After the Triumph of Tetris, an Unsolved Puzzle

Alexey Pajitnov, the architect of the falling-and-rotating-block puzzle game Tetris, is one of the industry’s most illustrious designers.The calming and chaotic formula he developed as a computer engineer in the Soviet Union has resulted in dozens of variants — Tetris Plus, Tetris Worlds, Tetris Effect, Tetris 99 — and more than 520 million sales.But Pajitnov, 69, is not that interested in talking about that legacy.

He prefers conversations about his canceled and ignored games, the past designs that now make him cringe, and the reality that his life’s signature achievement probably came decades ago.“I don’t like to talk about success,” he said, “because everybody else does.”Pajitnov’s contributions are a key component of Tetris Forever, a new game that also serves as a documentary and an interactive museum.Players can watch interviews with Pajitnov and Henk Rogers, his longtime business partner; review artifacts from Tetris’s development; and sample more than a dozen versions of the game, starting with a facsimile of the 1984 original as coded on a Soviet-era computer.

It also documents the convoluted commercial release of the game beyond the Iron Curtain.In Tetris Forever, Pajitnov acts like a guest star fulfilling his duties, equal parts smiling and stoic.But in a recent discussion near his home in Bellevue, Wash., he opened up on life beyond Tetris, including his nine-year tenure at Microsoft and his aspiration to release another hit some day.Pajitnov said that even if his current design experiments never take off, he is happy to be doing them his own way.“I decided that I will do the game myself,” he said about one unreleased project.

“Me, myself, enjoyed it a lot.And I don’t care whether the other people will like it or not.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

If you are in Reader mode please exit and log in...