Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 149: Tetris

Episode Date: April 30, 2018

Steve Lin and Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation join Jeremy and Bob to comb through the convoluted story of one of the most popular and addictive video games of all time: Tetris!

This week in Retronauts, we're back in the USSR. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another fine episode of Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish hosting this week. And this week we are going to be talking about the original game from Russia with fun. Yes, that's right. It's Tetris. And here this week we have an all-star cast besides the illustrious myself and the luminous Bob Mackie. Luminous.

Luminous. You're glowing. I was going to say I'm Bob from Russia with Fun Mackey, but I guess I can't anymore. Oh, I'm really sorry for stealing your joke. I'm from Russia with Ireland. I think that's called Ireland. Okay. All right.

And also two very, very important video game history experts and cool people preserving the past of the medium. We also have. Steve Lynn from Discord and the Video Game History Foundation. And Frank Sefaldi, who hey now is an all-star, apparently, also from the Video Game History Foundation. All right. And that's what you're doing full-time now? Or are you still with Digital Eclipse? I mean, yeah, I still work for Digital Eclipse sort of as a contractor.

like I kind of poke and prod at projects, make sure they have my fairy dust on them. But no video game history foundation has been my full time for a little over a year now. Okay. That's awesome. Yeah. It seems to be going well and you're doing good things. Yeah. I haven't paid myself yet.

We're working on that. All right. That's why they called a nonprofit. Exactly. All right. So anyway, yeah, I've called in Frank and Steve because the, you know, They know a lot about video game history, and there is a lot of history behind Tetris. It's one of the most interesting video game stories that's ever happened, in my opinion.

And it's kind of weird that we've never had a full episode, have we? I don't think so. Back maybe in the one-up days, I can't think of us having done one. I don't think we did. Is this unofficially the biggest selling game of all time, counting like every ports and every version? I think so. It's hundreds of millions of copies. Yeah. I mean, Minecraft only wants to be Tetris.

I'm going to say it's probably the most played game that I've ever existed. Just it in a video game? Very likely. Like, everyone has played Tetris. I mean, you can play Tetris on the side of a building. Like, literally, the building can be Tetris. So it's... Yeah, I agree that it's got to be way up there, but I would actually...

Maybe Mind Sweeper? Right. Well, maybe, but I would actually argue that games that were by nature on smart devices in everyone's pockets are probably... Like Snake. Yeah, like Snake. So Candy Crush beat Tetris. I would imagine that if we were to some...

know all of the time that put into games that Candy Crush might crush. I don't want to believe that, but you're right. Yeah. It's worth more than Star Wars. Life is full of sadness. So anyway, Tetris, if nothing else, was just named by Polygon as the number one game of all time. There were a very scientific and rigorous vote that I took part in which was like filling

out numbers for things, a whole list of things on a spreadsheet. So if, you know, 20 or 30 people putting numbers into a spreadsheet together, you know, is considered Canon. Well, there you go. Tetris. It's been number one in a lot of lists throughout the years. In the 90s, EGM named it number one in their top 50 games all time. Then it was supplanted by Super Metroid or maybe the other way around.

I don't know. Anyway, it's a great game. It's a universal game. It was made behind the Iron Curtain in an era of hatred and distrust between America and the Soviet Union. Very similar to now, actually. and despite those cultural differences, it transcended that barrier and became this universal game. Like I said, you can play it anywhere.

If you have a device that has 10 pixels across and 20 pixels tall and the ability to move left right and rotate with a button, you can play Tetris. That's about as, yeah, like as portable as you get. So this is a game with a very simple concept, but a very, I don't know if I'd say complex design, but a design that leads to complexity. There is complexity inherent in the expression

of how the rules for the game work. And that makes it extremely addictive because it's very easy to pick up. You look at it, you see these blocks falling, you line them up when you create a line straight across, that line vanishes. If you can make four lines disappear at a time, which is, you know, every piece has four parts to it,

So that's the most you can make disappear at once. Then you get a really high score and a jingle plays, and it's, wow, I'm awesome. So, yeah, from that, you know, the pieces fall faster. You don't know which pieces are going to fall in which order, except for, like, the next piece which you get a preview of. And, yeah, that's all there is to it. Like, I just described Tetris. That's it. That's all.

You rotate the pieces, you drop them, you make minds vanish. Something I've heard described as far as the game design goes, is that it has a really good. sort of negative motivation in the sense that any of your progress instantly disappears off the screen and all you ever see are your screw-ups. And so, like, it is a negative motivation to, like, clean up your mess. It is, like, very much a room about cleaning your, or a game about cleaning your room. Yeah. Like, it appeals to neat freaks and tidy people.

Well, I think it just appeals to something that's inherent in all of us, which is trying to make order out of chaos. I agree with that. I'm guessing probably something to do with Nintendo, but maybe not. So I'm curious to hear. For me, it was probably Spectrum Holobite on IBMPC. I actually think I played some weird European bootleg version before that because it was on BBSs. So whatever came up on the BBS, I would just download.

So I feel like I played before that, but the real experience was on PC. But then in terms of the amount of hours played for me, it's Game Boy. So, could you whittle the year down at all based on... I want to say, so based off the computer I had, I'm going to say, like, 87, 88. Okay. I can see that. Yeah, somewhere in that range. So you were ahead of the curve in America?

A little bit. I mean, I'd heard about it. People were talking about it in some of the doors, so... I wonder, I mean, we'll get into this, I guess, when we get into history a little more, but I wonder if that is the... Because there was a version prior to Spectrum Holobite is the one that came directly out of the USSR before the commercial version. I wonder if that was spread across BBS systems at the time

because it was basically a free game at the time. So you were saying that the I guess the PC version ported from the original Russian version leaked out of the Soviet Union? I'm not clear exactly what computers it ran on past the initial version. So the initial version was on whatever that sort of PDP 11. Electronica 60. Yeah, so that was the initial, initial version. I know that there was a color version that came out of there.

Yeah, my understanding is that Badam Garasimov and, or Jarzimov, and Dimitri Pavlovsky, Pavlovsky, ported the game to DOS from the electronica 60 version. And that was not the Spectrum Hollabite version. Right, that was done internally at the Russian Science Academy or Russian Computing Academy, sorry. So the narrative I understand is that the game spread organically. Yeah, I mean, from people, like, throwing discs around, but I guess, you know, it never really occurred to me until this moment that, like, it would have hit American BBS systems and people who had computers would have known what this game was even before there was a commercial version. Yeah, I mean, and me and my youth, I was on BBSs that didn't always worry about copyright much. And so a lot of whatever was uploaded, people would just download and start playing.

There was a lot of European. I mean, the cracking groups were, a lot of them were European. Right. Right. So then all that stuff would just leak out of there. So the first time I heard about Tetris was, I believe, the January 1990 issue of Nintendo Power, whenever they introduced it. It was on the cover, yeah. You know what?

Actually, no, it was the one with Batman on the cover. It was my first one. Right. There was a preview in there. That's right. Right. And it was the one that had the Howard and Nestor Claymation comic strip. Yeah, Steve, there's a glint in Steve's eyes because Steve owns an artifact related.

Yeah, I have them. the actual clay figures that they used for that shoot. Oh, God. You have to find the Maniac Mansion Mansion, and I'll give you $5 million for that. I want the M306 Gunner from the cover for Metal Storm. Yeah. And you can find that or 305, whatever it is. I think what else showed up recently was the sneakers from the track and field cover.

Really? It showed up as well. So all kinds of weird artifacts. And the mannequin from the Zelda 2 cover. The head from the Kazna. The one shooting laser eyes? But yeah, that was the first time I'd heard of Tetris And I believe the first time I played it

Was when I got a Game Boy for Christmas The year it came out, I believe. Bob It's going to sound weird But I believe the first time I saw Tetris was an arcade Do we know what year the arcade version was? I believe it was 88. Yes, being from the Midwest, my family went bowling a lot

And there was just this weird puzzle game I didn't really get in the corner with like Operation Wolf and Cabal and like, God, I forget what else was there, but yeah, that was the first time I saw it. And then I saw it at a local video store. They were having a competition, and I had no idea how to play it. I failed at that competition. And then I think gradually through Nintendo Power and the Game Boy release, I learned what it was,

and I played a lot of it on Game Boy. And it was like the last game my mom ever got into, probably the only game surely got into was Tetris on the Game Boy. So I guess the first I would have seen of it would have been the issue of Nintendo Power you're talking about. but it made no impression on me. So the first I remember of it was it being the cover story of a Nintendo Power with like a neighborhood that has blocks falling into it, like a drawing or a airbrush painting. Yeah, it was a drawing. Yeah.

