Tetris: the story of the video game that conquered the world

Its story, however, is anything but simple. Tetris was in fact born in Moscow, within the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, at a time when the Western video game market seemed very far away. Its creator is Alexey Pajitnov, a programmer and puzzle enthusiast, who in June 1984 developed the first prototype by drawing inspiration from pentominoes, mathematical games based on the combination of five squares. The limitations of the hardware led him to simplify the original idea, moving to shapes made up of four squares: tetrominoes. From here comes the name Tetris, a combination of "tetra" and "tennis", a sport particularly loved by Pajitnov.

The first Tetris is developed on the Electronika 60, a Soviet computer decidedly far removed from the imagery associated with Western video games. Its initial spread occurs through copies of the program and subsequent conversions, until it reaches the West. The problem is that Pajitnov is not in a position to freely turn his own invention into a commercial success: the rights are in fact tied to the Soviet state apparatus and to the structure that controls the computer on which the game was developed.

And it is precisely this particular situation that turns the story of Tetris into something much bigger than a simple video game tale. At the end of the 1980s, the game begins to be distributed in the West through a highly complicated chain of agreements and sublicenses. Several companies believe they have obtained the necessary rights, while actual control of the situation remains in the hands of ELORG, the Soviet body responsible for technological exports. When Henk Rogers discovers Tetris in 1988, he immediately understands that behind that simple puzzle there is something special. The following year he flies to Moscow to obtain the rights needed to bring it to Game Boy, meeting Pajitnov and starting a collaboration destined to change the history of the game forever.

It is such an incredible story that in 2023 it also became an Apple TV+ film, simply titled Tetris. The movie accurately tells the licensing chaos, the meeting between Rogers and Pajitnov, and the race to secure the rights, but it turns several real elements into a Cold War thriller, adding chases and situations that are decidedly more spectacular than reality. It nevertheless succeeded in bringing back into the spotlight one of the most unusual stories in the video game industry.

The real turning point comes in 1989. Nintendo decides to accompany the launch of the Game Boy with Tetris, a choice that today may seem almost inevitable, but that at the time had a commercial logic that was far from obvious.

Nintendo could have relied exclusively on its own characters and intellectual properties, but Tetris had a feature especially well suited to a handheld console aimed at a much broader audience than the traditional one: it did not need to be explained. All you had to do was look at the screen to understand what to do. No dialogue was needed, no story to follow, and no prior knowledge of the world of video games. The player simply had to take a piece and decide where to place it.

The choice proved extraordinary. The Game Boy version of Tetris became one of the console’s defining symbols and helped turn it into a global phenomenon. According to The Tetris Company, over 35 million copies of the Game Boy version were sold, making it the best-selling title in the console’s history.

The importance of the pairing is not measured only in software sales. Tetris demonstrated that a video game could become a universal experience. The Game Boy was no longer just a console for children or enthusiasts: it became an object that could accompany anyone, while traveling, at home, or during breaks. Tetris was perfect for this model because it could be played for five minutes or for hours, without changing its nature.

The result is one of the most important hardware-software combinations in the history of the medium. The Game Boy provided Tetris with the perfect machine to reach a global audience, and Tetris provided the Game Boy with an experience that was immediately understandable, accessible, and potentially endless.

It is no coincidence that this version in particular has remained especially beloved even by its creator: Pajitnov has named Tetris for Game Boy as his favorite version among the many reinterpretations of the game.

The success of Tetris does not depend only on its simplicity. The real strength of the project lies in the fact that its language practically does not need to be translated.

The shapes are universal, the rules are intuitive, and the goal is immediately legible. This allowed Tetris to overcome one of the main barriers of video games of the time: language. A Western title might require the translation of dialogue, manuals, and interface; Tetris, on the other hand, could be distributed practically anywhere while keeping its identity intact.

It is also for this reason that, over the decades, the game has continued to appear on seemingly incompatible platforms. Home computers, consoles, handhelds, mobile phones, browsers, electronic devices, and even decidedly improbable systems have hosted at least one version of Tetris. Guinness World Records recognizes it as the most ported video game in history, with hundreds of official versions and a documented presence on dozens of different platforms.

And here another fundamental aspect of its history emerges. Tetris has not simply remained the same game republished endlessly. Over the years, the original concept has been reinterpreted in dozens and dozens of ways.

