Story Highlights
- Historical event:
- 6 June 1984
- Tetris was the first game that the Soviet Union was able to export to the USA (it was published by Spectrum HoloByte for Commodore 64 and IBM PC).
On this day in 1984, the legendary computer game Tetris was conceived.
It was programmed in the USSR by Alexey Pajitnov, a Russian engineer who worked for the Computer Centre in the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.
The center in Moscow was used by the Soviets as an institution for research and development in the field of computer technology. Pajitnov did not receive any royalties from the sales of the game, because it officially belonged to the Soviet government as his employer.
The name Tetris was coined by Pajitnov as a combination of the prefix tetra- (Greek: four, because every element of the game contains 4 segments) and suffix -is (after Pajitnov’s favorite sport tennis).
Tetris was the first game that the Soviet Union was able to export to the USA (it was published by Spectrum HoloByte for the Commodore 64 and IBM PC). After the collapse of the USSR, Pajitnov moved to the United States. He worked at Microsoft for nine years, and today works on developing software for logic games.
