Mailland uncovers bizarre history of bestselling video game Tetris
What do the KGB and Tetris have in common? More than you probably realize.
Professor Julien Mailland‘s new book, “Soviet Blocks: The Bizarre Puzzle of How Tetris Embraced Western Values,” dives into the geopolitical and bizarre legal history of the bestselling video game Tetris.
Mailland said there is an official storyline that has been told about Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris — he created the game in 1984 in Soviet Russia, then moved to the United States and brought the game into worldwide circulation in the late 80s.
Mailland said the company tells a fairy tale about the invention of the game.
“The real story is much more complicated, and it really is kind of the stuff of a spy movie,” Mailland said. “It’s also a much darker version, a much darker story, than the Tetris company will have you say.”
Mailland said while Pajitnov claims he designed the Tetris pieces, the pieces were actually disclosed in the 1950s by an American mathematician. He said credit was not given where credit was due.
Mailland said he has been playing Tetris since he started playing video games. He happened upon the idea to write a book about the game after reading magazine-style books about Tetris and noticing that the storyline was not adding up.
“If there was no copyright on the game because you were in Russia, how do you claim now that the copyright was yours all along?” he said. “It just doesn’t work.”
It took Mailland around two years to write the book. In those years, he spent time researching court archives, retrieving documentation about the history of the game.
“I went to a federal court in Manhattan, and then I went to Seattle to a courthouse there as well, and found those really cool records, and so I took a lot of pictures and scans of that,” he said. “That’s all in the book; there’s about 50 images in the book.”
For Mailland, one challenge in the writing process was familiarizing himself with Soviet Russian law and culture, and understanding the context of that time period. He said he had to read an enormous amount of books about the KGB, Gorbachev, the Cold War, and more.
Mailland said the writing process was like an adventure, and that it seemed like there was a puzzle that he had to solve.
“It’s like investigative journalism in that sense,” he said.
“Soviet Blocks” was published by MIT Press and is available to purchase online.