A sort of oddly opinionated article despite having little citation to it and being rather vague on events and timelines compared to some other pieces out there. I’d love to know why for example, the author finds it so clear that Pajitnov should not have won a copyright. I don’t have any stake in it myself, the claim just isn’t supported in the article. I think this is the 4th or 5th retelling of this story I’ve come across now.
>Ironically, Tetris’s success began because the totalitarian Soviet regime did not recognize what we take for granted in the West: the freedom to publish. After Pajitnov adapted Golomb’s geometric discoveries for the nascent digital world, he had no choice but to distribute his game as a samizdat
Samizdat very specifically refers to censored texts and vinyl records. Yeah sure various versions of Tetris informally circulated around on floppies/tapes just like all other games and software, but that's not samizdat and had nothing to do with freedom of publish or censorship, there just weren't many viable ways to distribute the software to private users (and not many of those to begin with). It was way too long ago and I don't remember if any Soviet magazines like Radio had actual listings, but Tetris was a popular game in them.
The parent comment already removed the part about vinyl recordings, but I still really want to point out that people in the USSR had to be creative (have to be even now) to bypass censorship.
This created things like roentgenizdat or "ribs" (gramophone recordings made from polyester X-ray films)
Yeah I edited it out because it had a different name, and more importantly there were totally different circles of people. It wasn't a single underground community or something like that. Later on there were VHS clubs ("video salons"), completely different people again. Some describe all that as samizdat but it really wasn't. Mentioning Solzhenitsyn and Tetris in a single sentence doesn't make sense.
Samizdat was not just about censored texts. It was even used for cooking recipes and fanzines.
In USSR it was not possible for an ordinary person to publish anything because printing equipment and how to use it was a state secret tightly controlled by KGB. If you wanted to publish something samizdat was the only option.
>The point is that in USSR it was not possible for an ordinary person to publish anything
That's another extreme and just wrong. Of course if you were a dissident or just had wrong friends you couldn't even publish a cookbook, but plenty of non-members of either the party or the writers union were publishing their stuff, see Kir Bulychev as a notorious example or an ordinary guy with the disdain for the party (and his father was a lawyer thrown out of the party and his grandfather fought in the White Army, so he was certainly "на карандаше") who nevertheless was one of the most popular Soviet fiction writers. Your stuff had to pass the editorial board and литование by the censorship body, and of course you must have not been viewed as disloyal. Travelers, beginner writers, critics, etc. all published their stuff. I still have a fungi reference book written in Ukrainian by a non-member of either the union or the party, just a long-time outdoorsman.
> Before 1987 your stuff had to pass the editorial board and литование by the censorship body, and of course you must not have been viewed as disloyal or suspicious.
It's not really publishing as a private person. Which was impossible/illegal as people didn't have access to printing equipment. Yes you could publish it by sending it to a newspaper or magazine.
Well if by publishing you mean "mass printing with equipment owned by an ordinary person" then sure, it was impossible. That's a very careful, laser focused definition, though.
> What’s more, it had been designed and coded in a state artificial-intelligence research lab tightly controlled by the KGB
Hmm, according to Wikipedia this happened in the Computational Centre for the USSR Science Academy. As far as I know it was never a "closed" institute, so the article is over dramatising it at least.
> the Trump administration released a politically charged clone of Tetris called Build the Wall.
Knowing that the principle of Tetris is to destroy the walls that form when the shapes land, I start to wonder what was the winning condition of this version
Only one of the most well documented game development effort in history. There's even documentaries and the authors still are on speaking tours across the world
> A major instrument of that victory had been the spread of Western culture
That's the political fluff. The important thing was the spread of capitalism and its accompanying legal institutions such as trademark and copyright - which Tetris definitely represented.
The widespread protest movements that led to the fall of the Iron Curtain didn’t happen through some vague “spread of capitalism” or through copyright. The spread of Western culture was a major part of what sparked those widespread protests.
