Citation Needed - Tetris

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

Tetris (Russian: Тетрис [ˈtɛtrʲɪs]) is a tile-matching video game created by Russian software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984. It has been published by several companies, most prominently during a dispute over the appropriation of the rights in the late 1980s. After a significant period of publication by Nintendo, the rights reverted to Pajitnov in 1996, who co-founded The Tetris Company with Henk Rogers to manage licensing.

Well, of course it's your body. I get that. You can send those pictures to whoever you want, but those are my co-workers that you did most recently. You know what mom? I gotta go. I have work. Just please don't send anymore until we talk about it, specifically to my co-workers. Well then don't send anymore after tonight. Just no more after t- you know what nevermind. Finally! Oh man! Man, I'll take you long enough. Come on man. Jesus. Hey, guys, sorry I'm late.

Did I miss something? Yeah, so you know how I'm always trying to help our podcast? Yeah, you killed us so many times, man. Come on. I mean, almost. Would we say help? You made me say clip-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-cl It's worth since the topic of this week's essay is Tetris I thought what better way to set things up than human Tetris Yeah, and it was actually going pretty good Though I'm still not sure I like being the square really Tom. You're not the square

You're not the who's the square if not you Tom anyway. We've been sitting here for fucking hours like this waiting for you our Long piece. Oh me right. Yeah, cuz Paul awesome. Cause cause tall, exactly. Yeah. Cause. Yeah. All right. You guys ready to record? Give me a second. I just need to stretch my legs, man. Oh, I still don't know why I'm the like the L. I don't get why I'm the letter L. Because Noah and I were left Z. I'm not. I'm not gonna have many qualities that aren't tall. Just so many different aspects to me. Of course you do, buddy. Yeah, man. Nobody said you didn't.

Okay, good. Yeah, for instance, we get those naked pictures from your mom. It was great. Yeah. Okay. Exactly. Love those.

I want to talk about that. Hello and welcome! A citation needed! The podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnick and I'll be perfectly aligning the pieces of this story. But I'll need some blockheads! First up, two men old enough to remember when today's subject was cutting-edge video game technology, Cecil and Noah. I remember when they made the pong ball into four dots, and one was just a little darker to make it round.

It made the look right- It's amazing! Amazing! Long ball into four dots and one was just a little darker to make it round. It made the look right amazing amazing. Oh Well, it's cathode rate who's making high definition irrelevance Preach rather preach And also joining us tonight to men who refuse to play because building a wall is way too much like work I'm and he fucking heavy. That's not I'm not doing that without a serious paycheck. We're just typical lazy Irish people. Yo, it's a toy, it's a toy, great.

Keith, come on, man. Dude, how the Irish are up there? No, he lied. He lied. Last episode, it was a thing, like a couple of weeks ago, it's this, what about what? We were talking about Irish. I had no idea what you're talking about.

We were talking, is a whole thing. This is a set. Hey, you guys super racist. Sorry. Anyways, Tom, did you have a wall-based joke for us? Not anymore, I don't. Okay. Okay. You threw it in it.

Before we begin tonight, I'd like to thank our patrons. If the free podcast flowing into your ear tubes is perfectly aligned stack, our patrons' money is the long piece that satisfi ingly makes it all come together. And if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around till the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us, Tom, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event? Will we be talking about today? Yeah, we're going to be talking about Tetris so that that fucking music, it's lodged in your goddamn head for three weeks too. So, that's great.

There it is. There it is. There it is. And it never goes out to do it. There's some good emo versions of that too. And Noah, this one's been spinning around in your head for a while. Are you ready to clear things up for us? Oh God, I've made the bad puns too easy on him.

I don't know. Also related question Are you doing an essay about video games just to piss Tom? Yes he is good good question and good guess Well, okay, so I wanted to do something that happened on today's date and history But when I looked that up the only thing that I felt like I could milk an essay out of was the fatty Arbuckle's birthday and Instead I decided I placed Tetris what I thought about it. And then I I didn't come up with anything.

And here we are. All right. So tell us Noah what is Tetris? Don't say it like that. Well, we need to stop. We need to stop. You can not say it like that for the rest of the time. Yeah.