It wasn't a 3D model or anything like that. So that was the first I saw of it and I was like, what is this and why is it on the cover? And I thought nothing of it until a friend had me play it. He rented it and was like, you need to check this out. So I played it and realized, oh, this is really addictive. Yeah. But it took me a while to realize, like, you know, you see it on screens and you're like, it's some color blinds, who cares?

But once you actually play it, then, you know, it's very simple. It communicates immediately and you just want to keep playing it. Yeah, I don't know if I had any opinion on it either way after seeing it in the magazine because, I mean, during that time, anything that was in Nintendo Power was also in my brain. You know, it just absorbed that magazine and read it cover to cover several times. So I think once I finally got my hands on it, you know, I've already felt intimate with it, even though I'd never played it somehow. I think it's much harder to convey the appeal of Tetris through magazines. It was like Mario and Sonic and things like that are much easier to be like, oh, I do this in the game.

But I think you have to play Tetris to really get why dropping blocks is fun. Well, without going on too much of a tangent, I do think that Nintendo's strategy with Nintendo power and weird games like this was actually really smart. Like, you know, if you go back to Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior, for example, they did a really good job in, like, 16 pages of telling you what an RPG was. And I think that having, you know, this multi-page comic book with Howard and Nestor, like, going to the Tetris Kingdom and, like, learning strategy as a comic. Like, I thought that was actually really brilliant. By the way, my voice is strange because I'm a little sick. I should probably mention that. That's fine.

I didn't notice, actually. Okay. So it probably just sounds worse in your head. It might be. Bob, I think it's interesting. You first saw it in an arcade because that'd be the Atari arcade version. That was right, yeah. And I had not seen that version until much later in my arcade collecting.

I wonder if it's rare. That's the only time I've ever seen it in my life was that bowling alley. I've got the board now. And it was a relatively popular conversion kit. I haven't seen one that's dedicated. Yeah, I saw it in my mall. after the NES game came out and the Game Boy game came out. But it did show up in, you know, my shopping mall, the arcade there, the tilt or whatever.

So, yeah, I definitely saw that around. But to me, it was always like the Nintendo game because I loved the look of the Nintendo's official, like, license release. And, of course, the Game Boy version was like my brother had a Game Boy, and you just can't stop playing it. Everyone wants to play it. So that's the appeal of Tetris. It can be on any system and whatever kind of person you are, you probably want to just keep playing it to make those blocks disappear. I would argue it only works with buttons, though.

That's true. Yeah, I don't think touch screens are very fun. Yeah, I mean, you can do it. They do it. You can do it, but it's not. I don't think that's Tetris. That's some other game. Yeah, not a good game.

Yeah, touch Tetris. Touch Tetris. So to start with this episode, I mean, we've already kind of started, but to, you know, to begin the really the proper conversation, I'd like to go back and talk about the fact that this game was designed in the Soviet Union, which made it really notable at the, the time because this was, it was designed, you know, first created, developed in 1984, and that was kind of like the hottest part of the Cold War. You know, you had Ronald Reagan rattling sabers and, you know, everything was kind of building up to Gorbachev taking over and introducing Perestroika and Glasnost and, you know, trying to open things up to the West and kind of, you know, diffuse the Cold War.

But right up to that point, there was this great amount of tension. between the USA and the Soviet Union, which of course no longer exists. No, it's like a coalition. It's just a bunch of, it's a bunch of countries. It's Russia and Kazakhstan and so on. It's Ukraine, et cetera. But it used to be like a block of nations that were all united under sort of an umbrella government.

I don't really actually know that much about how the Soviet Union worked. They never really talked about it that much in civics class. It was always just like, yeah, the Russians, the Soviets, they're bad. That's why you watch Rocky 4 over and over. Is it 4 or is it 3? That was four. Okay. Yeah.

The Quest for Peace. So, yeah, like the Soviet Union was based around the idea of communism and, you know, like a sort of a political, economic, military coalition of nations on the other side of the East-West divide that was kind of embodied by the Berlin Wall that emerged after World War II. As Solid Snake once said, after the end of World War II, the world was split into two, east and war. West. This marked the beginning of the era known as the Cold War. That's a history from Oh, sorry. After the end of World War II, the world was split into two. It's not a good sneak voice. So anyway, like it was, it was, you know, it was us versus them. It was, you know, the sense that the world could end at any time because these two superpowers hated each other and they were diametrically opposed and they were enemies and they had these enormous nuclear

arsenals and they were going to blow each other up. And if you look at it, you look, look back to movies and music and comics and books, everything, you know, like popular culture of the time, it was very, very dominated by the idea of the Cold War, nuclear annihilation, you have spy movies, James Bond, you have albums by Rush, you have, yeah, you have war games, you have all these things that are just like totally informed by the tension between East and West. And somehow within that closed, locked down state run by the government, some computer scientist got kind of bored and was like, I'm going to create a video game.

So, okay, I don't, do we know the name of the organization that Pachentov was within when he created Tetris? I never knew that name. I don't know what the proper Russian name is, but it was the Soviet academy. Okay. So, you know, these were engineers who are working on like nuclear missile trajectories and stuff like that. And I don't really understand the environment where you could make a game within those walls. And, you know, from the documentaries I've seen and the things I've read, like it doesn't seem like anyone was surprised or he was like

going rogue or anything. It almost seems like, you know, they kind of let you experiment. Well, my understanding is that, you know, based on an interview that I read, there was a great interview a few years back in Time magazine with him and Hank Rogers, who was another key figure in Tetris's history, that has some really great first-person anecdotes. And basically, he would create little games for himself on the computer as programming exercises just to kind of stay in practice and stay sharp and to, I guess, to a certain degree, amuse himself. So, yeah, it's not like he was, yeah, like breaking the rules. or anything like that. It was just something that smart people do. When they have some off time, they're like, I want to, you know, practice on things. And so he would always kind of look to things that he enjoyed in the past and try to turn them into video games and create concepts around them.

It feels a bit like what people would do with workstations in academia in the 70s. Like, I've got this thing. I might as well make a game out of it because we like to play games as humans. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's how we got Zork. And, you know, the idea, like, there's a lot of, we'll talk about this, but there's a lot of sort of complications that emerge from the fact that he created this game while in the employ of the Soviet government. Yeah.

But it's not like that was some unique thing to the Soviet Union. When people created games or software ideas while working for the American government, if they had tried to, you know, like get a patent on those things, the government would own them because they were on government time. using government resources. Or if you work for Disney, they own all of your ideas while you work there. Neat. Yeah. So that's actually pretty normal in both communist and capitalist countries. So that is kind of a complication here is that, you know, it was not like he was working

for a company dedicated to creating software. There weren't really such things in the Soviet Union. So he was working for the government and he created this thing in his spare time. So once it started to trickle out and become popular and people started to take an interest in it, the idea of taking it outside the Iron Curtain where people spend money on things instead of standing in line for a day to get their essentials, like the government said, well, we'd like a piece of that. And by a piece, we mean all of it because it belongs to us. So that's where a lot of the sort of the mystery and ambiguity of Tetris's origins comes. into play. Like, it's a pretty well-documented game at this point, but there is still, I don't

know, like, I had a hard time pinpointing the specifics of its origins. It's all kind of based on interviews. You mean creatively? Yeah, like creatively and just kind of like the processes that happened. Sure. It's just very nebulous compared to something like Zork, which I just mentioned. Like, we know everything about how that game was created, how what its genesis was, how it trickled out.

Yeah. But, you know, with Tetris, it's a little more ambiguous. I mean, we do know that... There's a lot of opacity for that iron curtain. Well, we do know that Alexei, what he said in a documentary that I actually just rewatched this morning, that I highly recommend anyone, which is Tetris from Russia with Love, which BBC did, and I think 2005, 2006, something like that. Alexei was saying that, you know, puzzles was just kind of how you entertained yourself if you grew up in that environment because there wasn't a lot of... entertainment for kids. And so he was always interested

in puzzles. And then specifically, what was the name of the... Tetraminos? Yeah, the Tetraminos game. Pentaminos. Pentaminos. That's it. Are Tetraminos the pieces within pentaminos? The five. Yeah, five. And then tetraminoes

are the... Okay. The Tetris pieces. Got it. So, you know, it was basically a little jigsaw puzzle in a box where you had very Tetris-like pieces in the game was to make them all fit together by flipping them around. And, you know, you can see where, you know, he's sitting down at a computer and, like, playing with the idea of shapes and putting them together.

You can see how Tetris might form, you know, creatively from that. But, you know, that's about the extent of my knowledge for where Tetris came from at all. Right. You know, he worked at a place where he had a computer and he liked games and he played around until he made Tetris. Pretty much. And, you know, it was, it's interesting to look at the computer technology he was using. It was a computer, like you said, called the Electronica 60, which was basically a clone of the PDP, the digital equipment PDP 11, which hailed from like 1974 or 75. So it was like a decade old hardware at that point. And that was pretty much like cutting edge for what they could get access to in the Soviet Union at the time. Right. They just didn't have the resources that we kind of take for granted here. So he was using this machine like a shared network terminal environment, you know, within the public space or the space of the academy that he worked at, that, you know, I don't think anyone was really seriously using here in a similar environment anymore. And because it was basically a dumb terminal, the game, the computer did not have graphical capabilities.

