Interview: Tetris - The Making of an Icon

We interview two game prodigies, Alexey Pajitnov & Henk Rogers, whose fascinating story behind Tetris goes right to the top of NCL - with plenty of twists along the way.

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By Hasan Ali Almaci

Alexey Pajitnov gets a lot more attention these days but he's still not as well known as his most famous creation. In the mid 1980s Pajitnov, while working in a computer research lab in communist Russia, designed a devilishly addictive puzzle game that would soon inundate the industry.

Originally, the game only worked on the antiquated computer it was developed on, but as soon as it started spreading across the campus, Pajitnov knew that Tetris was something special.

The intervening decades have been good to Tetris - if not, for the most part, Pajitnov himself. It's one of the most recognizable games ever created, but few are aware of its bedraggled past, a story of lawyers and licensing that spans years and continents.

To find out more about how Tetris came to be and what it meant to its creator, we went straight to Pajitnov, to hear in his own words what creating a video game icon was like.

We also spoke to Henk Rogers, an entrepeneur often said to be close to Nintendo 'Godfather' Hiroshi Yamauchi, whose name is unfamiliar to most Tetris players but without whose help they'd never even have heard of the game.

What follows is their story, as both Pajitnov and Rogers talk to Kikizo in these exclusive interviews.

• Alexey Pajitnov, creator of Tetris
• Henk Rogers, Tetris licensee and entrepreneur

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