Well, now he's got his luck in the trees. Oh, no, no. Damn it. So you're off the ground. That's wrong. I'm so. The essence is silent. No, so the Tetris is almost certainly the most popular video game of all time.

Now, it's actually hard to pin that down with exact numbers, especially since free to play mobile apps and marketing bullshit, convoluted the hell out of the most players, ever lists. Suffice to say that two different versions of Tetris show up in the top 10 best-selling video games of all time list. And there are at least 26 versions of Tetris. I'm not counting sequels in the spin-offs when I say that. Like 26 versions of the original one that I've been sold. The game is so addictive that if you make the mistake of trying to sleep at some point

after having played it, you'll see the little Tetris pieces falling in your unconscious mind. And while Tetris isn't the only activity, they can do that to a person, the fact that psychologists call that the Tetris effect, Cl Clujian on how common it is. My sexual style was actually described as losing it, tetris, several times. It's funny you mentioned that phenomenon, because I actually have that, except instead of tetris,

it's every time I ever said or did anything embarrassing. So, right. Right. All right. So now, obviously, the story of Tetris begins in Russia, or as it was known then, the United Soviet Socialist Republic. 100% of this essay must be read in that voice. No, sorry.

It's that flocked in. Patreon goal, right? So, 100% of your life has to be read in that voice. All right. So, the year is 1984. Now that's 1962 in Soviet years. Everything those motherfuckers had at the time was decades out of date. And as omnipresent as that back no doubt was for anybody that lived there,

it was particularly noticeable if you were a computer programmer, like Alexei Pagetnov. So Pagetnov worked in the artificial intelligence department for the Dorodneets and Computing Center at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and his primary focus was on speech recognition. Now, is anybody who's ever used Alexa or Syria or something like that, knows even 37 years later,

we're still just dipping our toes into the water on that stuff. So needless to say, a guy in 1984 working on wildly outdated equipment wasn't making a lot ahead. The Russian Amazon Alexa called the KGB every time you added blue jeans to your shop. So one day they wheeled this new computer called an electronic 60. It's essentially the equivalent of a PDP 11, which was a state of the art mini computer in 1970. Seven numbers and so sad, like 60 and 11, like you use hundreds of these. Right.

How many as a mini computer in 1970 did it fit like in one room? Is that what made it many? Yeah, it's like, it's like the Tsar Bomba of a computer. It's like that. So, so like mini computer at that time in 1970 anyway, meant like the size of our fridge. But we put the handle on it. We can use it.

You just tuck it under your arm and go to the coffee shop, you know? Yeah, right. Well, Xbox is bringing that back, actually. I don't know. The Russians invented kettlebell training just to move their computers around. Right. So, well, and so for this huge fucking thing, it's got four kilobytes of real. Really?

It has no graphic capacity whatsoever, and it topped out in about a quarter million operations per second. So for contrast, the most popular home computer at the time in the U.S. was the Commodore 64, which had 16 times as much ram and twice the processing speed. And you could get it for under 500 bucks. Like this no shit eight year old Noah literally had more computing power than the Soviet Academy. And we were more afraid of eight year old Noah than we were we were the US. That's our. And it ain't. No, it was actually the kid from more games.

That was him. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So anyway, so they wheeled in this binary dinosaur and task Alexi with testing his capacity. So naturally, he sets about programming a video game. Uh, boss, this is just abacus and handful of sand. The game's going to be just squares that,

but it's just really just squares. It's just squares. Yeah, right. Like honestly squares might have been a little much for this motherfucker, because like look, this computer doesn't do graphics, right? So when you have a computer that doesn't have graphics,

your game potential is super thin. So Alexi decided to build this game around very simple shapes. Now, his first thought was that of a pentamino puzzle that he had loved as a kid. So, Pantaminno. Well, there's some description on that.