It could render text. So he created a game. What's that? It's like, you know, yeah, basically it was like, you know, I mean, the T-I-99-4A was kind of the same thing. Like, initially it could only generate characters as opposed to graphics, and they had to come up with hacks to come, you know, to work around that. But this was like a monochrome text-only display. So he created a game whose graphics were made of square brackets. Like, he created square blocks, and each of those square blocks was an open bracket and a closed bracket together.

And so he would line those up. But from those simple, very simple components, he created a game about four-piece blocks that would fall. And when you line them up, again, you know, they would cause things disappear. So it's extremely simple. It had to work on the technology he had available. But that actually works in the game's favor because there is not a lot of cruft to it. I mean, people have added all sorts of details to it. but you can't really improve on the basic concept.

They've added rules to it. I've seen people who like try to make Tetris with five block pieces or a variety of pieces like some pieces have three blocks, some have seven. Those are not good. They're not fun. They're not enjoyable. Whereas Tetris, it has this purity. There are only seven different pieces available, each of which has four blocks.

You have very fixed rules. You can move your pieces left or right or drop them or shift them left or right. That's it. I believe, and I don't know what to quote when I say this, but I believe that it's been shown that seven is the amount of things that the human brain can sort of keep in RAM. Like bone numbers? Yeah, exactly. And so I think that might lend a lot to why Tetris is so easily inaccessible is that we all, as we're playing, we know what each shape is and we can sort of plan ahead for any shape that's about to come because we're intimately familiar with them because they're stored in. whatever the brain equivalent of RAM is.

But what's interesting is that when you play a game that has like, like columns where you have seven different colors, you actually end up with far more permutations than just seven. You end up with like, you know, three differently colored pieces. So you get seven times seven times seven. Right. So all of a sudden you're dealing with like 140 pieces or whatever. And I don't even know what it is.

It's a whole lot. Yeah. It's, yeah, like that becomes much more complicated. And I don't think columns is as compelling a game because of that. But Tetris is just so simple. And, you know, it was the first game that I remember seeing as a keychain. It was like they brought back the game and watch idea. Right.

But with just Tetris blocks, and I saw those in the late 90s and was like, this is brilliant. I bought one. Yeah. I bought one at Walmart, I remember. I was like, this is way better than Tomoguchi. That lives in my bathroom for years. Not Tomoguchi. I'd be impressed with anyone who could keep a Tomoguchi alive for years.

Yeah. So anyway, like, that was it. That was, that was, that was Tetris. And so, anyway, like, Alexei Pajanov created the original concept for the game. And then, let's see, Gerasimov and Pavlovsky created the DOS conversion of the game. And from there, it began to trickle out because who was sharing electronica 60 games? No one. But DOS games, yeah, those were portable. Those were shareable. And they were shared within the USSR freely because there wasn't really a concept of selling software to people.

And so, you know, it was just a game. I mean, how many people necessarily had computers? No idea. Like the FAMICOM, I don't think, you know, the Dendi, the Russian equivalent, I don't think that really made much of a penetration into Russia until quite a bit after this. Right. So, yeah, like, computers were still a pretty – I mean, they were fairly uncommon here in 1984, but in the Soviet Union, they were like super precious resources where you had to get on a waiting list for three years to buy a car. Well, in the home. I don't know if –

Right. You know, I don't know how many people were using DOS-based computers in their jobs. And, you know, maybe we're able to install the software easily on those. Possibly, yeah. I don't know. I don't even know, like, why they made a DOS conversion. You know, like, that is what is so unclear to me about these early days of Tetris. You know, we just talked about, like, you know, not entirely understanding why the environment he was in allowed him to create this game to begin with.

But I can sort of see that in the sense that, like, oh, he had some free time. You know, was the DOS conversion just another exercise for somebody to, to then apply to their nuclear trajectory programs or whatever? Or like, you know, or was this organization, like, you know, were they officially publishing games also because it was just an organization that was funded to make computer stuff for the state? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Like, everything that I am saying about the origins of the game is based kind of on hearsay and secondhand knowledge. and like I've obviously never was inside the Soviet Union and I don't really know that many people who lived there.

I had like a classmate in junior high high school who had moved away from the Soviet Union, but he was Jewish and like moved away specifically because he was Jewish and was being, you know, like discriminated against and had a really rough life there. So he didn't ever really want to talk about what life was like in the Soviet Union. So, you know, you can kind of understand that. So it's very difficult to get clear information like that, kind of firsthand information. So maybe we're off base with some of this. Right. But, you know, just from everything that I've read and understand and kind of interpolating from the interviews that Pajanava has given, this all seems to kind of line up.

Yeah. It was created under not adverse circumstances, but just in a very unique scenario. And this game could easily have just vanished into the middle. of time. If, like, if the DOS version hadn't been created, I could see this just being forgotten. And, you know, like, who would, who would dig up a game created by some guy working on Electronica 60 in the Soviet Union? Like, that would have just been lost forever. So, how was this game discovered by the outside public? That is a good question. It's got to be your next note, right?

It's how did it start to trickle out? Yeah. Yeah, I actually was not able to find anything like that. Did you see that in your documentary that you watched? Yeah, so what's the name of the fella who first licensed it or the company? Mirrorsoft? No, no, no, no, before that. Oh, Elorg. Are you talking about Elorg? No.

It was the guy who got the initial rights. Right, the first guy who got the rights to Tetris. Right. He ran a... Oh, Andromeda. Was that it? Andromeda Software, yeah. Whatever that guy's name was.

And he worked for... Well, Andromeda Software would license... titles, I believe, from Hungary, if I'm not mistaken. And the way he discovered it was he was over there, you know, evaluating software to license. And, you know, he's looking at a lot of typical games. And the way he described it was there was this Tetris game at the corner. And he just kind of kept going back to that. And someone told him, well, this isn't actually one of ours.

This came from USSR. And so he licensed it directly from not Elor. which didn't exist yet. Right. From Pejanov. Well, not directly from Pachinov, but from the science center or whatever. And it was just, you know, like they'd never licensed software before. That's not a thing that they ever thought about.

You know, like the idea of selling Tetris was a foreign concept there. So, you know, they gave him a contract and he then went off and started life. licensing it to Merrersoft and Spectrum Holobite and stuff like that, but that's, that's, that's a gross simplification of the mess that's about to happen. Right. Yeah, because, again, yeah, the idea of licensing of selling things outside the Soviet Union was, I guess, had not occurred to them. So they actually established a company for the explicit purpose of licensing Tetris. and that was called Electro-Norg Technica, or E-Lorg for short. And this company basically said we have the rights to Tetris, and they came to an agreement with Pajtanov and said,

will we hold the exclusive rights to this game for 10 years? After that it can revert to you. I see. Or that's my understanding of it. That's something, like a few things that I've read said something along those lines. and I'm not sure why they said 10 years and I'm not sure exactly how rights reversions work

would have worked in the Soviet Union and Pat him up. I didn't know that he owned the rights to the game that he made for the state. That doesn't make sense. No, I don't think he did, but I think because I don't know. But that is the agreement they made like 10 years. I see.

He has said that and it's been in a few different resources. But he also said that he was fairly certain that once the 10 years were up, they would say, oh, we don't have any recollection of making that agreement with you, which I do believe that sounds very much like the sort of thing a big monolithic government would say. Yeah. And, you know, what right of petition or redress did he have?

Right. So, yeah, that ended up being the genesis of the Tetris Company, but that was 10 years later. Right. In the meantime, Elorg began, you know, peddling the game around, and they were sort of new at this whole. licensing thing and yeah it became kind of a disaster

and a bunch of companies became involved Indromeda was there of course but they licensed it to Mirrosoft Atari and Sega and then Hank Rogers

came into the picture and sold the game to Nintendo Yeah I think the short version of it right Oh I forgot about Spectrum Holobite they were also in there

They were yeah and I think the short version right is that Indromeda licensed it on sort of a nebulous handshakey way but with a contract

and then went about licensing different rights to different people, assuming that they had full control of all versions of Tetris, which they actually did, I believe, in their contract. And so, you know, they licensed, like you said, the European computer rights, I believe, to Marrosoft, the American computerized Spectrum Holobite. Japanese arcade rights to Sega. Yeah, or maybe. Well, I know that, so Hank Rogers was, he owned Bold Proof Software, right? And he licensed Tetris from Atari, which licensed from, I don't mind have even been Spectrum, Holobite, which licensed from Andromeda. Like, there was like four layers to this licensing stuff. It got really complicated.

