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The Game That Was Smuggled Out of the Soviet Union
Business & startups11 min

The Game That Was Smuggled Out of the Soviet Union

Tetris was invented by a Moscow researcher who had no legal right to profit from it, and its path to the West became a tangle of competing contracts, a state monopoly called Elorg, and Nintendo's search for a killer app for its handheld. This is the story of how an intellectual property empire emerged when the creator held no commercial claim to his work.

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Show notes

Alexey Pajitnov earned zero royalties from Tetris between nineteen eighty-four and nineteen ninety-five.

Robert Stein sub-licensed unowned console rights after misinterpreting an exploratory Soviet telex as a binding deal.

Henk Rogers exposed unauthorized console games by showing a Japanese Famicom cartridge to Soviet officials.

A federal judge ordered Tengen to recall and destroy roughly two hundred sixty-eight thousand unauthorized cartridges.

Henk Rogers convinced Nintendo to bundle Tetris with the Game Boy, selling over thirty-five million copies.

Pajitnov and Rogers bought Elorg for fifteen million dollars in two thousand five to reclaim full control.

In this episode
  1. 01Intro1 min
  2. 02The Moscow Academy and the Paper Chain3 min
  3. 03The Moscow Showdown2 min
  4. 04The Courtroom and the Handheld Gamble3 min
  5. 05The Economics of Extraction3 min
  6. 06Outro1 min
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