Thus, very different experiences were born: from sequels like Tetris 2 to reinterpretations like Tetrisphere, from the many arcade and console versions to more recent experiments like Tetris Effect, Tetris 99 and Tetris Effect: Connected. Some productions profoundly changed the original rhythm and structure, others added competitive modes, while still others transformed Tetris into an audiovisual experience.

The basic concept, however, has remained surprisingly intact.

Perhaps the best way to understand Tetris' cultural impact is to observe what happens when the player stops playing.

The so-called "Tetris Effect" refers to the phenomenon whereby people who spend a lot of time playing may continue to mentally visualize tetrominoes and combinations even away from the screen. The shapes can appear in one’s thoughts before falling asleep or when observing real objects and subconsciously beginning to imagine how to fit them together in the most efficient way possible.

The term has become so associated with the game that it has also been used as the title for one of its most famous reinterpretations, Tetris Effect, released in 2018. In this case, the phenomenon becomes almost an integral part of the experience: music, colors, visual effects, and rhythm transform the original puzzle into something much more immersive.

It is a significant passage because it shows how much Tetris has managed to enter popular culture. Its blocks have not remained confined to video games: they have become design objects, decorations, toys, clothing, and instantly recognizable visual references.

In other words, Tetris has reached a level of recognition where it is no longer necessary to show the logo to make it clear what is being talked about. A few colored squares arranged in the right way are enough.

If one tries to quantify the commercial importance of the phenomenon, the numbers become almost surreal. In 2026 The Tetris Company stated that the brand had surpassed 520 million copies sold worldwide, distributed across more than 50 platforms.

It is important to clarify that the figure of 520 million refers to the brand and not a single version of the game: it therefore includes the vast history of Tetris releases and products. It is still a figure that captures the brand's ability to span generations and platforms without losing recognizability.

Among the most curious milestones is the one reached in 1993, when Tetris became the first video game brought into space. The cosmonaut Aleksandr Serebrov took a Game Boy with him during a space mission, turning a simple game of Tetris into a small piece of space exploration history.

But the relationship between Tetris and competition did not stop at individual records. In recent years the game has also become an extremely technical competitive discipline, with the Classic Tetris World Championship and an international community capable of turning the 1989 NES version into a true sporting arena.

The most incredible chapter of this story came in December 2023, when thirteen-year-old Willis "Blue Scuti" Gibson reached the so-called kill screen in the NES version of Tetris. Having reached level 157, the game froze because of the technical limits of the original version: for the first time, a human player had therefore reached a point that had for decades been considered practically unreachable.

It is an almost perfect episode to describe the longevity of Tetris: a game born in 1984, apparently solved in its fundamental formula, which more than thirty years later still manages to produce new feats capable of capturing the public's attention.

For a collector, Tetris presents a particularly interesting situation. The number of versions released is so high that simply looking for "the rarest Tetris" risks losing sight of what truly makes a particular copy interesting.

The versions to consider are in fact tied to different moments in the game's history.

The first category is naturally that of the first computer versions, starting with the Soviet Electronika 60. This is not the classic commercial product that a collector can simply look for on the shelves of the second-hand market: the historical value of these early incarnations lies above all in their origin and in the difficulty of documenting and preserving materials directly linked to the birth of the project. For a collector interested in the history of video games, however, they represent the absolute starting point.

A second fundamental chapter is represented by the first Western computer versions, which tell the rapid transformation of Tetris from a Soviet experiment into an international product. They are particularly interesting because they precede the explosion of the Nintendo phenomenon and make it possible to reconstruct the path that leads from the original program to the global market.

But naturally it is the Game Boy from 1989 that represents one of the fundamental pieces of any collection dedicated to Tetris. Here, attention must be paid to an important detail: the version distributed together with the Game Boy at launch and the subsequent standalone copies are not necessarily the same thing from a collecting point of view.

The 1989 version is in fact tied to the very birth of the console. Tetris was used as a pack-in title and its presence contributed enormously to the system's success. The separately packaged copies arrived later; Heritage Auctions points out, for example, how the U.S. standalone boxed copies from 1993 are now much harder to find than the simple memory of the Tetris included with the console.