It was like Monster World, but for puzzle games. What came first? And I think what ended up happening was that, uh, uh, and, you know, and, you. If your notes can correct me on this, great. But I believe what happens that Elorg sort of saw this happening and wanted to sort of renegotiate or something with the Andromeda guy, whose name I wish I could remember. He's in this documentary, by the way. Like, he's interviewed pretty extensively, and it's great. And I believe they got him back in, and they added a clause to the contract defining what a computer was.

which is very important for a video game contract, right? I think it specified that a computer was a thing with a keyboard or whatever. Right. And this is not the first time we've seen in video game history. Right. The need for this distinction, this also happened with Donkey Kong and Colico and Atari and everyone. Like, who has the rights to which version of the game? And the distinction between a console and a computer had to be laid down.

Yeah. But what was brilliant is, you know, he actually had all the rights to all versions. And what the E-Lorg guy who was sort of put in charge of this did was he like stealthily added in that clause in a revision to the contract. But then to distract him from that clause, he asked for way more money than was like ever going to happen to like draw his attention away from actually looking at changes in the text to like being focused on the money. So like, you know, and it worked. Like he was like, no, that's too much money. That's all he was focused on. He got the money back down.

He signed it, not understanding that he just signed away the rights to anything but computers, which is how they were able to then get, you know, eventually signed with Nintendo. But that's a whole other story in itself. Right. And a story worth telling. No, we can skip that one. So you guys, have you, you said you've met Hank Rogers, right? Steve has.

Yeah, I have. So I met Hank Rogers and Petrovit Dice a couple years ago. And they were really, I mean, they were great to talk to. The question I asked, because you have only a couple of questions, was whatever happened with Tetris Betokieden on Super Famicom. And Padgetov told me an interesting anecdote that that's his kid's favorite Tetris game. And they loved playing, and they were always asking, why is there not a sequel to that? So I think it's funny.

Like, you think he's at home with his kids, and they're playing Tetris games. Battle Guy Dan, and it's the one that's totally unbalanced. It's got special powers in and everything, but it is a lot of fun. Was that localized under some of their name? Not for the U.S. I've never played that. So that's a Japan exclusive... It's wild. Yeah, I don't think I know that one.

It's not Tetris Flash or anything like that. No, no. It's different. It's like kind of like puzzle fighter for Tetris. And each character has their own set of powers. I actually, I love the game so much that I would buy a bunch of them whenever I would go back to Japan. And now when I go to conventions, I usually

have one or two that I just give to people. I was like, have you played Tetris Battle Guy? No, here it is. Hannah McCart. Yeah, I'm looking up a copy on eBay right now. It sounds really interesting. I can just give you one. Did you bring a stack?

I have stacks of them in storage, so. Wow. Yeah. I'm sure it's not super expensive. It's like $8. Oh, I've seen this before. I didn't realize this was like a unique. Let's see the cover.

Yeah. Yeah, I see this at Japanese used game shops all the time for like 500 yen. I had no idea that it was. awesome. So I'm going to add that to my cart. Yep. Totally unbalanced. But we didn't unfortunately I didn't get a chance to ask a lot about sort of their history and everything, but

those who have met with them have said, you know, they're very open about kind of the history and making sure that Pashtonov was rewarded for all that work or for creating that and not just sort of the guy who ended the chicken nugget. Right.

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Some of his past guests include Chris Weber, Rob Gruncowski, and Rob Riggle. Make sure you check out The Big Podcast with Shaq every Monday exclusively on Apple Podcast, the Podcast, the Podcast One app, and podcast1.com. So Hank Rogers, he has a significant role in the He has a significant role in the Tetra story. But he's an interesting guy all on his own. He was one of the first Western game publishers to build a presence in Japan. He was born in the Netherlands, I think, and he just moved to Japan and was like, I want to be here. So he moved to Japan in the early 80s and was working as like a software developer and said, they need some RPGs here.

So he made his own RPG specifically for the Japanese market, the Black Onyx. That's what I love. I love that the JRP genre was invented by a guy named Hank. I know technically he didn't invent it, but I think he popularized the format. And technically it's Hank with an E, so it's not as funny. I'm still funny, though. Yeah, it's an interesting little wrinkle in history. The Black Onyx is very much in the wizardry vein,

and wizardry was very popular among a very small, hardcore, course set of Japanese computer nerds. You know, people who would go on to make their own games like Yuji Hori and Akitoshi Kawazu. Like, they all loved wizardry. But it was not localized into Japanese, so they all had to play in English.

So they were playing these complicated games in a foreign language, and Rogers came in and so it was like, all right, I'm going to make a game just like this in Japanese, and it did pretty well. And from that, he formed his own company, bulletproof software and kind of established himself as not a major player, but a noteworthy player in Japanese games, mostly doing PC games at first, but then once the Famicom took

off, he started developing for Famicom and got in, you know, to business arrangements with Nintendo. He tried to convert a Go board game from computer to Famicom. and brought it to Nintendo and Hiroshi Yamuichi, the company's president, who was like a high-level go master, played it and tested it and said,

no, this game's not good enough. The computer should be able to give me a hardcore challenge immediately, like right out of the box. So it wasn't good enough for Nintendo to publish, but Rogers published it under his own label. And so, you know, from that point on, he had kind of a foot in the door with the Nintendo.

This could be apocryful, but was that the only video game Yamauchi he ever played on the record? According to Game Over, I think. Okay. But then that's Game Over. It's hard to say. But I wouldn't be surprised if the only video games he ever played

were Go games just to test them out and to make sure they passed muster. Well, I believe, you know, the way Game Over phrased it was even that, like, he was sort of forced to sit down and actually play this game as opposed to, like... So he didn't play games at all, but apparently he was the one who

decided yes or no on every game even though he wasn't a game player, which is That guy's fascinating. He was the Japanese equivalent of Howard Phillips. Yeah. Wait a minute. He was the game, you know, the game match. But he was, but Howard Phillips played the heck out of game.

I know. It was like the inverse. He was hired because he played games. He was like the command I version of inverse. I actually suspect that that history is a little bit off. Also, I don't believe Howard was ever in a position to say yes or no. I believe that was a committee. I wouldn't be surprised.

But that's okay. It's all incidental to this conversation. I don't believe he beat every game. I said it. Whoa. Wow. You don't think he beat deadly towers on his own. There are some.

I'm like, you didn't beat this game. Sorry. So, Rogers, you know, was always going to trade shows and events and looking for games that he would be interested in publishing. And there was one trade show where he saw Tetris and kind of like the Andromeda guy, didn't think too much of it at first. but then this was also

in the time interview. He kept going back over to it and after like his fourth session with the game when he's like there are there's like a hundred games here that I should be looking to license but I keep coming back to this one. I need to know more about this. And just going back to this documentary for a second,

Hank was really into videotaping at that time. Maybe since then I don't know but there's a lot of footage in this documentary from Hank just of moment that you're like, why do you have this, including Hank playing Tetris at CES and seeing it for the first time? That is footage that exists in this world for some reason.

And that's great. If only every pivotal game publisher documented themselves that way. We just need to give Snapchat specs to everyone. And in the footage, he's playing the Tengen version on NES, which was interesting to me because I would have assumed he played a computer version there. But we do know the Tangen version was in development for a long time. And it might have been like Chicago CES in 88 or something where he saw it. It says CES 88. It doesn't say where.

Yeah. So like if it was Chicago, it was like January. And then the lawsuit, I'm sorry, June. So it would have been June 88 if it was the Chicago one. I believe that the lawsuit we're about to talk about where Nintendo, you know, after Nintendo got the rights, I believe that was January of. of 89, so that kind of makes sense that in that six months that would have happened. So, Steve, do you want to talk about what you just showed me on your phone?

Oh, yeah. So I just showed him. Oh, sure. Yeah, so one of the things that kind of I picked up as a collector was, yeah, so when Atari was shutting down their Sunnyvale headquarters here in the Bay Area, one of my friends found some boxes in an old marketing closet. And it was basically anytime Atari licensed something, they would have, they would get a copy. of whatever game that was and in there were three or actually four builds of Tetris Tengen Tetris

and the picture I just showed had a copyright on the first version we have was 87 and the really interesting part about it is it does take license by Nintendo on some of the earlier versions and you can actually see a progression

in the game itself from like they're all on those like NAMCOT development boards and it's just sort of a progression from there. So the earliest one we have is 87. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and there's such a perfect little slice of history because there was that one brief period where Tengen, an offshoot of Atari, that was closely related to Namco, was licensed, you know, publishing licensed games for Nintendo before they went rogue. Right. They got out

Gauntlet and Pac-Man and RBI baseball. RBI baseball. And Tetris was going to be one of them, and then things kind of fell apart. And I'm sure the lawsuit didn't have. help. Right. But, yeah, like that's such an artifact of a very specific time and it's very interesting. But it also does kind of get to the problems with the licensing issues with Tetris because Atari had the arcade rights in the U.S. and we're like, well, this gives us the right to publish and sub-license it for consoles.

