Alexey Pajitnov was supposed to build voice recognition software for the Russian government. Instead he built a video game and gave it away.

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Dave Young:
Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, Dave Young, here alongside Stephen Semple. And Stephen just whispered in my ear that our empire today that we’re going to talk about is Tetris, or as I like to call it, instant anxiety.

Stephen Semple:
So you’re familiar with the game.

Dave Young:
I’ve played a few times, and man, does it give me anxiety.

Stephen Semple:
Really, Dave.

Dave Young:
It’s just like, oh, it’s just like, oh, the pressure, and it’s building and it’s building and it’s like that’s just the way my life is, and I don’t need a game to remind me.

Stephen Semple:
You may feel differently about it after you hear the story, because it’s a kind of cool story.

Dave Young:
I have a distant hunch of a memory in my mind that it has something to do with Russia.

Stephen Semple:
It does. Well done. The story starts behind the Iron Curtain.

Dave Young:
Yeah. Soviet Russia.

Stephen Semple:
Russia, yeah. But to give an idea of how big Tetris is, to date it’s estimated that there has been 500 million copies sold.

Dave Young:
500 million copies sold. I wonder how many billions of games of Tetris have been played.

Stephen Semple:
Oh God, you’d only have to each game-

Dave Young:
Trillions.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, well, exactly. Because you think about, with 500 million copies out there, if everybody just played it twice, there you’re at a billion.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
You get there really quickly. Like your two games, Dave, that’ll put you there.

Dave Young:
Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
So where it starts is we got to go back to 1984, and we have to remember what it was like in ’84. It was the Cold War.

Dave Young:
Oh my gosh.

Stephen Semple:
And communism was a real thing. It’s easy to forget that at that time in the Soviet Union, all production was owned and controlled by the state, and the economy was completely centrally planned. It’s hard to remember what that was like and the government made all decisions about what to make, how much to make, what price to sell goods and services at.

Dave Young:
Yeah, and from a geopolitical point of view, we were in the middle of the Cold War and Star Wars, Ronald Reagan’s hand tie ballistic missile, we were going to spend a gazillion dollars to-

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Dave Young:
Yeah. It was crazy times.

Stephen Semple:
And the wall was a real thing that if you climbed over-

Dave Young:
It was still there-

Stephen Semple:
You got shot. It’s almost hard to believe and private property was not allowed, and all citizens were expected to work for the quote, unquote common good.

Dave Young:
And Vladimir Putin was a young guy working his way up in the KGB.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. There you go. Yeah. We almost need to remember that just to understand how remarkable this story is, because here’s this guy, Alexey Pajitnov, who’s working at the Moscow Academy of Science, which of course is state run, and he’s a computer genius, and he’s working on an early form of voice recognition technology.

Dave Young:
Oh, okay.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, and the KGB learns about this, and they’re really interested because they want to use this for wire taps.

Dave Young:
Of course they do.

Stephen Semple:
Right, and Alexey’s very anti-war, and he has to work on this project. But on the side he develops an interest in building a game. He’s a dreamer in the computer industry. He believes everyone should have one, and that computers should be there to make things better. And if we think about the early mid 80s, that was a common theme in the computer industry, but finds himself instead making things for the military. And his real goal is he wants to get out of the Soviet Union. And he likes this game, there’s this little puzzle game that he likes playing, which is called pentominoe. It’s like dominoes but it’s pentominoes.

Dave Young:
Pentominoes. Okay.

Stephen Semple:
And it’s a puzzle game that involves arranging 12 sets of geometric shapes that make up five squares called pentominoes into a large rectangle without any overlaps or gaps. So you basically have got these pieces that you assemble.

Dave Young:
Okay. So like static Tetris.

Stephen Semple:
Very much like static Tetris.

Dave Young:
Okay.

Stephen Semple:
So the game was invented 1950 by Solomon Golomb, a mathematician at the University of Southern California. So Alexey thinks, well, what if I could create a digital version? What if he could create a game? So he starts taking the puzzle and applying it to computers, and he gets working on it, but it’s not, he finds it’s not really exciting as a computer game. So he starts thinking, how can I make it exciting? And he starts thinking about pieces falling from the sky.

Dave Young:
How can we give Dave anxiety?

Stephen Semple:
How can we give Dave anxiety. Exactly right. It’s all about you, Dave. As the pieces fall, the player can manipulate it on the way down. But the challenge is he’s working on Soviet computers in the mid 80s which are pretty slow.

Dave Young:
I can imagine. Yeah. Honestly, compared to what we’re doing today, everything was a little slow.

Stephen Semple:
Oh, good God. Yes. Yeah. And the interesting thing is when you talk to people in the computer industry today, is that many of the world’s best computer programmers are actually from Soviet block countries. Because there’s something about this fact that they had to learn with these constraints. They had to learn with the constraints of processing power and space. And there’s been, I think, something lost in computer programming where we’re not dealing with any of those same constraints

Dave Young:
When it’s so fast, when computers are so fast that nobody notices that the software is inefficient.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, but back to Alexey. So he needs to speed up the game. So the first variation was just use the middle of the computer screen, not use the entire screen. So they revert. Early versions of the game, if you look at it, it’s just the middle of the screen and reduce the size of the blocks, because that then reduced the computer power needed quite dramatically.

