[Slate] The Vanished Game Copyright... The Soviet Union Also Collapsed Together

Director John S. Baird's film 'Tetris'
Competition for Tetris business rights excluding developers
Highlights collapse of Soviet state capitalism through real-life figures
Also does not overlook unfairness of Western capitalism

Tetris is a simple game. Blocks made up of seven shapes are moved left or right or rotated to stack. When a block fills a horizontal line, it disappears and scores points. The goal is to keep removing these continuously stacking blocks so they don't reach the top of the screen. At first glance, it seems easy, but as the level rises, the falling speed increases, making it more difficult.

Developer Alexey Pajitnov was inspired to create the puzzle after watching a flounder dance-like swimming in an aquarium. He focused on the movement of the flounder swimming without overlapping other flounders and blending with the bottom. He applied the pentomino (a puzzle made by connecting five squares to form shapes), which he enjoyed, and turned it into a computer game.

In psychology, there is a theory that humans can process seven numbers, seven shapes, or seven concepts at once. For example, seven digits of a phone number are easy to memorize, but more than that is hard to remember. Pajitnov believed that the seven-shaped blocks could be immediately recognized and trigger intuitive responses. As expected, Tetris was copied onto floppy disks in 1987 and rapidly spread in North America. Over 700 million copies of thirty different versions were sold, and it was downloaded over a billion times on mobile phones. In the movie 'Tetris,' the protagonist Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) explains the magic as follows.

"I only played Tetris for five minutes. But even now, I dream of blocks falling. It's not just addictive. It absorbs you inside. It's poetic. Art and math coexist like magic. This is... a perfect game."

Rogers is a real person who bought the rights from Spectrum Holobyte (a Mirrorsoft subsidiary) to distribute Tetris as a computer and video game in Japan. Mirrorsoft had already sold video game rights for the US and Japan to Atari Games, securing only computer rights. He did not give up. He contacted Atari Games to acquire home video game rights and released versions for PC and Famicom consecutively.

At that time, Nintendo wanted to prominently feature Tetris when launching the portable game console Game Boy. Mirrorsoft did not have the rights for that. President Minoru Arakawa met Rogers and proposed guaranteeing a sublicense if he could bring the portable game console rights. Rogers went to Moscow and signed a contract with Elorg, the Soviet state export-import company. However, during this process, it was discovered that neither Atari Games nor Mirrorsoft had approval rights for home video games. They had contracted and even released products with companies that had no rights.

'Tetris' tells the story of Rogers' struggle in the newly opened rights competition. Looking back, it was a farce that happened because Tetris was developed in the Soviet Union. Pajitnov gained the honor of being the developer of Tetris but did not receive royalty income from the game's licensing business. There was no copyright law based on private property in the communist Soviet Union. Moreover, he was working as a researcher at the Soviet Academy of Sciences' computer center when he developed Tetris. It was quite possible to consider it a work made in the course of his duties.

President Minoru once asked Nikolai Belikov, an Elorg bureaucrat, who signed the contract granting rights for the video game version of Tetris, about Pajitnov's rights. Belikov replied, "Pajitnov works for the Soviet Academy of Sciences and developed Tetris during working hours. The copyright belongs to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and Elorg, as the trading organization, has the right to license Tetris." Western media criticized this as the Soviet Union stripping all rights from Pajitnov. Belikov countered, "If Tetris had been developed by an employee working at Boeing during working hours and Boeing licensed it, would that employee have received more than Pajitnov?"

In fact, Pajitnov transferred the rights to Tetris to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Whether it was permanent or limited to ten years later became a legal issue. The expiration of Pajitnov's rights transfer to Elorg at the end of 1995 coincided with the end of Elorg's exclusive five-year license contract with Nintendo in 1989, leading to disputes. Belikov, Rogers, and Pajitnov tried to resolve the issue through agreement rather than litigation. They each took shares according to their claims and established the current Tetris Company (TTC).

These facts do not appear in 'Tetris.' Instead, it hides the fact that Pajitnov transferred the rights. It even presents a fictional setting inspired by Hungarian businessman Robert Stein selling Tetris rights to Mirrorsoft and Spectrum Holobyte without any permission. There is a scene where Valentin Triponov, a Communist Party Central Committee official, secretly asks Pajitnov if he sold the copyright. "I heard you sold the copyright of your game to the West. Did you make a profit? How could such a popular game here not make money overseas? Someone must be intercepting it."

This seems intended to link with the signs of the Soviet collapse. The Soviet state capitalism system had become inefficient since the late 1970s. New General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev tried to overcome the crisis with reform and openness policies but failed. It was not because of socialism but rather the demise of a state capitalism system that destroyed the achievements of the workers' revolution and prolonged authoritarian one-party rule. As Gorbachev defends in 'Tetris':

"Our country is broken. People want freedom. Freedom to vote, freedom to choose their destiny. Communism was never a means to block absolute freedom. But unfortunately, human greed got in the way. The world is changing, and the Soviet Union will not fall behind."

Robert Maxwell, chairman of Mirrorsoft, the listener, spoke of 'the end of communism' when the Tetris rights contract went awry. In reality, the Soviet Union disappeared into the pages of history. It was not a victory of Western capitalism. The global capitalist economy had been in crisis since the early 1970s. Even around the time the Soviet Union collapsed, it had not recovered to previous levels. Shortly after celebrating the Soviet collapse, it faced economic recession and popular resistance, such as the 1995 French public sector strikes and the 1999 anti-capitalist movements. Could this be the result of unfair dealings even in a simple game like Tetris?