And it probably did. Actually, in that initial contract, I think by the contract that the guy initially had, that was true. He had licensed the arcade and home rights to Atari, but that contract had been revised without him realizing it and people thought they had rights that they didn't actually have. So by really no fault of Tengans and Atari's, they were peddling rights that they didn't actually possess. Right.

And so I think when this came to light, Nintendo jumped on it. But Rogers, you know, he saw the opportunity in Tetris when he played the game and said, I need to get this, you know, licensed up. Yeah. No, he went to Russia, E-LORG, to get the rights for Game Boy for Nintendo. Actually, no, no, no, I'm getting ahead of myself. Sorry, he licensed it for himself for Bulletproof. That's right, for the Famic.

Right. Yeah, it's supposedly he traveled to the Soviet Union in 1989, so it must have been the very beginning of the year. Well, this was after he had already published. So he licensed from Andromeda, or, whatever. No, sorry, he licensed from Atari. So he played the game for, I don't know which version he played that he first saw it. Now I'm kind of

questioning myself with that footage that he was playing the Tangon version because I don't know, but he saw it. He's like, I want to license this. He licensed the game from Atari, converted it at bulletproof, published it on the Famicom. And if you look on the back of the Famicom box, like, that's where you see like the four company chain. And, you know, it's like he licensed from Atari,

which licensed from Spectrum, which licensed from Andromeda, I believe, was the chain. But, yeah, he published on Famicom and did pretty well. Yeah. So he licensed it from Atari and then went behind Atari's back to Elorg. No, no, no. That's, that's, that's, okay, here's what happened. Okay. Because the way I'm reading it here is he kind of pulled a fast one on Atari.

Nope. Well, eventually, but not yet. So he had the Famicom rights. He published it. He did it really well. Nintendo was coming out with a Game Boy. And here's an interesting thing that I didn't really realize and would like to know the story behind. This game was on Nintendo's radar, Tetris.

Like someone at Nintendo had discovered it and wanted it. And they went to Hank because they had good relationship with Hank. And they're like, we need you to represent us at Elorg to get the rights for this game so we could put it on Game Boy. That's interesting because the interview that I read with him, he said he went and got the console rights from ELORG. And once that had happened, he brought in Howard Lincoln and Minora or O'Cawa from Nintendo of America to get the rights for them. Like he was the one, he says he was the one who reached out to them. Well, according to the documentary I just watched, which interviewed him pretty extensively also. Like, he went in to get the Game Boy rights.

And as part of the conversation, he pulled out the Famicom version, and he's like, I've been selling this in Japan. And the Elor guy was like, what is this? We didn't authorize this. Like, you are selling this illegally. And he's like, let me make this right. I want to work with you. So, you know, the stories I understand it was he was there to get the Game Boy rights, which no one had, no one had the portable rights. And that's when, you know, that sort of misunderstanding got brought to light.

and then he renegotiated at that moment to make it right with them. So that's when he actually got the console right. Yeah, he did tie up the console right. Or at least for Japan or something. Right. But that's not exactly when he – so actually, no, he didn't secure the rights on. Sorry. This is how confusing the story.

No, it's baffling. Like I read so many articles on this, putting the notes together. We need a diagram or something. I've never, like a beautiful mind. Yeah, exactly. Give me the red strings. Yeah. I've revisited the story so many times and I've never quite gotten it clear.

But I believe the way it went down was he's like, he made it right, you know, like financially for what he'd already done, but didn't have the console rights necessarily at that moment. And so he secured the Game Boy rights. And then the Elor guy who had just like the day before done that. Clause thing was like, we'd like to talk to you also now that we've done this about the home console version. At the same time, the guy from Mirrosoft was also there. This is how crazy the story gets. The three of them were at E-Lorg at the same time.

Someone needs to make a movie of this because this would be an amazing movie. This would be incredible. Like the wheeling and dealing, the negotiations and like walking from one room to the next next and being like, oh, here. Well, what's even wilder is that the Marrersoft guy and the Andromeda guy were there independently. Hank showed up unannounced at the same time that those two guys were there negotiating things. So, like, Hank being there was a coincidence. And all three of them were there.

And the Elor guy was, like, making sure they never saw each other in the building and was, like, playing them off of each other. Yeah, this is like one of those comedy movies, like Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin and the Tetris rights. A lot of doors. Yeah, people chasing each other and outdoors. So Goldie Haunted's Hank? I don't know. She's not a farce. It's all a farce.

But basically, they were negotiating with, you know, with Hank representing Nintendo and with whoever it was at MarroSoft at the same time. Now, there was weird pressure there because the Marysoft guy was the son of a very influential billionaire in the UK who had major ties to the Kremlin. And so, like, you know, this Elor guy is put in a position where he's, you know, like the obvious thing to do to not make Gorbachev like murder me or whatever is to go with these guys, with the son of the guy who knows Gorbachev. But these Nintendo guys, what they bring to the table is like actual honesty, which is like something that they were really frustrated by with the Andromeda guy. And actually, at least as it's positioned in this documentary, I read, would actually push them toward Nintendo, toward Hank, I should say, was Hank meeting Alexei and hitting it off with him. And Alexei is sort of pushing for like, we should work with this guy. He's honest. And, you know, ultimately that's what, well, and, okay, so this is all going down.

And Hank's like, if I get Lincoln and Ericawa here, like, in the next couple days, will that seal the deal? And he's like, yeah, do it. And that's how it went down. So they flew in and knowing that Atari was about to publish on the NES, unlicensed, right? Like, because that had just happened. Right. They'd just gone rogue. Right.

So, like, to get back at them immediately. So there was no love lost right there. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. So they went in and signed the thing and came home. You know, as Lincoln described it on the way home, you know, he and Eirokawa would, like, occasionally, like, catch each other's eyes on the plane and just start laughing.

because they had just not only gotten a great deal for Tetris, they had screwed over Atari in the process. And this did result in the very first Nintendo collector's Holy Grail. Yeah. The Tengen version of Tetris was on sale in the U.S. for about a month before it was recalled. And for a while, it was selling for as much as $100. Can you imagine? $100 for a Nintendo game, that's so much money.

I actually have a memory of being in probably Kmart in the video game section and a woman, like a mother-aged woman. I mean, I was a kid, so, you know, mother age, not my age, mother-age, coming in and specifically looking for the Tengen version of Tetris because she, it was a collectible. So, like, even then people knew. Oh, yeah. So my copy of Tank and Tetris was a copy I lost from the video rental store that I had to pay them like $40 for because I lost the cartridge. So Roadrunner Video. Nice. You come and claim for the confession.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I didn't have the box, but the box one I have came from somewhere. Is this where I confess that I lost the mystery science theater episode that went out of? of print when Netflix sent it to me. Right. Or confessing me. Which one was that? That's the amazing colossal man, right?

No, that was VHS, which I actually bought at Suncoast video. Shion Helod? No, it was Godzilla versus Megaloff. Oh, okay, I forgot that was on DVD. Yeah. All right. So, yeah, so that's

a headache right there. We're missing some things, too? Oh, yeah. Let's take a mental break by going to the reader mail, or listener mail. We give that all yours and And then we can go back to kind of talk about the aftermath of all of this and the Tetris Company.

So for Ryan Johnson, as a kid in the late 90s, I started studying Russian at a language immersion camp that took away all video games, non-Russian language books, non-Russian language music, etc. When they found my Game Boy, the counselors began the process of logging my brick Game Boy to store. But I was able to convince them not to by launching into an impromptu level. on the spot on the history of Tetris, Alexei Pazetnov, and the role of Soviet academia in creating the world's greatest video game. Nice. That's awesome. Needless to say, the language nerds running the camp adored my preteen enthusiasm and let me

enter the camp with my Game Boy intact, thus saving me from spending an entire month in the scenic northern Minnesota woods and pristine lakes. Video game history helps. Yep. Let's see. There's a whole bunch in here. Fight Club says Tetris is the only Cyrillic word I know, but he spells it T. E, T, P, and C, since

the way they write Tetris with a backward R. Like, in Cyrillic makes no sense. Well, and like, it's not a word. You know, you mentioned the USSR and that Iron Curtain being sort of fascinating to us as Americans, and that was how Spectrum Holobite

actually marketed it. Yeah, that big red box. Yeah, with it spelled out in Cyrillic and, you know, like, you know, having the, whatever that structure is on the front. Yeah, it was the allure of, yeah, some sort of onion dome, the allure of the exotic, the forbidden.

