--- title: Tetris Still Taunts: The Game's Legacy 30 Years Later | TIME description: Tetris Still Taunts: The Game's Legacy 30 Years Later canonical: https://time.com/video/BgYs7dOM/ og:title: Tetris Still Taunts: The Game's Legacy 30 Years Later og:description: Tetris Still Taunts: The Game's Legacy 30 Years Later og:url: https://time.com/video/BgYs7dOM/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/BgYs7dOM/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Tetris Still Taunts: The Game's Legacy 30 Years Later twitter:description: Tetris Still Taunts: The Game's Legacy 30 Years Later twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/BgYs7dOM/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Tetris Still Taunts: The Game's Legacy 30 Years Later > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Tetris Still Taunts: The Game's Legacy 30 Years Later [Watch (HLS stream): Tetris Still Taunts: The Game's Legacy 30 Years Later](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/BgYs7dOM.m3u8) (2:07)  _Published 2014-06-05. Tetris Still Taunts: The Game's Legacy 30 Years Later_ --- Jul 27, 2023 4:45 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [30 Years Later, Hong Kong Still Harbors the Spirit of Tiananmen](/video/2jMvaDA8/) ### 30 Years Later, Hong Kong Still Harbors the Spirit of Tiananmen [Good Things Never Get Old: Tetris Influences In Today’s Games](/video/YTFNPuhF/) ### Good Things Never Get Old: Tetris Influences In Today’s Games [Tiananmen: The Legacy 25 Years Later](/video/zuTzxNSa/) ### Tiananmen: The Legacy 25 Years Later --- ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] Everybody's heard of Tetris, the video game. People played it on their PCs in the 1980's, they played it on their GameBoys in the 1990's, people play it on their cell phones now. It's as close to video games get as being a household name. The one person who isn't a household name is the creator of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov. Pajitnov invented Tetris when he was 30. He was a young computer programmer working for the Moscow Academy of Sciences. He named it Tetris as a portmanteau word, between tetromino, which is the shape of the block, and tennis, because he apparently liked the game. So Tetris began to be a popular game in Moscow in the 1980's. People would play it on early PC's. They share floppy discs with the game on and then it came to the attention of an English video game producer who decided to smuggle it through the iron curtain from Hungary to the West. And sold the rights to it before the Russians had sold it to him. As Tetris began to get popular in the West, there began a huge battle over the legal rights for the games between games produces in Europe, games produces in the United States, games produces in Japan. Whilee the Russians were trying to get some money for it as well, the one person who didn't benefit was Pajitnov, who didn't get any money from the sale of Tetris until 1996, well after it had become a huge hit on Gameboys, Super Nintendo's, all the video games at the time. It all ended in the early 1990s when Nintendo won a legal battle against Atari for the rights to produce the game. But the man who created the video game, Pajitnov, didn't earn any money from it until 1996. He started a company to get the rights for the game. Pajitnov emigrated to the United States in the early 1990s. He worked for Microsoft for a while, designing video games all the time, he still designs games today. In fact his latest, Marbly is available on the iTunes store, you can also get Tetris on the iTunes store which may be the more addictive of the two, but time will tell. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Tetris Still Taunts: The Game's Legacy 30 Years Later","description":"Tetris Still Taunts: The Game's Legacy 30 Years Later","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/BgYs7dOM/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2014-06-05T22:01:21.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/BgYs7dOM.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/BgYs7dOM/","duration":"PT2M7S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/BgYs7dOM/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```