The Tetris Wars: How Nintendo Stole Tetris From Atari & Made Millions!

#tetris
The Western capitalists and the Eastern communists, a stark divide most evident on the European continent where the continent was divided by the Iron Curtain, but unbeknownst to the West an invasion was on its way from the core of the enemy deep within the Soviet Union. This creation would bring the massively wealthy British Tycoon Robert Maxwell to face off against a small-time video game trader based in Japan by the name of Henk Rogers.
Atari and Nintendo, faced off in a legal battle over a dispute that involved millions of dollars, the outcome of which hinged on the outcome of the battle between the Billionaire Tycoon Robert Maxwell and the small-time video game trader Henk Rogers. This is the story of Tetris. With the most notable competition being the space race that occurred in the 50s and 60s continuing on from the space race the focus in the West and the East still remains on rapid scientific progression, the race for scientific supremacy spawned research labs like Bell labs and Darpa in the US which were largely responsible for technologies such as radar and the internet, while within the Soviets Union, several research labs were created which explored scientific advancement which resulted in the invention of satellites and many other brilliant innovations.
Alexey Pajitnov, Alexy’s favorite childhood game Pentominoes, had created a new game which he called Tetris from the Greek word for 4.
The first version of Tetris didn’t have color or sound effects. What also helped the game spread like wildfire was the communist system within the USSR. In the soviet union there was no notion of intellectual property rights all individual ideas were owned by the state, so with the soviet union and soviet bloc countries the game was being shared freely without the fear of copyright infringement, it had protections put on it to prevent piracy, this lack of restrictions on sharing software helped the game proliferated to millions of players spread across the Soviet Union.
There was a booming industry of middlemen who traveled to soviet satellite states and soviet union countries licensing technology from the East and then going on to sell it to the West for a handsome profit, among these middlemen was a lawyer by the name Robert Stein, He had built a successful business called Andromeda software which licensed Hungarian software products to sell which sell Great Britain for a sizable profit, so under the assumption that had the licensing right to Tetris Stein wasted no time shopping his license around to big-time British game producers, one of which was Mirrorsoft the software arm of Maxwell corporation, In 1986 the Maxwell corporation was a giant entertainment empire, it owned newspapers, magazines, and football clubs among other business ventures. If Maxwell bought into Tetris.
Just weeks after officially securing the rights to Tetris, it became a best seller and sold more than 100,000 copies within its first year of release in America alone. This presented a massive opportunity for Tetris to expand into other device segments. Home video games played through gaming consoles that plugged directly into a TV and were played using game
controllers were rising in popularity.
Apart from entering other device segments Tetris still had one more market to conquer, a market so big that for most of the early 80s, its economy was predicted to surpass the United States and become the biggest economy in the world, that market was Japan. The industry giant Nintendo was gearing up to launch a handheld game-playing device and wanted to sell Tetris as part of the package, but they needed someone to discreetly get them the rights to Tetris without alerting their competitors. The handheld device Nintendo was working on was called the Gameboy.
Mirrorsoft had secretly sent Kevin Maxwell the son of Robert Maxwell to negotiate a deal for the handheld rights. Had he not done that Mirrorsoft could have legally maintained the right to the license for the video game console Tetris which they had sold to Atari, Atari had over 100s of thousands of copies of Tetris already selling on shelves but they were about to receive a rude awakening. headed to Seattle the American headquarters of Nintendo to enlist their help of Nintendo in securing the rights to the console Tetris. With Nintendo behind him, he could easily match the industry power of Mirrorsoft. Nintendo at the time had the best-selling video game console in the world. The Nintendo Entertainment System. Atari and Nintendo were arch rivals and Nintendo now had a chance to snatch console Tetris right from underneath the nose of its biggest competitor. Nintendo offered full support to help Henk Rogers secure the rights for the console Tetris.
Meanwhile, in Britain, the entertainment tycoon Robert Maxwell, tetris.

[@victorgw]

Cool vid

[@Tech_History_Channel]

Thanks!

[@foradome5204]

A communist commercial success pretty wild

[@Tech_History_Channel]

Indeed :)

[@GelatoGecko]

23 minutes of talking and you couldnt make your own thumbnail? lmao don't quit your day job just yet