For a decent documentary tracing the creation of Tetris, and the machinations that eventually brought it to the west (taking out part of Maxwell's Mirror empire along the way), find BBC4's "From Russia With Love". Last I checked it was available in full on Youtube, those of us in the UK can no doubt get it on iPlayer.
By far the most compelling telling I've seen of the "How BPS and Nintendo got the Tetris rights" story is in chapters 13 and 14 of David Sheff's book "Game Over". The whole book is a good read if you're into game history (apart from the Atari chapter, which leans too hard on Nolan Bushnell as a source), it's basically the only time people at Nintendo talked at length with a reporter.
Meanwhile the Tetris film was awful. The Tetris rights negotiations were all about the various sides wrestling for power and the Soviets trying to play them against each other. The film basically goes "nah that's too boring for our target audience" and tries to make it into a Cold War spy thriller, but the hamfisted modifications to the events that transpired make the plot nonsensical (especially for general audiences that would be unfamiliar with what actually happened).
FWIW, The Gaming Historian youtube channel did a good cover of it [0]
> Meanwhile the Tetris film was awful. The Tetris rights negotiations were all about the various sides wrestling for power and the Soviets trying to play them against each other. The film basically goes "nah that's too boring for our target audience" and tries to make it into a Cold War spy thriller, but the hamfisted modifications to the events that transpired make the plot nonsensical (especially for general audiences that would be unfamiliar with what actually happened).
It was definitely a bit much in places, but it was a fun dramatization. Having been very familiar with the background, they at least did a good job of keeping it interesting enough where even a non-gamer would stay interested through the film as far as theming/story/etc.
I mean it takes what's actually compelling about the story (the comedy of errors that caused the Tetris rights to slip through Robert Stein's fingers, culminating in the Soviets entirely redefining who has which rights in two days of simultaneous negotiations with all involved parties) and adds all sorts of nonsense about the KGB being involved in everything from the start, about Pajitnov's family being threatened over the licensing, about Tetris somehow having the potential to both keep the Mirror Group empire from imploding and liberalize the Soviet Union, etc. Then the film has to deal with the problem that it's ostensibly about real events, but the characters' motivation makes no sense because of all the embellishments. It all just comes off as cartoonish.
It is weird how they use the letter Я ("ya") as a "Russian" version of R. The Russian (actually Cyrillic) version of R is "P". So I read the name with flipped "R" as "Tetyais" and it makes no sense.
Also I wonder how Vadim Gerasimov managed to obtain an IBM PC-compatible computer: where he got the money and what store would be selling that. This shows how unequal and unfair the society became when reforms began at the late USSR. In earlier USSR, everybody would equally and fairly have no computer.
As a Russian programmer, certainly you are aware of Elektronika 60 and Dorodnitsyn Computing Center? Regarding я, it is the same shape as R but backwards and feels exotic, nothing too complex there.
This can't be the first time you're seeing such use of Я? It's very commonly used in Western typography / graphic design as a symbol to invoke associations with Russia. It's not being used as a Cyrillic letter, it's being used a "think of Russia" and people unfamiliar with Cyrillic will mentally associate it with R so TETЯIS is easily read as "tetris". Even if yes, people familiar with the alphabet find it harder because the first reaction to Я is to in fact read it correctly.
Same with Σ being used as a "think of Greece" symbol that people from Latin-script languages are expected to process as E, leading to "brilliant" designs in GRΣΣK. Or how the Chinese character 山 would remind a Russian speaker of Ш so ПО山ЛИ would be easy to read.
Nobody ever referred to software as “samizdat”, and there was no concept of “freeware” - everything was “free”, including stolen Western software. Source: I’m from there and then.
The author similarly dives into the crazy and interesting series of events - such a snapshot of that era - that led to the game getting onto the Gameboy, and the impressive impact that had.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 39.8 ms ] threadSamizdat very specifically refers to censored texts and vinyl records. Yeah sure various versions of Tetris informally circulated around on floppies/tapes just like all other games and software, but that's not samizdat and had nothing to do with freedom of publish or censorship, there just weren't many viable ways to distribute the software to private users (and not many of those to begin with). It was way too long ago and I don't remember if any Soviet magazines like Radio had actual listings, but Tetris was a popular game in them.
