Tetris’ creators reveal the game’s greatest unsolved mysteries

Despite creating one of the most recognizable video games of all time, Tetris creators Alexey Pajitnov (who first coded the game in Russia) and Henk Rogers (who was instrumental in bringing the game to prominence in the West) have not been all that recognizable to the general public. That has started to change, though, with the recent release of Apple TV's Tetris movie, which dramatizes the real-life story of the pair's unlikely friendship and business partnership.

In Ars Technica's latest Unsolved Mysteries video, Pajitnov and Rogers went all the way back to the game's earliest origins. That includes the origin of "the Tetris song," aka Korobeiniki, which Game Boy Tetris fans have had stuck in their heads for decades now.

"In 1988, when I first published Tetris in Japan... I knew somehow that Alexey didn't want Tetris associated with the Cold War side of Russia or the Soviet Union at the time," Rogers told Ars. "So I looked back in the history of Russia and found some folk songs."

Pajitnov explains how the game was originally programmed in 700 to 800 lines of PASCAL on a Russian Elektronika 60 (similar to the Western PDP-11), where he had to use square brackets to represent blocks on the machine's text-based green-on-black display. The game was then ported to C for a wide array of personal computers and 6502 assembly for the original Nintendo versions.

That initial coding wasn't without its issues, though. "I had some problem with the random number generator because it always starts with the same number," Pajitnov said. "So I had to put some other sort of randomness to start this random generator."

Over the years, that pure randomness has evolved into the standardized "bag system," which guarantees there will never be more than 13 pieces between those coveted long-bar "I" pieces.

"I thought the game lost something there," Rogers said of that randomization system. Under the old system, "everybody's watching you and you're surviving at the top and it's a big 'Yeah!' [when the I piece comes]. But if you already know the I piece is going to come up, it takes away some of that excitement, I guess."

Our full interview has plenty of other fun anecdotes about the wooden block puzzles that inspired the game, the origin of the name "Tetris," and disagreements over arcane details like piece rotations and "T-spin" bonuses. We also see Rogers wax a bit poetic about a game whose worldwide spread lined up beautifully (and coincidentally?) with the end of the Cold War.

"Tetris went a long way toward giving people the understanding that people behind the Iron Curtain and not behind the Iron Curtain are just people at the end of the day," Rogers said. "We're driven by the same thing. We play the same games. And all these things like politics don't come close to things like friendship."