You said pentaminno. But now, nobody says tetramino. So, Patramino. No, a pentaminno. Is any shape made of five equal size squares that's connected edge to edge? There are a total of 12 potential shapes or 18 if you count mirror shapes as different

ones. And as with their last diverse cousin, dominoes, there are a number of games that you can play with those shapes. I believe it's for us. A lot of you said. Yeah. So Alexie said about programming a game where you had to fill an eight by eight grid

by rotating and placing pentaminos. Or a pentamino. I don't know. I don't know. It's all like filled a game thing. Maybe wasn't what Russia had in mind when they gave him their only working computer. It's like,

a lot of me know. Alexi is going to do it. Soon we'll have the answer to global domination of the capital is swine in America. Yes, comrade, he is genius. Sooni will have programmed the program so devious, so cunning, the lights in America will go dark forever and the USSR will rule the earth. To Mother Russia. To Mother Russia. Okay, let's check on him. Alexey! Yes? What have you come up with, a computer virus that make real virus?

A worm, which will work its way into the American military mainframe, and then launch missiles at their own cities. Hey, that's very good, I like that. Yeah, I know, right? Thought of all night. Oh, so Alexey, what do you make? Alexey! Well, it like... I like that. Yeah, I know right thought of all night. Oh, so Alexy, what you make? Alexy Well, he'd like

Domino's Domino's If not actually as good as Domino All right, so ultimately that original game had a couple of problems most notably is fucking boring, but while he was fucking around with that, there was something that he found very addictive about filling in the square. So he felt like there was a good game down there somewhere if he kept digging. So he simplified it. He downshifted from pentominoes we're talking about. See now so but that meant he only had seven shapes to work with instead of 18. Then he fidgeted with the rules and the playboard for a while until he

came up with a crazy addictive game and he christened that game Tetris a combination of the prefix tetra for four and the game tennis. So no, that word does not mean anything in Russian. Penis in Soviet Russia was kind of a weird. All right, so now keep in mind that the computer he was using had no graphic capabilities. He couldn't even do squares, right? So he couldn't create the shapes at all. He had to represent the squares of the pieces with hashtags. So the original Tetris has a very asky art look to it.

But regardless, it was crazy fun. And pretty soon everybody at the Academy was stealing away a few minutes here and there to fuck around with Alexie's new game. His boss is like, you know, I was going to ship you off to Siberia for wasting company time, but this is great. This is really fun.

Oh, bobo bobo. No. Yes. So if you or I came up with a game that people couldn't stop fucking playing, our first thought would probably be how to sell the thing. Right? But Alexi was living in a communist country

working for the government, right? He didn't own the game at all. He couldn't profit from it. So instead, he just copied and passed it along that pretty much every place in Moscow that had an electronic a 60 Which was like eight He enlisted the help of a 16 year old whiz kid programmer named Vadim Galisimov who translated the game to IBM PC

Because while officially there were zero of those in the USSR in reality. It was a relatively common black market item Okay, just hand it off real smooth when I give you the, Ow! That's so big. All right, so pretty soon the game was spreading like a fire. So I'm friend of Alexey's named Vladimir Pococo, saw the game. He realized that it could have an enormous value in academic research, believe it or not. He was a clinical psychologist who specialized in human computer interactions and he spread the game around by using it to study learning and addiction and a host of other subjects.

He was so instrumental in spreading the game around actually that many sources list him as the co-creator. After the fall of the USSR, he would start his own software company, make a bunch of money, lose a bunch more than he made, and then stab his wife and his child to death in a horrific murder suicide. She's, sorry to add that detail, but you got to spice up the Tetris essay where you can. He's just turning a square knife around, okay, does cement. Stabs are perfectly and she disappears.

By 2086, Tetris managed to slip past the Iron Curtain. And that's going to do named Robert Stein for a sought. So Stein is an international salesman for a London based software company. And as soon as he saw the game, he knew he was looking at a mega hit. He wasn't a big video game guy himself, but he played Tetris all the three times and he was addicted. So he talks to no vote trade, which is the company that's distributing it in Hungary about securing the UK rights for it. And he gets basically the worst news he can get. The game came out of the economic black hole of the USSR. Okay, so basically at this time, nothing was exported from the Soviet Union. At least not outside the Soviet blog. I mean, they're consumer goods. We were all shit. Nobody wanted them

But even the stuff they were good at didn't make it out. Nobody was watching Russian movies or listening to Russian music or reading Russian novels or Not anything was made after 1945 anyway. Come on. Lolita was amazing. Thank you But the thing is that like that it's not because they sucked at the arts It was because it was essentially impossible to license commercial properties from a country with no intellectual property law. Right, so the idea of trying to license software from a Russian programmer was a fucking nightmare. Yeah, Russian programming had like an extra thousand pages

of extraneous code and more characters in a kid who remember anyway. So, yeah, these Russian lit is a lot like Tetris. It's tedious, repetitive. And you know there's a way to get to the end, but God damned if you've ever got it. Right? It's not. I was promised this code was going to jump under a train. I was going to jump under a train. All right. So, so Stein does a bit of research. He finds out that the game was made at the Academy of Science. So he contacts them. He gets nothing from them. So then he contacts Alexi Pagetnav directly.

