Tetris (Mirrorsoft video game): Difference between revisions

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[[Category:Items included in physical compilations owned by WEC Museum]]
[[Category:Items included in physical compilations owned by WEC Museum]]
[[Category:puzzle games]]
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[[Category:Tetris variants]]
[[Category:Video games]]
[[Category:Video games]]
[[Category:Video games developed by Spectrum Holobyte]]
[[Category:Video games developed by Spectrum Holobyte]]

Revision as of 01:31, 23 June 2024

Tetris (Mirrorsoft) cover.jpg
Tetris
Developer Mirrorsoft
Publisher Mirrorsoft
Platforms Acorn Electron, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Atari ST, BBC Micro, MSX, ZX Spectrum
Released DOS
United States: January 1988
Amiga, Apple II, Mac OS
United States: 1988
Atari ST
United States: 1989
Added to
Museum
DOS: April 5, 2020

Tetris is an influencial puzzle video game. Mirrorsoft released the first version in Western Europe.

Development

The original version of Tetris was developed by Alexey Pajitnov on an Elektronika 60 computer while employed as a computer engineer at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Sciences in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on June 6, 1984.

It was ported to DOS by Vadim Gerasimov, then a high school student, and was expanded by Gerasimov, Pajitnov, and Dmitry Pavlovsky, a computer engineer, from 1984 to 1986.

Original commercial release

As the game was made in the USSR, a communist country that was largely closed to outsiders, it was irregular for a product to have a worldwide commercial release.

However, a British man named Robert Stein sought the rights to Tetris. He first made telephone calls with Pajitnov, and later was told to deal with AcademySoft, the internal licensing and publishing division of the Soviet Academy. He was told that they were interested, and, taking this as a verbal agreement, began to make deals with the British publisher Mirrorsoft to sell Tetris for computers in Europe and the American publisher Spectrum HoloByte to sell Tetris for computers in North America.

Before Tetris was commercially released Stein was contacted by the Soviet organization known as Elektronorgtechnica, or Elorg, which informed him that he did not have a contract to publish Tetris and that all further negotiations would have to go through them.

Stein flew to the Soviet Union to meet with Elorg directly, however, before any contract was signed, the commercial version of Tetris was released, in January 1988, and became huge successes. Stein eventually signed a deal with Elorg on May 10, 1988, which gave him the right to release Tetris on home computers as well as the vaguely worded "different types of computers".