Tetris (Mirrorsoft video game)

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".