Now Alexi had spoken to his superiors about licensing the game outside of the country and they had been receptive to that idea. So when this British guy reaches out to him, all he knows is that yes, Robert Stein has discussed this with the Academy and yes, he wants to sell Tetris outside the USSR. So he gets a friend who speaks a little bit of English

to facts or apply to Stein saying that yes, he is definitely interested in licensing the game. Now, the rest of this story all hinges on the intent of that facts. It's in broken English, so piecing together the intent is a bit tough to begin with, but Stein reads it, and he interprets that as a go ahead to start shopping the rights around for this game to different software companies. Alexi says his intent is just to tell Stein that he's interested not to empower him to sell any rights. And since there's going to be tens of millions of dollars at stake the first time that

that dispute bubbles to the surface, who the hell knows what anybody honestly meant or thought at any point. The end result though is that Stein thinks he has the rights to sell Tetris, but what he really has is an RSVP. See, this is why we need heroes like Thomas Edison, and this fucking around with permission stuff just, oh, that looks cool. Bam, light bulb. Bing, Hissie, the hour.

There you go. All right. So in 1987, Stein takes his phantom rights to the consumer electronic show in Vegas. That would be the biggest trade show in the video game industry until E3 started in 1995. And while a lot of companies were scared away by the game's Soviet origins, he did manage to sell the European rights to a company called MirrorSoft and the American rights to Spectrum Hollowbyte. And then it gets complicated.

Spectrum Hollowbyte somehow gets the impression that they have the Japanese rights, which they then sell to a dude named Hank Rogers, who works for Bulletproof Software. Mirrorsoft also thinks it has the Japanese rights, so they sell them to Tenjin, which is a subsidiary of Atari, and then Tenjin sells the Japanese arcade rights to say, oh my God, what is even happening right now?

Well, so at this point, basically every company in the video game industry except Nintendo thinks they own the rights to Tetris. And then Nintendo fought the rights to Tetris. And they finally come out with the cover for the new Tetris. It's just a series of Spider-Man cartoons pointing at each other just that.

That's the thing. All right, well, quick before Nintendo turns the Z piece into a beloved character with a franchise and PlayStation turns it into a greedy man with a dead wife. I need a great break. For a little something we like to call apropos of nothing. Do you know if he's coming? I mean, he said he was. Oh, what's this?

Room for me to slot in. Square? Square, you made it. LPs, T-block. How the hell are you guys? Been years. Tell me, buddy. You look great, block. How the hell are you guys been years tell me about it You look great man. No, no, I don't mean use that square to am I right?

Yeah, totally about it. Yeah, by the way, El I'm tired of here about you and you know other Diverse rough. Thanks. Are you guys just such a perfect fit though? I know I just you know, I think at a certain point we were just too similar. Sure. Hey fellas! Oh, see piece. You made it. Of course I did. You think I'd miss the big Tetraminos reunion did you? Uh oh, we're glad you're here. You know, this is so funny. I actually didn't get invited.

Like, I think my invitation got lost in the mail, but when I saw OPs here, I post a better on Facebook. I had the weekend free, so I came. Yeah. You can just call me Square. See, everybody calls me Square. But your official title is OPs.

Yeah, right. I'm very clearly a square. You can see this. Whatever you say, Big O, whatever you say. And look what I brought. Organic chick pea puffs. I know I've been telling you guys to go vague for a while.

Trust me, these taste just like Cheetos. Oh, I'm good, I'm fine. No, thank you. Come on! Trust me! Don't put that in my mouth! Oh, they're so dry. Right?

