Tetris was created by a Soviet computer scientist
On this day · 6 June 1984
On a clunky Soviet research computer with no graphics to speak of, one programmer assembled the most universally addictive puzzle ever.
On June 6, 1984, Alexey Pajitnov, a programmer at the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ computing center in Moscow, built the first version of Tetris on an Electronika 60 — a machine so basic it had no real graphics, so he drew the falling pieces with bracket characters.
The idea came from pentominoes, a wooden puzzle of flat tile shapes. Pajitnov simplified them to four-square blocks (hence the Greek tetra) that players rotate and slot into clearing rows. It was meant to test the hardware; instead it ate everyone’s afternoons.
Copied disk by disk across the USSR, it escaped to the West in 1987 and never stopped.
The Tetris Company marks June 6 as World Tetris Day, and in 2015 the game joined the inaugural class of the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Some historians date the finished game to 1985, but the rights-holder’s official creation date is 1984.
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