The creator of Tetris, in Malaga: the video game born from communism and conquered the world

If one were to determine the most popular video game in history, Tetris would surely be among the finalists. The puzzle game released in 1984 is easy to play, intuitive, suitable for all ages, and has sold millions of copies across all platforms over its lifetime. Anyone who has ever anxiously awaited the long desired block can cast the first stone...

Well, if Tetris is a legendary game, so are its creators and its history in general, and next week this can be experienced firsthand in Málaga. OXO Video Game Museum will celebrate the first edition of OXO Legends, a new annual event that pays tribute to those figures who changed the world of video games. The first edition will be held on December 6 at 19:00h at the Edgar Neville Auditorium and will award Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, who will be accompanied by Henk Rogers, president of The Tetris Company, who will exclusively present his book 'The Perfect Game: Tetris: From Russia With Love' in Málaga.

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Alexey Pajitnov is a computer engineer and video game developer born in Moscow who created Tetris during his spare time while working as a programmer at the Soviet Academy's Computing Center. On a black-and-white screen with no graphical environment, everything was based on brackets that simulated the pieces, and the first testers were his own colleagues, who couldn't stop playing it. Tetris began to gain popularity in the former USSR and spread rapidly across all the countries of the Soviet bloc, moving from computer to computer. Versions of the game reached IBM, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Spectrum... However, this was all wrapped in a real legal battle with the Soviet state, which considered itself the owner of the game's rights when it wasn’t even clear at that time that a video game could have intellectual property rights. Mikhail Gorbachev himself, president of the Soviet Union, insisted on controlling the marketing of Tetris and on it being considered a communist achievement.

When Tetris was already a total success in the computer market, Dutch businessman Henk Rogers appeared. He discovered the video game at a Las Vegas fair in 1988. He traveled to Moscow with a tourist visa and negotiated with the Russian government and even with members of the KGB to secure the rights of Tetris for the emerging video console market. With Atari thinking they would acquire the popular video game, Rogers closed a deal with Nintendo. And Tetris was included in the new star product that the Japanese company was about to launch: the Game Boy. The handheld console was a true revolution worldwide, sold hundreds of millions of units, further popularized video games, and turned Tetris into a whole culture.