And the way it was sort of described in the style, I keep going back to this documentary because I watched it this morning. But the way it was described is that people wanted sort of like a souvenir of that mystery out there. And that's probably a big part of why it sold so well. All right, Fight Club says Tetris was and this still is amazing. Pac-Man and Mario may have more global recognition. But I'd wager there's no video game on Earth that more people know how to play from experience at least a little bit. I found Tetris in a weird way on Macintosh. There was a Mac lab inside the shop class at my middle school.

and in seventh grade, I spent a lot of time in there. Mostly the teacher used the Macs for the then-magic purpose of taking a digital photograph of students, but he also had a copy of Tetris on every machine. No music, no colors, just Tetris with some appropriately Soviet background art. So when the N-E-S and Game Boy version came out, I already knew Tetris pretty well. It was still cute to see it catch on with the adults in my life.

And years later, when I bought a Nintendo DS to get back into video games after a long break, my first cartridge was Tetris DS. Do you remember there was a different Tetris DS? T.HQ. Yeah, there was like a bad, one and then the Nintendo one. Yeah, it was like Tosay was doing it, and it never came out. And I was wondering, like, what's the licensing mishap that happened there?

Like, did that happen again? All right. Javier Juarez says Tetris was the first game I played in a Game Boy. I rented the NES version and played many other iterations, but the Game Boy version is the one that feels right. Even now my first recollections of playing Tetris, my brain memories throw me back to a Game Boy screen. What is the actual state of Tetris today? I hope you tackle this issue. how it ended up in EA's hands.

Oh, it's with EA now? I thought it was with Ubi. And what can we expect for the future? I would love to play it in the NES Classic and share it with my children, but instead we play competitive Dr. Mario. Is it on the NES Classic? It's not.

No, that's why. Javier's a hacker. No, he says he wants to play it on NES Classic, but instead they play Dr. Mario. I think the state of Tetris is strong. In fact, if you watch Awesome Games Done Quick, one of the highlights is the Tetris competitions where people are thinking like 40 moves ahead.

Yeah, the Grandmaster? Superbrains, yeah. Which is, which version of Grandmaster is invisible? Like all the Boxer invisible. Well, I think that Tetris, yeah, the third one. And it's during the credits, right? Yeah, it's during the credit sequence. Oh, okay.

When you sort of read the first section. So that's actually like a decade old now at this point, but there was an arcade series called the Grandmaster produced by Areka, I believe. Yep. The company that, you know, made the street. Street Fighter EX games and so forth. And they're like crazy, insane renditions of Tetris that do weird stunts like that.

They're meant for like high level play. Yeah, TGM is on, I think, Taito X2 hardware. And it's kind of expensive, so people pirate it. Weird. Yeah. Tetris was a formative game for me, says Jared McComb, it's probably single-handedly responsible for establishing my love of puzzle games falling black and otherwise. years later as I discovered the magic of NES and Super NES

emulation, I made it a goal to play every single falling block style game I could find. Some of them were just crap, like Palamedes and Hattress. Some were fantastic, like Puyo Puyo. Another series I became hooked on, or Dusun, Ganseki Battle, a game that turned columns into a fantasy

battle game. Some of them were so off the wall I couldn't help me be charmed, like Cadillac, a game where you drop cards from a deck into a well trying to make money from poker-like combinations, or Wild Snake, a game that replaced the static pieces of similar games with snakes that moved like in the classic snake game while still falling. And does anyone remember Sammy's Famicom game Puzz Slot?

You had to match lines of three or more symbols, but not only did you have to maneuver the blocks, the blocks themselves were slot machine reels that had to be stopped on the symbol you wanted. Tetris sure has paved the way for a lot of weird things, but really what genre creating game hasn't. I've never heard of some of those. They sound kind of awful, actually. You ever played Pyramid?

I have not. That's the worst one. That was Sachin developed. Yeah, I was going to say, I've heard of that one. Yeah, it's one of those bootleg, famicom games. Well, they're not bootleg, but unlicensed. So it's like the horizontal space is just gigantic, first of all, which sucks. And you're supposed to make lines, you know, in a probably twice the width of Tetris space.

And the shapes are, they have slopes. They're like triangles and diamonds and things like that. It's awful. That sounds really bad. I feel like there are more takes off of Tetris immediately afterwards, like things like pack attack. But now I feel like we talked about earlier, bust a move slash puzzle bobble is the thing everyone rips off. In fact, coming here, I cut through the mall. There used to be a grocery store.

Now there is a giant wall with a Snoopy-themed candy crush-style game where it's like, oh, that's puzzle bobble. I was just thinking of that when I was on the way over here. So that ended up being the champion, I guess. That's tough when you're colorblind. I wonder why all of those games. I wonder why that caught on that genre as opposed. to the Tetris one. It's all snood.

Snewed did it. Right, but why is that the one that stayed within the public consciousness? Why is that the one that's continued to be ripped off? I wonder, yeah. I don't know. That imbejeweled. Yeah. I think because they're lower stress, like, you can take your time making moves with those games.

You're not on a timer unless you're playing like a specific timed mode. That makes sense. So you kind of just like take your time with it. I think that's better for more casual play, whereas Tetris gets faster and faster the longer you play. You get instant results, too. You fire a thing and then something happens. You're not waiting to build up to something happening. But the lines clearing.

Like, I think what those games have that Tetris doesn't is like chains of events happening. Yeah. You know, Tetris has that to an extent, but not nearly as much. Yeah, some of the variants of Tetris have combos and chaining, but, you know, like with gravity. I think the introduction of gravity and hanging and that sort of thing changed Tetris. But I don't think that's official. like officially within the dock now like the structure

of the Tetris company approved. Yes, the mandate. From Jared Natsis, one thing that has continued to surprise me about Tetris is how absolutely ubiquitous it has become even outside of gamer culture. I can't count the number of times I've heard someone tightly packing a vehicle or suitcase

make some comment like, I really had to use my Tetris skills for that. If there are boxes in a store arranged in the shape of a Tetramino, someone is sure to point it out, even though they probably don't know they're called Tetraminos, which is fine. The eyepiece is universally recognized as the fulfillment of the idea

that good things come to those who wait. I like that. And, of course, when you run into the drought and you don't have the long piece, what seems like an eternity, and you're just creating these crazy structures. And finally, from Mike Mariano, which is better, A-type or B-type.

Hmm. Is B-type the one that starts where you have to, like, solve what's our already there, and A type is the playing one? Yeah. I like, I mean, I kind of like solving the puzzle. I guess it depends on what... Are we going to figure this out right now? If you're in the mood to play something perpetually and you deciding when it ends, that's A, I guess.

But B, it's like if you want to have an objective in mind, you play B. Well, I don't want to clean someone else's mess? Well, you get better by playing B. And with B mode, don't you get little animations in the Game Boy one? Well, A and B, it's when you get... Was he talking about game type or music type? Oh, yeah. I took that as music. Oh, that's right.

We have A, B and C. This is A. That's, yeah. Yep. And then B type. Dant-da-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d- I think you might be talking about game because there's also C-type.

Yeah. So Pajitinov regrets the A music in the game because people don't think of Russia when they hear that. They think of Tetris, and he regrets that happening. Really? Yep. I hadn't read that.

I read a statement by him. It's like, ah, no, think of Mother Russia. Wow, it's weird that I can't. I can't even recall this one. Like, I must have never played with the C. Yeah, you have to scroll down. Is it like the Bach? Yeah, I never like C.

Yeah, I think it's like, is it Bach or is it Chikovsky? It sounds like Bach. I'm no Bach hit. I don't know if that harpsichord. Yeah. Yeah. But, all right. So anyway, yeah.

I think it was Game Type. I don't know. Okay, so Game Type. A type is, and in the Game Boy version, like, where you're just playing standard Tetris, the blocks fall. You keep going. B type is where there is. there is crud in the field and you have to

you basically start with a handicap. You have to clear away the stuff that's already existing. And of course part of the appeal is that you can start at any level you want to up to level nine, which is both in terms of speed, how quickly the blocks fall. And also on B-type, you can choose how high you want the crap on the screen to be. So if you're really cool, you pick like high speed

and high crud level and you clear that away and everyone's like wow, he's so good. Except you know, it's on the tiny little Game Boy screen so no one can actually see what you're doing except you're wow but you can be impressed with yourself what's your answer? My answer I like A type better same yeah B type is like it's too Dr. Mario

ish I don't need that it takes away from the elegance of the design of Tetris I think to add anything to it it's good novelty yeah and the game boy version does have multiplayer like Tingen Tetris did yeah NES Tetris by Nintendo did not

I love all the wacky ass broken in D.S. modes that were just kind of ridiculous. Even though they were, they had Mario stickers floating in the background. It was all a nostalgia grab. I still like those. But I prefer like I guess standard Tetris is fine. Tetris D.S. is a precious creation because it is the final

sort of gasp of like creative weirdness with Tetris. After that the Tetris company laid down the law and said everything's got to be a certain way. You've got to have infinite spin. You've got to have what else do they have? Like color designations. Like each piece

is a specific color. There are rules for physics. I think... Do you have to see where the thing will fall? Yeah, there's like the drop zone indicator. That's mandatory now. Yeah, I think so. At least like when you first start playing and maybe it goes away after a few levels.

