Who owned Tetris? The real rights timeline

Tetris is one of the most sold games ever: the Game Boy version alone moved about 35 million copies, many of them bundled with the console. Its creator saw none of that money for more than a decade.

The timeline

• 1984: Alexey Pajitnov writes Tetris at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. (He once gave 1985; 1984 is the usual date.)
• 1984 to 1988: The game spreads; Pajitnov arranges for the Computing Center to hold the rights for ten years. Foreign deals must go through Elorg, the state body with a monopoly on software exports.
• 1988: Robert Stein secures a computer licence from Elorg and sublicenses it onwards to Mirrorsoft and others.
• Early 1989: Henk Rogers, a Dutch-born game designer based in Japan, flies to Moscow as a tourist with no right to do business and talks his way into a meeting with Elorg.
• 15 to 22 March 1989: Rogers returns with a lawyer. Nintendo of America's Minoru Arakawa and Howard Lincoln arrive on 19 March. On 22 March Nintendo signs for the console rights, guaranteeing Elorg at least $5 million; Rogers also gets the Japanese rights.
• Summer 1989: Tetris ships with the Game Boy. Atari's Tengen, which had released its own console version, loses the legal fight.
• End of 1995: The Computing Center's rights expire and revert to Pajitnov.
• 1996: Rogers and Pajitnov set up The Tetris Company; Pajitnov finally earns royalties.

The 2023 film adds car chases and KGB agents. The reported KGB interest is only rumour. The paperwork, though, was real: thirty-five million copies came out of one Cold War deal.