So good! What is that aftertaste? Oh, that's the chickpea. I got an anaphyr. A lot of pears. Okay, but don't be too long ago I brought a very complex World War II themed board game that I have played and you guys haven't Don't expect me to go easy on you. Oh cool

Excuse me did somebody order shots You knew I would miss this shit. Alright, so you fuckers drink these first rounds on me. And, you know what, I'm gonna get round two, also on me. And then we can take turns doing donuts in my brand new... A Ferrari. I'm Ferrari. I'm a very long beast.

Very beast. And then we'll play my board game that I brought it only takes 10 minutes to set up And it's 20 to 10. Well, yeah, we'll see we'll see what they're not I take so we have time for that. Oh, okay Late it's not the same either sound weird. ["Pleabians on this Podcast"] And we're back! But only because the other plebians on this podcast didn't trust you, our audience with a full remake of the Iceman comment using the Tetris pieces Whatever

All pieces Eli So the next chapter of the story revolves around a dude named Hank Rogers Yeah, of course Hank is a Dutch entrepreneur and environmental activist and broken to the video game industry by introducing role playing games to the Japanese market. How does that sense make sense to you? Hank is a Dutch guy selling shit to the Japanese. Yeah, he's quite the international dude. I fucking love I honestly almost just did a whole ass

I know every word to put him in that order. I don't know what happened All right, so no Hank was also one of the few non-Japanese people who managed to wrangle a software development license out in Nintendo in the mid 80s And like pretty much everybody who ever saw Tetris he he got addicted, but unlike anybody who had seen it to that point, he was super buddy buddy with Hiroshi Yamachi, the president of Nintendo, and Manuro Arakawa, Hiroshi's son-in-law, and president of Nintendo America, which means that he's already seen the YIN to Tetris's Yang. See, by 1987, Nintendo was hard at work developing

what would become their best selling console to that point and remains the third best selling console of all time, the Gameboy. Affectionately known as the brick, the original Gameboy was an underpowered system even by the standards of the day. Other handhelds had way more pixels, backlit screens, color graphics, and they used 26 double-edged batteries in the last two 14 minutes. With the Game Boy's 15-hour battery life and phenomenal game selection would ultimately propel it to over a hundred million sales.

Some kids trying to power his off-brand hand held with a length of cable, a clock tower, and a lightning bolt. Yeah, that's awesome. How's it going? You remember the Atari Lynx? Yeah. It's very Ellen, run around in circles for me.

I got five. Five. Duck, I need to tell you something about the tree. All right. So but as of 1987, the Game Boy is still just an ugly ass brick a plastic with a screen that offered up four shades of baby shit. Great. Okay. To sell the motherfucker, Nintendo was going to need their killer app and Hank Rogers knew that he just found it. What's more, he was reasonably sure that nobody had

bothered to sew up the handheld rights to the game. So he figured there was probably some wiggle room for him to get in on this deal. Okay, imagine if the rights for everything where this might notely subdivided. Okay, so I see you do have the land rights to the property fine, fine, but I'm afraid you didn't buy the window or door rights. So, I don't know how, not bullfinner. You know, you're gonna have to sky rights, actually. Why don't you make a foot held system to fuck with all these guys?

Right? Right. All right, so at the same time, Robert Stein is sitting in the middle of his tangled web of sub-lease Japanese arcade rights and shit and still always got to back up his claim to the game as a fact that says, yeah, man, see what you can do. So he is desperately trying to get a signed contract with the Russians that cement his end of this deal. And at the same time, Russia is all the way glass nose, right? So they're trying to reform their country, they're dipping their toes into the waters of capitalism. And

that means that suddenly, Stein is dealing with two dozen different people who just did the 1980s equivalent of googling how to negotiate video game rights, all of them determined to get the best possible deal for the motherland. Oh, okay. I know you read something about like making me talk first in some negotiation manual, but now you have to say something now, like I've talked now. There's nothing going to happen. It's happening.

It's not. Mm, it. Okay. Exactly, actually. So, okay, so by this time, the Russians are pissed at this time. They can see that the game is doing well on three continents and they're still not seeing any money. Now, this is actually a fairly natural thing.

