Original article publisher Toronto Star
June 6 will mark the 32nd anniversary of enduringly popular Tetris, originally made by Alexey Pajitnov, a video game designer in Russia.
The game continues to capture the imagination of players. A monster hit starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s on the Nintendo Game Boy and other early video game devices, Tetris is now available on a multitude of platforms.
And plans are in the works for a big-budget Tetris movie.
Who better to explain the phenomenon than Syd Bolton, founder of the Personal Computer Museum in Brantford, Ont., which has a collection of more than 1,000 computers that date back to 1976, and claims to have the largest collection of video games in Canada. This conversation has been edited for length.
Tell us a bit about how Tetris began.
A man named Alexey Pajitnov originally designed it (in 1984). He worked for the (Soviet Academy of Sciences). At the time Russia was still under communism, so the rights to his game were owned by the government. Pajitnov worked with a programmer to bring the game to life. They didn’t think the game would be popular. There were no graphics in the first version. It was text-based, so it had brackets and symbols. Originally it was just passed around, and not available commercially.
What happened after that?
Later, there was controversy over the copyrights to the game, a big fight. Included in all of this was a man named Robert Stein, the president of a British software company who ended up selling rights to the game, rights that at one point he didn’t really have. Basically, Tetris was turned into a game for personal computers, and took off in popularity. And later Atari and Nintendo ended up making the game available, and incredibly popular, on video game devices in the United States, particularly the Nintendo Game Boy.
How did that part of the story end?
Henk Rogers (the entrepreneur credited for bringing Tetris to the U.S., and who today is the director of the Tetris Co., which has the exclusive licence for Tetris) has ensured that Pajitnov is now finally getting royalties from his creation. They’re both making tons and tons of money. Now Tetris holds the distinction of being the most ported video game ever made — in other words it’s available on the most platforms ever.
What do you think is the appeal of the game?
It’s really easy to understand what you need to do. It’s also difficult to master because there are so many different ways you can approach solving it, or continuing on. Getting a Tetris is (forming) four lines at once. Some people just clear as many individual lines as they can, so it’s like the obsession of cleaning up. I think that’s part of the reason why a lot of people, especially people with any OCD at all (laughs), love the game and get addicted. You’re constantly trying to clean up.
You can’t really beat the game though, right?
The original, you could never really beat it, but over the years various companies have attempted to make different versions of Tetris, and some have different modes, that you can consider beating it by getting to a certain level. But generally speaking there is no end to it.
I understand you have a lot of Tetris games in your museum.
I have Tetris on just about every platform. I’ve loved Tetris from day one. I have extra stuff — Tetris that plugs directly into the television, and memorabilia. I get Tetris Christmas cards every year from one of Henk Rogers’s companies.
Tell me more about yourself.
I’m an IT manager for a pharmaceutical company and handle all their computers. I also run the Personal Computer Museum in Brantford, a not-for profit interactive computer museum that preserves computer technology and shares it with the public. I have the largest collection of video games in Canada, well over 15,000 games that I’ve been collecting for over 30 years. I’m married, age 44, with no kids.
What does your wife think? You remind me of the guy in the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin, who had all those action figures in his house.
She was aware of this when we met … She gets that it’s a hobby for me and something I’m passionate about. I love video games so much that I just can’t imagine not doing this.
