In 1984, a researcher at Moscow’s Dorodnitsyn Computing Center built a small game to test the limits of an Electronika 60, a Soviet clone of an older American machine with no graphics at all. Alexey Pajitnov drew falling shapes out of text brackets, trimmed the twelve pentomino pieces of a toy he loved down to seven tetrominoes, and named the result after the Greek prefix for four and his favorite sport, tennis. This episode traces how that lab distraction spread across Moscow on floppy disks and then leaked through Budapest to the West, where a polite telex reply was misread as a license.

The episode follows the tangled rights fight that followed: Robert Stein’s sublicenses to Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte, the Soviet export agency ELORG taking over, and Henk Rogers flying to Moscow on a tourist visa in 1989 and writing a check on the spot to salvage negotiations. It covers Nintendo’s decision to bundle Tetris with the Game Boy, the court battle with Atari, Pajitnov’s emigration to Seattle as the Soviet Union collapsed, and the 1996 founding of The Tetris Company once his ten-year rights assignment finally expired.

• Why seven pieces, not twelve, fits the limits of human working memory
• How Vadim Gerasimov and Dmitry Pavlovsky rebuilt the game for the IBM PC with color and scoring
• Why Pajitnov signed his rights over to the state for ten years to protect himself
• The Welltris and Hatris sequels and why adding dimensions broke the magic
• The Tetris Effect, the clinical term for seeing falling blocks when you close your eyes