It deals like this. The money has to be fed up through this huge chain a half dozen subsidiaries before Stein's ever going to see any of it. And then he's got a pass along to them. But if there's one thing that everybody who doesn't know what the fuck they're doing in a business deal, hasn't common, it is the unshakeable certainty that they're getting ripped off So so the Russians are hesitant to sign anything at all with Stein until he proves that he can actually show them the money

Okay, here's a picture of me and the money with today's newspaper You guys maybe read about a different negotiation. Yeah. All right. So meanwhile, along comes Hank Rogers. Now, after an unsuccessful attempt to wrangle the handheld rights from Steine, he says, fuck it. I bet they never thought to specify handheld rights in the contract at all. So he just goes to Moscow, but he doesn't call anybody. He doesn't set up any appointments.

Doesn't even know where the fuck he's going. Yeah, he just, he gets a super shady passport and and in fact The only way even manages to figure out who we should be talking to at all is by visiting muskofian go clubs So he gets that since that game was so popular with mathematicians and shit It would be the best way to meet computer Programmers just kicks open the door what up nerds nice rock game anyone here know where I can file a rights to fucking shapes So okay, so by now the rights to Tetris are being handled by E lord E lord the company who dares to ask Rang

So so E lord is the state-owned monopoly that's in charge of exporting computer software, which means they set up this entire fucking thing to South Tetris because it's the only goddamn software that are exporting. So Rogers shows up one day and he's like, hey, I'm with Nintendo, I want to give you a shit ton of money so they let him in. Now, he talks with a dude named Nikolai Bellacoff and I love this fucking guy. Now, Bellacoff doesn't know a hell of a lot about negotiating business deals, but he does know that two potential buyers is better than one. So here's Rodgers out.

Now, ultimately, they reach an informal agreement on the handheld rights. Yeah, Hank just slides a rolling stones LP across the table face down. And if you lie, nods. Right. Yeah, can you just facts this informal agreement to me so I feel more secure with the other guy? Yeah, right? Okay, so now the meeting is between Rogers and Bellica, but they've got a Lexi Paget knob in the room in case there are any technical questions about the program itself and even though He's not directly involved in the negotiations Hank Rogers is a computer programmer and he wants to impress on this other computer program That hey man. I'm gonna do a good job translating your game. So he busts out the

cartridge version of the game that his company already has that they're selling in Japan. Now keep in mind that somewhere down that chain of rights tension subsub sub least his company the console rights in Japan except nobody had the console rights in Japan to sell him and that was how you were first learned that the game was even available on consoles. See, they knew that Stein was shopping the rights, but they'd only granted him computer rights, not consoles. Oh my fucking god.

Now I miss the Etruscans. That's how man this guy, D. I'm gonna make you regret saying the whole point of this essay was to make you say that. So, so ever the opportunist, head Rogers is like, Hey man, you know, if those console rights are still available,

I know a guy who will take them off your hand and he immediately calls up his contacts with Nintendo America. And so as soon as Minero Araqawa learns that the rights of the most popular game in the fucking world are up for grabs, he and Howard Lincoln, that's Anna-Wayce Chairman,

Hoppaflight to Moscow, or actually it's nowhere near that easy. They hoppaflight to DC to jump through the 2700 hoops that it takes for a foreign-owned American company to go to a business deal with the Soviet power like in the A.E. And you know a bunch of those DC people were convinced they're spies. But yeah, in the room, it's these Nintendo nerds just being like, it's video games. We're like the Mario Kart. I could show you how to set up a VCR, but that's nothing like that.

Alright, now, so I should point out that there's a kind of personal angle to all of this. Now, I know that multi-million dollar business deals don't happen because a petty personal grudges accept yes the fuck they do and the company most heavily invested in Tetris at this point was a Tari's subsidiary tangent. Now that's a company that had been suing Nintendo since it was conceived for being more successful than them. So everybody involved in Nintendo was super stoked about a chance to pull the rug out from under tension. So anyway, so after a couple of spoiled ass Uber rich American business elites

acclimate to hotel and a USSR on the verge of full economic collapse. Araka was shows up at E-Log and they set about their negotiations with Bellacop. Now, Araka was sensed right away that Bellacop is worried about money. So he's like, here, man, here have a half a million dollars. Like before they can sign on the dotted line or whatever, they have to make sure they're buttoned down from a legal perspective. They know if they know that if they snag these rights, they're going to get sued by pretty much every video game company on earth simultaneously. Yeah, that entire facts correspondence has to be very well buttoned down. Right. So now

