Uncle Sam illustration By Carlos3653 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45073770
- By Derzsi Elekes Andor – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19061241
- By jennybento from Jackson Heights, usa – DMZ, North Side looking into South, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63969828
- By Thomas Backa from Turku, Finland – Soviet Spy Cams, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45838084
- By mike from New York, NY, US – Ocilloscope Tetris, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38670042
- Bowling grandma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA2aY2ADoVE
Music Credits
8bit Dungeon Level Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