The parent comment already removed the part about vinyl recordings, but I still really want to point out that people in the USSR had to be creative (have to be even now) to bypass censorship.
This created things like roentgenizdat or "ribs" (gramophone recordings made from polyester X-ray films)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribs_(recordings)
This is a plot point in the excellent Star City, a spin-off of For All Mankind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_City_(TV_series). Also see this project by English musician Stephen Coates: https://www.x-rayaudio.com/
In USSR it was not possible for an ordinary person to publish anything because printing equipment and how to use it was a state secret tightly controlled by KGB. If you wanted to publish something samizdat was the only option.
That's another extreme and just wrong. Of course if you were a dissident or just had wrong friends you couldn't even publish a cookbook, but plenty of non-members of either the party or the writers union were publishing their stuff, see Kir Bulychev as a notorious example or an ordinary guy with the disdain for the party (and his father was a lawyer thrown out of the party and his grandfather fought in the White Army, so he was certainly "на карандаше") who nevertheless was one of the most popular Soviet fiction writers. Your stuff had to pass the editorial board and литование by the censorship body, and of course you must have not been viewed as disloyal. Travelers, beginner writers, critics, etc. all published their stuff. I still have a fungi reference book written in Ukrainian by a non-member of either the union or the party, just a long-time outdoorsman.
It's not really publishing as a private person. Which was impossible/illegal as people didn't have access to printing equipment. Yes you could publish it by sending it to a newspaper or magazine.
i mean by a private business that the person could just go to... the equipment is massive
Hmm, according to Wikipedia this happened in the Computational Centre for the USSR Science Academy. As far as I know it was never a "closed" institute, so the article is over dramatising it at least.
Knowing that the principle of Tetris is to destroy the walls that form when the shapes land, I start to wonder what was the winning condition of this version
That's the political fluff. The important thing was the spread of capitalism and its accompanying legal institutions such as trademark and copyright - which Tetris definitely represented.
Meanwhile the Tetris film was awful. The Tetris rights negotiations were all about the various sides wrestling for power and the Soviets trying to play them against each other. The film basically goes "nah that's too boring for our target audience" and tries to make it into a Cold War spy thriller, but the hamfisted modifications to the events that transpired make the plot nonsensical (especially for general audiences that would be unfamiliar with what actually happened).
> Meanwhile the Tetris film was awful. The Tetris rights negotiations were all about the various sides wrestling for power and the Soviets trying to play them against each other. The film basically goes "nah that's too boring for our target audience" and tries to make it into a Cold War spy thriller, but the hamfisted modifications to the events that transpired make the plot nonsensical (especially for general audiences that would be unfamiliar with what actually happened).
It was definitely a bit much in places, but it was a fun dramatization. Having been very familiar with the background, they at least did a good job of keeping it interesting enough where even a non-gamer would stay interested through the film as far as theming/story/etc.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fQtxKmgJC8
1. [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1836974/]
Also I wonder how Vadim Gerasimov managed to obtain an IBM PC-compatible computer: where he got the money and what store would be selling that. This shows how unequal and unfair the society became when reforms began at the late USSR. In earlier USSR, everybody would equally and fairly have no computer.
Same with Σ being used as a "think of Greece" symbol that people from Latin-script languages are expected to process as E, leading to "brilliant" designs in GRΣΣK. Or how the Chinese character 山 would remind a Russian speaker of Ш so ПО山ЛИ would be easy to read.
https://www.filfre.net/2017/08/a-tale-of-the-mirror-world-pa...
The author similarly dives into the crazy and interesting series of events - such a snapshot of that era - that led to the game getting onto the Gameboy, and the impressive impact that had.