Dave Young:
And honestly, this is still, ’84 is still the era when computer games were like adventure games. They were text based almost for the most part.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Young:
So doing anything in some kind of graphical form is going to be challenging and new.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, absolutely, but so he does that. He reduces the size, gets it running better, but it’s still boring because here’s the thing that’s missing. How do you win? There’s no satisfaction in a game. You need to create that anxiety, Dave. You need to create that sense of winning. So one day he’s working on a chalkboard and he starts to erase the board and he realizes, here’s how you win. When you fill in that line, that line is deleted. There’s now a goal. The game can go longer. It’s now fun.

Dave Young:
Endless.

Stephen Semple:
Could be potentially endless. But here’s the problem. He’s in Soviet Russia. He can’t own a game. And he’s also moonlighting to make the game. And remember the KGB and their program, this is pretty risky. He’s going against the state. He’s supposed to be working on voice recognition software for the KGB.

Dave Young:
And he is using state resources to fiddle around.

Stephen Semple:
To build this game. But he knows programmers all over Russia, and he believes this, if he casts this game to the wind, it will get a hold somewhere, even though he’s risking getting arrested by doing this. So he names it Tetris and he puts it on a floppy, and he hands it out to people hoping it gets out and people start to share.

After a few years, Tetris makes it to Hungary. And here’s the important thing at the time. Hungary is a gateway to the west.

Dave Young:
Okay.

Stephen Semple:
Lots of things are being moved back and forth between the west and communist Russia through Hungary. And Robert Stein comes across Tetris, and Robert works for a drama to software and he actually specializes in importing software from the Soviet Union.

Dave Young:
Oh, wow.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. He loves the game. He reaches out to Alexey and he wants to make a deal. But remember, it’s communist Russia. The state owns it. So to make the deal in 1986, Alexey has to sign it over to the Soviet government for 10 years. Only way to get it to the West.

Dave Young:
Wow.

Stephen Semple:
Now, here’s the other thing, because it was made to run on such small, inefficient computers on such a tiny screen, it ends up being perfect for Nintendo Game Boy. So Robert convinces Nintendo to include Tetris in the release of Game Boy. And Game Boy is released on April 21st, 1989, and in six months it sells 2 million units. Huge success.

Dave Young:
Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
But Dave, what else happens? You’re a history buff. What else happens in 1989?

Dave Young:
Is that the… The wall comes down.

Stephen Semple:
November 9th, the wall falls.

Dave Young:
So the Berlin Wall falls. We’re into the Soviet Union collapsing economically.

Stephen Semple:
Right. Right. So Alexey doesn’t see a dime right away, but he’s able to leave and go to the US. Okay. 1996 rolls along, the IP expires, and guess what he’s able to do? He’s able to own it again and he’s now a really wealthy man.

Dave Young:
Nice.

Stephen Semple:
But here’s the thing I found interesting. There’s all this stuff about the Soviet Union and whatnot, but so often when I meet people who’ve invented things, they’re afraid to tell people about it.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Like oh my God, I can’t, because it might get copied, or it might get this, or it might get that. And Alexey, now granted, he did this because he had no other choice. But Alexey started with the strategy of, I’m going to pass this out to the world. The world needs to know. But he could have easily sat on it and made it the world’s best kept secret out of a, fear of being arrested. B, fear of losing it. C, fear of not being able to profit from it, all those things. But he let go of all those fears and said, look, I’ve created this thing that’s really cool and neat, first and foremost, I need to share it with the world.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
And I found that really interesting that he had that mindset.

Dave Young:
And share it from a place that’s almost impossible to share anything.

Stephen Semple:
Right. And in the end, it’s that sharing that led to this a, the success in this game and this success with him. And yes, there was lots of other happenstances that happened around that, but it was that thought process to me that I found so interesting. And I also found interesting that the obstacles of dealing with the limited programming power of Soviet era computers is what allowed him to build something that fits so well for something like Game Boy.

Dave Young:
Gosh, I don’t know, I’ve been telling people for years, I’ve taught classes on content and talked about people teaching their ideas and the best advice is always just start giving away your expertise. Just start showing that you know what you’re doing, give it away. And eventually you’re going to come across somebody that’s like, I really like this, and I’m behind you, and I want you on my team.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. It’s this whole thing of if you hold onto it too tightly, it just remains a secret. And when it remains a secret it doesn’t benefit you at all. And yes, there’s also stories where things got ripped off and people have been taken advantage of when they share it, but more times than not, you got to be open with the world. You have to be open with the world.

Dave Young:
Well, it’s a great lesson for him. What did he go on to do?

Stephen Semple:
He went on to work for a number of other gaming companies, and he’s developed and worked in computer software when he came to America, but nothing at all close to the success of Tetris.

Dave Young:
He’s the guy. I’d have changed my name to Tetris.

Stephen Semple:
There you go.

Dave Young:
Dr. Tetris.

Stephen Semple:
Dr. That’s it. Dr. Tetris. That would be the one that would really make it happen.

Dave Young:
There’s a real philosophical bent to this, and that is create something and give it to the world.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Dave Young:
Put it out there.

Stephen Semple:
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

Dave Young:
And if you don’t benefit directly, you’re going to benefit indirectly through appreciation and recognition.

Stephen Semple:
Exactly.

Dave Young:
And that’s not a bad deal either.

Stephen Semple:
It’s true. And if you hold onto it it just remains a secret.

Dave Young:
I mean, was it Linus Pauling that invented the polio vaccine? And he just said, you know what, here, here it is. I want to save lives with this, not make money.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, it’s my gift to the world.

Dave Young:
Yeah. So cool, cool story. I’m glad to know about this.

Stephen Semple:
All right, awesome. Thanks David.

Dave Young:
Thank you. Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to questions@theempirebuilderspodcast.com.

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