![]() The only way for a company to defend itself against patent infringement claims, after all, is to see the patent in question and compare its product to it. Not Nintendo-to sue Atari, for patent infringement.”īy claiming that Atari was a defendant in a lawsuit over the lock-out chip, Atari was able to convince the United States Copyright Office to hand over a copy of the 10NES program. “So what did-which is not in the movie, but it’s true-is they hired a law firm, I believe it was in Virginia, to sue them. And this effort, according to Pink, included a lawsuit against itself. At the same time, Atari Games was attempting to reverse engineer the lock-out chip to circumvent it, but initially failed and agreed to Nintendo’s terms.ĭespite this agreement, Atari continued its efforts to reverse-engineer the lock-out system. However, Nintendo charged the company $10 per cartridge to manufacture them, and used a lock-out chip and program called the 10NES to enforce this policy. ![]() The story in question involves corporate intrigue so dense it could be its own spinoff film.Īs Pink relays the tale, Tengen-a subsidiary of Atari Games-was attempting to make games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. “I wrote an entire, like, 20-page Atari subplot,” Pink laments. ![]() Which meant color graphics, 8-bit music, and floppy disks that people copied and shared for free.” It’s a compressed version of the story, and might have been incomplete if Tetris had been a documentary, but it left room to focus on the emotional journey.Īnd as with any story this big, there are countless details that simply had to hit the cutting room floor. “Alexey and a couple of buddies from work made the game IBM-compatible. The film briefly alludes to Gerasimov and Pavlovsky’s contributions in an early scene where Rogers is explaining Tetris’ origins to a bank manager. “When it came down to it, after talking to Alexey and Henk,” Pink said, “This was definitely Alexey’s game.” However, as Pink explained to WIRED, while the technical process and iteration may have been collaborative, the core idea and design for the game still originated with Pajitnov. This complexity strikes up a fascinating question of credit in a collaborative medium like game design. Gerasimov.” In other early iterations of the game, such as the Atari Arcade version, both men receive a credit for “original concept and design.” Some versions of the title screen in the IBM version-the first version that went viral-reads “Game by A. Pavlovsky additionally contributed the idea of a high-score mechanic. Gerasimov not only translated the game into Pascal, but also contributed the idea of color-coded blocks. With Gerasimov’s help (along with another of their friends, Dmitry Pavlovsky) they were able to rebuild the game for IBM machines.Īccording to The Tetris Effect, this process involved a time-consuming effort to rebuild the game from scratch, but also involved additional design elements. This version used parentheses to form blocks and was rather rudimentary. As the film explains, Pajitnov made the first version of Tetris on an obscure computer, the Electronika 60. Meanwhile, Vadim Gerasimov has a somewhat more tangible connection. ![]() In 1998, Pokhilko and his wife and son were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide, and the recent docuseries, The Tetris Murders, builds many of its theories around the premise that Pokhilko was a co-developer of the game. Nevertheless, his association has led to some accounts crediting him as a co-developer of Tetris. It’s unclear whether Pokhilko made any other contributions, or whether those contributions made it into any published versions of the game. The Tetris Effect also details how Pokhilko worked with Pajitnov to develop an early two-player version of the game, where players would control blocks falling from opposite sides of the screen to meet in the middle (notably, this is different from the multiplayer mode that shipped with the Game Boy). He also subsequently had to ban the game from his offices, as workers were getting too distracted-a detail the film alludes to through the character of Valentin Trifonov, who tells Pajitnov that his game was “being played by government workers across the Union for hours a day.” In his book The Tetris Effect, Dan Ackerman relays how Pajitnov showed the game to Pokhilko, who immediately identified its addictive nature. Pokhilko was a clinical psychologist and friend of Pajitnov.
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