But what else? Is there like instant drop? Yeah. Is there instant drop or is it... I think, yeah, I think you can do instant drop. You have to be able to do that. I don't know. They lay down some rules and it kind of suffocates the fun.

I guess it's their platonic ideal of Tetris, but I don't know. Like, by their standard, Game Boy Tetris would not be acceptable. Yeah. And are you really telling me that Game Boy Tetris is not the best Tetris? My guys. I hate, I don't like infinite spin. I say commit. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. Something I want to point out about Game Boy Tetris, because you mentioned it being multiplayer, that, you know, you might not realize this if you didn't have it at the time, but every Game Boy came with a link cable and Tetris. Yeah. Yep. So here's a quote that I copied from Hank Rogers' interview in time with Alexi. After Nintendo released Game Boy in Japan, I realized that this was the best platform for Tetris. NCL had no policy of including games with hardware, but Nintendo of America did. I convinced the CEO of NOA, Minora Aracawa, to include Tetris rather than Mario by saying to him,

if you want little boys to buy your machine, include Mario. But if you want everyone to buy your machine, include Tetris. I guess it worked. People say Tetris made Game Boy and Game Boy made Tetris. Both statements are true. Agreed. Yeah. Was that picture of Hillary Clinton on a plane?

Oh, right. That's right. I can say I got a Game Boy, I think, for Christmas of 1990, and my parents and sister both played it a lot. Yeah. Yep. And let's see. So the Tetris Company, we mentioned, it came into existence around the time that the ELORG deal, the ELORG agreement arrangement, would have fallen through. And according to Pajitnov, it was actually spearheaded by Hink Rogers.

to reclaim the Tetris rights from Elorges for Pajdanov because Pajtanov didn't think that Elor was going to surrender the rights to him, even though by that point the Soviet Union had dissolved and it seems like I have no idea what happened to rights and things like that in the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the Soviet Union. But maybe that made it easier for them to come in and renegotiate. Yeah, maybe, I don't know, maybe like E-LORG became a private company. It must have, yeah, because they continued to own the rights to Tetris, and Rogers and Pagetnav created a partnership with them. And then in 2005, apparently, Rogers bought out E-Lorg.

And so now they, that's a point at which the Tetris company gained total control over the Tetris rights. That's when they started locking down the rules. I think Infinite Spin was introduced with the next. Tetris. Well, did they found the Tetris company before that? It was founded before that, but it was a partnership with Elorg.

I got it. I guess they had joint custody. But then eventually... It must have been Hank only. Yeah. It wasn't Alexei for a while. Alexei, I mean, we talked to him in like 2006 and he was still at Microsoft.

Right. You thought it went Hexick and games like that. I don't know. Like, he says that, or the interview I read, said that Rogers founded the Tetris Company specifically for the purpose of making sure that Pajtanov received his due. Maybe he wasn't an employee. So, yeah, it might have been like an LLC or something.

And it was kind of spearheaded by Rogers, but Pajtanov was the beneficiary, basically. Because Pajtanov was just quietly making games at Microsoft that nobody played for a long time. But then, yeah, 2005. I don't mean that as an insult. That's just the truth. Right. Yeah, but apparently around 2005, Rogers bought out Elorg. Yeah.

And they gained control. Or bought out the Tetris rights, I'm guessing from ELorg. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, at that point it kind of solidified and you started to see, you know, the Tetris company define what Tetris is. Yeah. And the rights of the game have bounced around, which has had some unfortunate side effects. When virtual console launched on 3DS, Game Boy Virtual Console, Tetris was one of the games

that came out. But it was very quickly delisted. and there is no way to play that version of Tetris without, you know, buying the original Game Boy cartridge at this point. I have a strange fun fact. At GameTap, we somehow had the license for the bulletproof Famicom version. I don't know how that came about. That is very strange.

It was our only NES game on the platform was the bulletproof version of Tetris. And it was also the Nintendo published version. And it was also the, I believe the only version of Tetris we could negotiate somehow. So, like, it might have been that the Tetris company inherited the Bulletproof version of Tetris or something. I don't know. And that was the only one they could license to us that was done. That would make sense since that was Roger's company. Right.

So he might have, like, bought out his old company with his new company or something. I don't know. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. What did happen to Bulletproof? I don't know anything to look that up. It probably was absorbed into the Tetris cover.

Or he still owns Bulletproof and just license it to himself for a dollar or something like that. You know, it could have been something like that. Yes. So that's more or less the Tetris story. There were lots and lots of sequels. Yeah. It's crazy things like Battle Guidon. The next Tetris, new Tetris, many of these versions and recreations did not go over very well.

Yeah. Tetris DX for Game Boy Color was, you know, Game Boy Color launched, and that was the launch title for it. But it wasn't as good as the original Tetris. What's the story with Tetris 2 for the NES? What is that? I owned it, inexplicably. Tell me about it.

I don't remember. I thought it was pretty bad. There was just something about it I didn't like. I don't know. I think there was regular Tetris, but also different modes in it. I just want to know if anyone else had played it. I played it and have zero recollection of it. It's weird that there was a Tetris sequel, but no one remembers it.

Yeah, and then there was like bombless. Well, right. There were actually, there were other Tetris sequels, too. Like Hattress, I think was considered Tetris. Hattress, wordtris, weltrus, wet tricks, which had nothing to do with Tetris. Is that the N64 games? Yes, okay. Which is a very cool looking game with a great soundtrack, but not Tetris.

And a lot of those were bulletproof games that, like, say, designed. And, you know, it's what's really interesting. He kept trying to capture that lightning in a bottle and never really pulled off. Right. And the problem is that the first one was already perfect. There was nothing to, like, improve. And I feel that's been true of any, like, falling pieces game since Tetris. It's like, we already did it. I looked it up, and Tetris, too, had a matching colors mode, which was like Dr. Mario, and I don't like Dr. Mario.

So that's why I didn't like that game very much. But there have been some pretty cool takes on Tetris. I really like Tetris DS, just because it's so weird. And they managed to cram all this Nintendo nostalgia into it, which didn't feel forced because, you know, Game Boy Tetris and, In ES Tetris, you know, you had the little windscreens with, maybe just Game Boy, but you had like the Nintendo characters playing music for you when you won. So this just felt like an extrapolation of that. Puyo Puyo Tetris just came out this year in the U.S. finally. And it's weird but great.

It doesn't seem like those two things should be able to work together, but it succeeds somehow, mashing together these two very different kind of, you know, falling block games into one weird fusion. So Sega has some rights to Tetris, but I don't know who has the rights now. Well, I don't know if they have or it was licensed for this product, you know. Right. They have some of the rights. They have rights to publish something to do with Tetris. Yeah, I don't, yeah. I don't think anyone has the rights to Tetris, but the Tetris company.

And I think those rights are licensed for products on a temporary basis. Right. And I don't know that, you know, I know that EA had sort of the exclusive rights for a while. as one of your reader mails actually pointed out and all the mobile versions and things like that were from EA but I don't know that any game publisher has any kind of exclusivity anymore I think it's just kind of licensed out piecemeal

Yeah I didn't mean that Sega had exclusive rights to Tetris I'm just saying like they have some piece of the pie for Puyapuya Tetris Right yeah And did that come to PS4 or was it just on Switch It was on PS4 and Xbox 3. Well, Grand Master's

on Xbox 360 for sure. I don't know. Yeah, PS4 is region free. Okay, well, yeah, like I thought about getting it on PS4. I saw it at Tokyo Game Show 2013, so four years before it came out in the U.S. And I was like, this game is weird and cool. I want this to come to the U.S., and it never did.

And then finally it came, but I think it just came to switch in the U.S. Yeah. So I don't know, you know, how right or wrong this may be or if I'm being totally unfair or what, but I have never gotten the appeal of another Tetris-like game after playing Tetris. Like, every time I play a puzzle game, like, I just feel like it's not, it's like adding another base to baseball or something.