this is where Bella comfort feels himself to be a bit of a down. Exactly, right. Right. So now this is where Bella Cunford feels himself to be a bit of a shrewd negotiator. So he's already agreed to a contract in principle with Stein, but they haven't signed anything yet. So he sends out a revised copy along with a tie rate about how he needs to start seeing some goddamn money. Now, the contract was rewritten in a couple of places,

but mostly they were small changes that just clarified definitions and shit. But the sections on payment were substantially rewritten such that e-lord could recover penalties for late payments and shit like that. So Stein looks it over, he rolls his eyes at the late payment shit he says, okay, I'll agree to this. Yeah, and then he takes the sign contracts, taps them on the table together, and then they line up perfectly and disappear, just right out of the straight. Exactly. Really difficult working with you mother. Now since these guys had done nothing but bitch about late payments and Stein met him, he's certain that the

entire point of the rewritten contract was the late payments thing. But hidden among the other changes were some brand new hyper specific definitions of what a computer was. See, until now, Stein was operating under the assumption that a game console is effectively a computer, which was the justification that he'd been using to sell those rights.

But in this new version of the contract, it specified that a computer met a machine with a screen and a keyboard. So with Stein's name on that dotted line, E-Log was free to sell the console rights to Nintendo, along with the handheld rights. So in March of 1989, about a month before the Game Boy is set to be released in the US, Nintendo sends this gleeful cease and desist to Atari telling them to stop making Tetris and withdraw all the cartridges they already had in circulation. So naturally Atari calls their way up the chain of rights until they get to Mirrorsoft and

Mirrorsoft is owned by the student named Robert Maxwell. Robert Maxwell does not fuck around. Okay. Maxwell was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Czechoslovakia. He was coming to age just as Hitler was coming to power. He escaped to England, joined the army, got a bunch of medals for killing Nazis, and then he sent himself up as a media mogul in the UK. And that worked out well for him until the British government suspected him of being an Israeli spy, which is not the kind of guy you want lording over a giant media

empire in your country. He would fall off his yacht shortly after fall off his yacht. He walked into a polonium door. He's actually a psychopath. Totally in his really spy, by the way. But yeah, but allegedly, but see, I saved it. I saved it right there, but at this point though He's just a super rich super litigious publishing magnate who happens to own a software company called Mirror soft along with a billion other companies But this particular company is run by his son

So he is super inclined to not let that one get fucked over by Nintendo. So he starts calling in international contacts about this, including a private conversation about Tetris with Gorbachev. This is what? Yeah. What? But despite a fucked on a political pressure, Bellicov sticks to his guns and manages to defend his deal with Nintendo.

Yeah, a few years earlier, Reagan would say, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall and the crowd would have to wait for him to get that L piece perfectly lined up. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, followed, but ultimately the deals Bellacov made with Nintendo and Stein stock. Nintendo went on to sell over a hundred million Gameboys with Tetris as to pack in game. Rogers would make millions on the deal just for acting as a go between, but one dude that wouldn't make a goddamn penny was Alexei Pagetnov. In fact, as his game went on to become the most popular video game ever made, all he got out of the deal was an advanced release Game Boy for skis and a lifelong friend that he ended up finding in tank rogers. Really?

I feel like that friendship would have been kind of strained. Right. And so I said to him, look, I could get a second yacht for those kind of prices. There has to be something you can do for me. You know what? Boom, gives me the boat for asking price, write that in there.

hilarious. Huh, right? Hey, how you doing, man? My wife make very good potato soup, it's good. Oh, this potato soup, that does sound good. It's good, it's good, it's cold potato soup. Vichy's one. It's called eatin' on my boat's cold, but they do suit. Vichy's fine. It's cold.

Eat it on my boat. No. All right, so now for years, this story just had that sad fucking ending. And in interviews, Pajit Nauf blesses little heart. He would try to put a brave face on it. He'd go out there and be like, well, you know, I never cared about making money. My goal was only to make people happy.

