Alexey Pajitnov: Tetris Game Creator Biography

Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov was born on 16 April 1955 in Moscow, which was then part of the Soviet Union. He studied at the computer engineering faculty and got hired by the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Sciences.

In 1984, while experimenting with the capabilities of the Electronika 60 computer, he decided to test out an idea that had been nagging at him for a while – the creation of a simple puzzle game based on pentominoes, which he had been playing since childhood. A working prototype with brackets and character graphics was ready after about two weeks.

He worked on the game a bit more, adding rotation and the line-clearing mechanism, and by early June 1985, everyone in the centre was busy playing his puzzle game.

Since he was an employee of the Soviet government, all the rights to his creation officially belonged to the state, and for many years he did not receive any royalties. For several years, the game has been circulating the web from floppy disks and university networks.

From the Soviet Computer to the Global Millions

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Pajitnov moved to the US with the help of his acquaintances, who had been negotiating the rights to Tetris. He settled in the Seattle area and began working for Microsoft, developing various puzzles and entertaining software.

In 1996, he, along with Henk Rogers, co-founded The Tetris Company, which officially started earning royalties from the game. The total net worth of Alexey Pajitnov, as of recent years, amounts to ten to fifteen million dollars, most of which come from the endless flow of royalties from Tetris.

He always seemed more interested in his other open-source projects than in the game that made him famous. Nevertheless, he remained one of the key figures in the licensing rights management and even today, sometimes gives interviews about the development of video games and the peculiarities of the Russian school of programming.

From a simple puzzle game on Soviet computers, Tetris has grown to become one of the most popular video games in the world. And this is another incredible example of how one man’s work can live and multiply far beyond the borders of the homeland.