Word of mouth. Although Tetris became immediately popular among programmers with access to an Electronika 60, the machine had no graphical capabilities -- and less memory than today's calculators. Pressed with requests to create a version of the game for the IBM PC, a more widespread computer with better graphics, Pajitnov assigned the job to Vadim Gerasimov, a year-old student on a summer job at his office today an engineer at Google.
The game spread quickly. Pajitnov wasn't making any money off the game, nor did he intend to. Ideas were owned by the state and the very concept of selling software as a product was unfamiliar to him. People were just sharing Tetris through word of mouth and by copying it onto floppy disks. Then, Pajitnov heard rumors that the game might have crossed borders and was being played in other Eastern bloc countries.
In , he got a message via telex -- a forerunner of the fax machine -- from Robert Stein, a salesman for a Hungary-based software company called Andromeda. Stein, who had seen Tetris in Hungary, wanted to secure the rights to sell it as a computer game in the West. He offered significant money in advance. Illusion of control: Why the world is full of buttons that don't work.
He knew that doing business directly with a Western firm could have landed him in jail, even before making any money, so he started investigating how he could sell the rights to Tetris through the state. Stein, however, interpreted his response as a green light and immediately started producing the game. But as he was preparing to launch, he received another telex from Elorg -- short for Electronorgtechnica, the Soviet organization that oversaw software and hardware exports.
It said that the rights had not been officially granted and that his launch was illegal. The game played up its Soviet origins through Kremlin-themed illustrations and Cyrillic characters. But the misunderstanding between Pajitnov and Stein showed how tricky it would be to export a video game from Soviet Russia to the West for the first time -- an issue that led to years of confusion and legal battles, and is even rumored to have landed on the desk of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
The Game Boy. Concordski: What ever happened to Soviets' spectacular rival to Concorde? Tetris was selling well on computers, but the big money in the games sector was being made elsewhere: consoles. Henk Rogers, a Dutch video game developer and businessman living in Japan, was the first to realize that Tetris was a perfect match for the Game Boy, a new handheld system released by Nintendo in Japan in early The console was about to launch in North America and Europe too, and Rogers set out to convince the company to bundle a copy of the game in the box, a common practice outside of Japan.
I have Mario. Sony has been developing lithium ion batteries since , and the units being used in Rogers' home are top of the line. The batteries store energy from solar panels, allowing people to use it at night without having to rely on expensive energy from the grid. Rogers' company will sell and install the battery systems for commercial and residential use, supplying everything from the housing to the software to monitor and maintain the systems.
That could change in the next few months with several new systems besides Rogers' expected to hit the market. Rogers, who also owns a ranch on Hawaii's Big Island that is energy independent, said he had an epiphany after suffering a heart attack and near-death experience in Rogers is the founder and chairman of the Blue Planet Foundation, an organization that promotes clean energy alternatives and lobbies politicians to change policy.
Recently, the foundation created a book of children's drawings and letters pleading for state lawmakers to mandate Hawaii become energy independent. Hawaii Gov. David Ige announced earlier this year that the state of Hawaii would become completely energy independent by Hawaii state Sen.
Lorraine Inouye, who is on the Energy and Transportation Committee, said she is encouraged that people are taking the initiative to become energy independent. The plan for energy independence by "can be accomplished, but we need to remove obstacles," she added.
For you. Repeat ad infinitum. Unlike the majority of products developed during the early boom years of video game design, "Tetris" was a no-frills outlier: no fancy images, no memorable characters and no narrative. But while the game may be uncomplicated, the story of how it came to dominate the gaming industry and bewitch millions of people around the world is quite the opposite.
The tale is rife with handshake deals, game industry rivalries, and tense negotiations between Western executives and Soviet officials during the last decade of the Cold War , when relations between the USSR and countries in the West were anything but friendly. It all began with a puzzle-loving software engineer named Alexey Pajitnov, who created "Tetris" in while working for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a research and development center in Moscow created by the government.
Pajitnov didn't intend to make money from his creation; he designed the game "for fun," Brown told Live Science. Pajitnov was inspired by a puzzle game called "pentominoes," in which different wooden shapes made of five equal squares are assembled in a box.
Brown wrote that Pajitnov imagined the shapes falling from above into a glass, with players controlling the shapes and guiding them into place. Pajitnov adapted the shapes to four squares each and programmed the game in his spare time, dubbing it "Tetris. And when he shared the game with his co-workers, they started playing it — and kept playing it and playing it.
These early players copied and shared "Tetris" on floppy disks, and the game quickly spread across Moscow, Brown wrote. When Pajitnov sent a copy to a colleague in Hungary, it ended up on display in a software exhibit at the Hungarian Institute of Technology, where it came to the attention of Robert Stein, owner of Andromeda Software Ltd.
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