Tetris: The Games People Play

by Box Brown

A graphic novel about the history of Tetris. It also has a pretty interesting history of Nintendo at the beginning.

• Ninteno began in 1889 making Hanafuda cards (cards depicting flowers, I guess?). Eventually, the cards were used by organized crime groups for gambling, which made Nintendo a lot of money.
• "Nintendo" means something like "Work hard, but in the end it's in heaven's hands."
• Sometime in the 1960s they began releasing new toys and devices, like the "Ultra Hand" and a "Love Tester" for couples. They bought up old bowling alleys and turned them into places to play shooting games (similar to Duck Hunt).
• Gunpei Yokoi (inventor of the Ultra Hand) also came up with the idea for the Game and Watch -- a watch with a game built into it. This later inspired the Gameboy.
• Tetris was invented by Alexey Pajitnov, based on the physical game Pentominoes. In Pentominoes, shapes are made from combining 5 squares; in Tetris, 4 squares.
• Alexey invented it for fun while working in a computer lab. It quickly took over the lab, then was copied and began to spread.
• Robert Stein (Andromeda Software, Mirrorsoft) first got the rights to distribute the game. After this, the story is a mess of people fighting over what rights are really granted, who has the right to grant the rights, etc. The key players are Mirrorsoft, Atari, Nintendo, and a branch of the Russian government called Elorg. Nintendo eventually secured the console rights from Elorg.
• Alexey got nothing. He just kept working at the computer/science center where he had been. But he made friends with Henk Rogers (Spectrum HoloByte), who got pretty rich off of Tetris but was also a game creator. Henk eventually helped Alexey move to Seattle, and they formed The Tetris Company.
• The name Tetris = Tetra + Tennis.
• Tetris was the first video game in space.