It is precisely in this segment that production differences can become very interesting for grading. Packaging variants, seal types, different artwork, and production elements can distinguish copies that appear identical. A sealed Game Boy specimen should therefore not be evaluated solely on the numerical certification grade, but also on the correct identification of the variant.

The market for top-grade copies shows how much this distinction can matter. In 2022, a 1989 US Game Boy copy certified Wata 9.4 A+ was sold by Heritage Auctions for $14,400. More recently, in August 2026, a standalone 1993 copy certified PSA 9.6 A was auctioned for $13,750; according to Heritage, it was then the Game Boy copy with the highest PSA numerical grade and belonged to a surprisingly small certified population. These are naturally results related to exceptional examples and do not represent the market price of a normal Tetris Game Boy.

If there is one version that deserves a special place in the history of Tetris collecting, it is probably the Tengen for NES.

In 1988 Atari Games, through its Tengen division, released a version of Tetris for NES without owning the necessary rights to do so. The affair escalated into a legal battle with Nintendo and the subsequent removal of the product from stores. It is one of the best-known stories of the early NES generation and makes the Tengen version interesting not only because it is a variant of Tetris, but because it is a material document of one of the most important software rights clashes of the era.

The version is also particularly interesting from a video game perspective: it was programmed by Ed Logg, a key figure in American arcades and coauthor of titles such as Asteroids, Centipede, and Gauntlet. His version of Tetris has therefore become a collector's item for at least three different reasons: the Tetris brand, the Nintendo-Tengen story, and the presence of an important name in arcade development.

Here too, the market has produced notable results. A sealed Wata 9.2 A+ Tengen copy was sold by Heritage in 2022 for $13,800, while in 2021 a Wata 9.4 A+ reached $33,600. The record cited by Heritage for a Tengen Tetris is even more significant: a Wata 9.6 A++ was sold in April 2021 for $36,000.

It is also interesting to note how these results are not necessarily reproducible. In subsequent years, Tengen copies of the same type with high grades achieved much lower results: a Wata 9.4 A+ was sold in 2023 for $6,600 and a CGC 9.6 A+ in 2024 for $4,500. This clearly shows how risky it is to use a single auction result as an absolute indicator of a copy's value.

The Nintendo NES version remains interesting nonetheless, especially in the early productions and packaging variants. Collectors may encounter differences related to the type of seal, the so-called Oval SOQ, the wording on the packaging, and production elements that allow grading services to distinguish early, middle, and late productions.

Even here, copies in exceptional condition can reach significant prices: in 2020 a Nintendo NES Wata 9.8 A+ copy was sold by Heritage for 5,520 dollars, while in subsequent years several sales of high-grade sealed copies have been documented.

The point, however, is not to determine which Tetris is "the best" to collect. The different versions tell different parts of the game's story: the Soviet origin, the export to the West, the birth of the Game Boy as a global phenomenon, the rights war between Nintendo and Tengen, and finally the evolution of modern collecting through variants and grading.

This is exactly what makes Tetris particularly interesting even for those who collect historical video games. A single copy can be important for its rarity, but a variant can become even more interesting when it tells a specific moment in the history of the medium.

An idea that never needed to age

The true Tetris record, probably, is precisely this one.

In over forty years, video games have gone from a Soviet computer to a handheld console, from arcades to home consoles, from mobile phones to virtual reality, all the way to competitive championships and the most modern multiplayer experiences. The Tetris Company today speaks of more than 520 million copies sold and a presence on more than 50 platforms: numbers that tell better than any celebration the game’s ability to span generations.

Yet, despite this enormous evolution, its fundamental idea has practically not changed.

The tetrominoes keep falling. The lines keep disappearing. The player keeps looking for the best way to place the next piece.

Perhaps this is exactly why Tetris has never truly become a video game of the past. It does not belong to the Eighties, to the Game Boy, or to any particular generation of players. It belongs to video games themselves, because it represents one of the purest demonstrations of how powerful an idea can be when reduced to its essence.

Pajitnov had not created a character destined to become an icon. He had not built a narrative universe. He had not even imagined that that little puzzle born on a Soviet computer would reach hundreds of millions of people.

He had simply found an almost perfect way to fit blocks together.

And, forty years later, we are still trying to put the next one in the right place.