Tetris is thirty years old

Friday marks the 30th anniversary of Alexei Pazhitnov’s release of the very first version of his popular puzzle game Tetris. Pazhitnov wrote the first version of Tetris in 1984 on an Electronica 60 computer.

This version was subsequently adapted by Vadim Gerasimov so that it also worked on an IBM PC. The game quickly became popular at the university where Pazhitnov was studying at the time, and quickly gained a significant degree of popularity outside of Moscow as well. Due to this increasing popularity, the rights of Tetris were sold to the American Spectrum HoloByte, which in 1987 brought the game in the United States to the Atari ST, DOS and the Macintosh, among others.

After a lot of legal proceedings, Nintendo finally managed to release a version of Tetris for its new handheld in 1989; the Game Boy. To the surprise of many, the Japanese company bundled Tetris, not the popular Mario, even with the GameBoy. However, Tetris was the first game to prove that a handheld can actually have added value compared to a console. This is because the games do not last long and the game turned out to be extremely suitable to be played on the go. The cartridge with the first Nintendo version of the game sold a total of about 35 million times.

In 1996, Pazhitnov again received all the rights to the game he wrote in 1984. Pazhitnov subsequently founded The Tetris Company, which to this day owns the copyright to all registered Tetris products in the world. In collaboration with developers and publishers, The Tetris company has released a large number of Tetris games for all kinds of platforms in recent years.

The latest Tetris game will be released this summer for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. A variant for Windows will be released in the fall. Tetris Ultimate, as the game for next-gen consoles and Windows is called, is being developed by SoMa Play and published by Ubisoft. The closing ceremony of the 2014 Winter Paralympics in Sochi also featured a completely Tetris-style event.