You know, it's just like, it's not as tight. It just, it doesn't work for me. And I've personally, I think, dismiss. missed the puzzle genre because I just feel like Tetris nailed it the first time and every time I play something else it just feels like a lesser Tetris. So I don't know if I'm missing something that would blow me away or not, but like I feel like Tetris just ruined that genre for me. I do think Puyo Puyo is probably the one that holds up best because it does have that

enormous combo mechanic and if you're really good at creating those color combos, then there is that certain appeal and then you have the competitive element to it. So you can't just sit there and, like, build big chains because if you just fart around and don't actually execute anything, then someone's going to send a bunch of garbage over to your side of the screen and you'll lose. Yeah, and to be fair, I'm also really bad at chess. I think I just can't think more than like two or three. I'm the same way.

I live in the moment. I can't do combos. They happen on accident. I pretend they really happen. Yeah. So, I don't know. What is your favorite version of Tetris? Bob, what about you?

I think it is a DS one. I played the Game Boy one the most, but the DS1 made me interested in Tetris again just because of all the different weird modes. I don't remember what the Donkey Kong mode was. I think it was just like a rotating Tetris board maybe, but I was really into that, whatever it was. The one where you rotate the entire board, right? I think so, yeah. I'll look it up, but yeah, I really love all the nostalgia crap in there, even though it is a shameless nostalgia grab. It was, it dressed up Tetris in a way that made it appealing to me again.

Yeah, this was before I think 8-bit nostalgia was quite so tired. This was, what, 2006 or so? I remember playing this. It was during the time that I worked at OneUp.com, and a bunch of people had that game, and we would sit around like before and after staff meetings competing with each other. And it was one of the games that, you know, so many people at that site were really down on DS and thought it was beneath them. But occasionally a game would come along and people would be like, I need to play this. And this was one of those games that made people push aside their handheld snobbery and their D.S. elitism and say, like, this is amazing. I need to play this.

So it really does speak to the universal appeal of Tetris. Yeah, I really love that version. I mean, you know, the one I spent the most time with was the Game Boy one. But I think the only one that ever drew me back in and it might be, you know, the same reason that Bob just said was Tetris D.S. And I think the nostalgia play worked specifically for me at that time because, like you said, it just wasn't really that, you know, there weren't Sprite shirts at Target yet. And, you know, for me, it was like it's Tetris and then all these other toys I can play with, you know. And, yeah, I don't know. But this is also coming from someone who's played maybe four versions of Tetris, you know, so I'm not all that well versed in it. But if you were to ask me which one I want to play right now, it would probably be the DS one. Yeah.

I think for me, Game Boy, obviously, the one I've played the most. Tetris Battle Guy Den is the one I love to sit down and play with people. So that in terms of now, when people ask to play a Tetris game, that's what I'll pull out. I will say my favorite memory of Tetris was, for me, Nintendo World Championships. because I was on that huge stage. My Tetris board is behind me and I have that sort of victorious moment was just, you know, it was like the wizard but real life.

So, you know, and now, and when you look at like NWC when people play it now, I mean, it's all about Tetris. Yeah. How good are you at Tetris? It's just a rush to get to Tetris as a strategy. Pretty much, yeah, yeah. It's like you can shave some time early on and just whatever you can do in Tetris. So for me, that's that cart and that particular memory for me is probably my best Tetris memory.

Yeah. That's a hard memory to me. But it's also one that most people can't share. It's a pretty unique memory. I feel bad because I always found the NES version of Tetris kind of dry. And that's an odd, I don't know, opinion to have about Tetris, but there's just something missing about it. Just something very sterile about, I don't know. If you had to play Tengen, I mean, you had the two player and everything else.

Yeah. EniS was missing a two player mode, which I found. a big omission. But I love the colors in the NES version. The colors are nice. It's such a beautiful looking game. It makes each of those little pieces look like candy. It's just, it really makes the most of the NES palette.

I really love the look of the game, even if it's not the best version of Tetris. I don't know. For my money, it's really hard to beat the Game Boy version. Even if it's very limited, it's just the format and the nature of it. Like, I don't know, you just pop open the Game Boy and 15 seconds. later, you're playing Tetris and you can play for an hour or you can play it for two minutes and it's fun

either way. It's such a great time. But is it a better version than other portable versions or is it, you know, or is it just the one that you've played the most? I don't know. Like, I think maybe it's not the better version, but I think the format

is good. Like, you know, playing this on, even playing it on 3DS, like I don't like this version as much. But when I played on the original Game Boy, there is just something... Oh, even playing the ROM on something else, like a 3DS. Yeah, like the virtual console version on 3DS. Like, it's okay, but there's just something about playing the game on this system, the Game Boy.

He's holding a Game Boy. I am. I'm shaking it wildly, madly. I don't know. Yeah. It's just, there's just something about it that just clicks in a way that no other version does for me. And there are other versions like DS that I love, but the simplicity of this version, version and the simplicity of the hardware, really, I think, I don't know, there's just some

sort of synthesis that works there. Yeah. I don't think it's totally nostalgic because I didn't play that much of Game Boy Tetris as a kid because I didn't own Game Boy, my brother didn't, he never really let me play his system. But going back to it, I can just play this game and it's so great. Yeah, I just wonder if it's the elegance of, you know, it's kind of what you were just saying, the elegance of the game design, how simple it is with the elegance of that screen

technology and how simple it is. Just, yeah, I agree. The synthesis of the two just, you know, it just feels very pure somehow. It almost feels mechanical, you know, as opposed to digital. I'm not going to say it's the best version or the best platform for it, but it's the one that feels most right to me. Yeah. I mean, my Game Boy's, I have two together with a link cable and each system has a copy

of Tetris in it. Nice. And that's kind of how I store them. Right. So it's like, let's all pay Tetris. I think we're out of time. I think we're out of time. So let's go ahead and wrap this episode up.

This has been the Retronauts episode of Petrus you've been listening to. I have been Jeremy Parrish. Retronauts, of course, is a weekly, actually more than weekly, video game podcast about history. And you can find us at Retronauts.com on iTunes, on the Podcast One Network and app, and other places if you look around. It's pretty cool. You should listen to us, download us. And feel free to support us on Patreon because that's our primary form of funding, my primary form of eating. Very exciting, this modern world we live in. So check us out at patreon.com. slash Retronauts.

And as for myself, you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. You can also find me on YouTube, Jeremy Parrish. That's one R& Parrish. Thank you. I'm doing videos on video games such as Tetris, game by game, on Nintendo Systems. So check those out if you like games like this. Bob. Hello, I'm Bob Mackey.

You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. I have another podcast. That's right. I'm cheating on all you listeners. And it's Talking Simpsons, the Chronological, exploration of the Simpsons on the Lasertime podcast network every Wednesday. Just look for it in your podcatcher, iTunes, whatever you use to listen to the podcast. You should be able to find it.

That's Talking Simpsons. And we also have a Patreon, which Steve can vouch for. He gives me money to talk into things. So we do a lot of extra content there. We've done all of the critic in the Talking Simpsons format. And we do interviews with writers. We've done a lot of extra stuff. We've done a special on the problem with a poo documentary.

So if you like Simpsons, if you like cartoons, that's the place you got to go. So, patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Great. So you can, you know, almost everything I do right now is on gamehistory.org, which is a very convenient URL. The Video Game History Foundation is a nonprofit that Steve and I and three others founded earlier this year. And what we're sort of focused on is making sure that researchers have access to materials to tell interesting stories about video games. And that's, you know, for us, it's sort of a three-tiered approach. It's like finding and surfacing rare material, interpreting those artifacts in the form of articles through a writing fund that is publicly funded, and then also sort of teaching you all how to be video game historians yourself through education.

So gamehistory.org, this is the third Patreon you're going to hear about. We also have a Patreon, which is patreon.com slash game history org. we are an entirely publicly funded nonprofit, so any donations you can give through that or any other means would be appreciated. And I'm Steve Lynn at Stephen P. Loon on Twitter. I actually give money to all three Patrions. I just realized that while we're sitting here. I'm actually for it because you contribute to the video Patreon that I run.

Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. I didn't pimp that one. Yeah, well, there you go. Now we have another one. Man, I give a lot of money in Patreon. Very generous, man. Thanks.

You can find me, you know, on Twitter I usually just tweet about random stuff I find in storage and then hand over to the foundation. That's awesome. All right, everyone, thanks very much for your time and thanks everyone out there for listening. I hope you enjoy this conversation of Tetris. It was very sort of chaotic, but that is the nature of Tetris' history. So we were just kind of, you know, paying it forward, basically. So please come back and listen to us again for our next episode in one week. check in on Fridays because every other Friday there's a new micro episode, which usually

ends up being like an hour long, so they're not really in the micro. All right. Thanks, everyone. Bye. Hi, it's Jamie, Progress's Employee of the Month, two months in a row. Leave a message at the... Hi, Jamie, it's me, Jamie. I just had a new idea for our song about the Name Your Price Tool.

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price and coverage match limited by state law. The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General.

Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to bill the border wall. becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral.

It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect and a man police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.