And I have succeeded. The citation needed story right there. Yeah, exactly. need to make people happy and I have succeeded. The citation needed story right there. Exactly. But eventually he used the cloudy hat as the Tetris Desider to immigrate to the United States and take a job as a game designer in Washington and eventually his buddy Hank Rogers helped him set up the Tetris company, which was ultimately able to buy back virtually all the rights to the game and belatedly the game finally made Pajitnaval million. See now that's the friendship I'm talking about.

Alexi, hey man, how's that wife of yours? No idea, I leave her for much younger woman, so she good. Man, okay. Alright. How's the suit? Yeah, this one though, this one though. Fuck that. Fuck that's true. Alright, so now Tetris has a ton of records in the video game industry. Like I said, it's hard to say which game is like the most played and how do you compare a game that most people play for 15 minutes at a stretch to the kind of games that you play for hours at a time. But I think the most significant record that Tetris holds and indeed the most significant record that any video game could hold is that it has been translated to more platforms

by far than any other game. But for some cosmetic changes, it remains virtually the same exact game that Pageant enough created in 1984 and where virtually every other game of its day is dated and really only fun if it comes with nostalgia, Tetris is still winning new addicts three and a half decades later. And if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be? Tom wishes I would talk about the Atrustkins. And are you ready for the quiz? I mean, I can wait for a better piece, but it's right.

I mean, eventually I'm going gonna have to put something there. Yeah, we'll go ahead and now. We'll do it. All right, you got a tall piece. I'll go first. Great. You ready? Okay.

So how did Robert Maxwell really die? A, green shell. Shell weapon. B, really long fire stick. Moves like the hand of a clock. We'll see. Spy Hunter. Right.

Or just a name of a game. Thank you. D, he's actually still alive when he fell off that yacht. He got fished out. I look key to. Oh, right on it. I put back on the track. Okay, well,

it's another Nintendo reference. Yeah, so with that, I can't imagine I'm going up from a green, a shallow, be red at least. God the bike. You okay, no, you know what? Secret answer E, he decided he'd rather stop playing all together than go through another fucking water level.

That is correct. Absolutely. Also blue shells are bullshit. Yeah. All right, Noah, if you beat Tetris on the Game Boy, a bunch of Russians dance comically about the screen and then what looks very much like an American space shuttle takes off in celebration. Why? Hey, something had to happen.

B, oh I'm sorry, how did you want the story to happen? All right, actually, secret answer C. That's actually the baron. A baron, I think, it's a Soviet shuttle that had one uncrewed flight in 1988 and then got destroyed in 2002 when it's hanger collapse. Such a Russian story. 1988 and they got just written 2002 when it's hanger collapse. So Russian story. Great. I'm making a no

NASA. You've got a really long piece next to it. Yeah. Oh. Okay. No more question. What's the second best known game developed in Russia? A.

Zarbamba man. Pupsy. Cold War. Eupsi. Cold War. EO World. Pupsi. U.S.S.R. type. Nice. Or D.

Comrade racer. Alright. You know it's results. I'm not sure if I'm correct, but I'm so excited to have been present for the 21st century's first red racer reference. I'm going to go with the algorithm. I'm gonna go with the algorithm. You are correct, Noah, it is D.

All right, I go with me. All right, nobody stumped Noah, so you are this week's winner. All right, well, the key to my heart is references to obscured Nintendo games from 1987, so we're gonna go with Cecil. All right. All right, well, her Tom Noah, Cecil,

and Heath, I'm Eli Bosnick, thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week, and by then, Cecil will be an expert on something else. True now and then, Heath will be playing Smash Bros. against himself. Cecil will be the last human playing everquest, and we'll be doing the non-porn stuff that's allowed in virtual reality, and I'll be playing Don't Let Your Baby Die for the All Workin' No PlayStation. And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod. Or leave us a five star review everywhere you can. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media, or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citationpod.com.

And remember, I didn't forget Tom. He doesn't play video games Dude I can't believe she gave you her number. How can I say you want a little bit of the long piece I'm not. It's almost 9 30. Any chance you fell as a ready to call it a night. I still have some papers to grade. Oh, yeah, sure, sure. Yeah. I got a paper you can grade.

Yeah. Long peace, long peace, long peace, long peace, long peace, long peace. Long peace. That's what we're doing. You can't join it. Don't. Just stop.