The Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris

> What’s more, it had been designed and coded in a state artificial-intelligence research lab tightly controlled by the KGB

Hmm, according to Wikipedia this happened in the Computational Centre for the USSR Science Academy. As far as I know it was never a "closed" institute, so the article is over dramatising it at least.

A sort of oddly opinionated article despite having little citation to it and being rather vague on events and timelines compared to some other pieces out there. I’d love to know why for example, the author finds it so clear that Pajitnov should not have won a copyright. I don’t have any stake in it myself, the claim just isn’t supported in the article. I think this is the 4th or 5th retelling of this story I’ve come across now.

>Ironically, Tetris’s success began because the totalitarian Soviet regime did not recognize what we take for granted in the West: the freedom to publish. After Pajitnov adapted Golomb’s geometric discoveries for the nascent digital world, he had no choice but to distribute his game as a samizdat

Samizdat very specifically refers to censored texts. Yeah sure various versions of Tetris informally circulated around on floppies/tapes just like all other games and software, but that's not samizdat and had nothing to do with freedom to publish or censorship, there just weren't many viable ways to distribute the software to private users (and not many of those to begin with). It was way too long ago and I don't remember if any Soviet magazines like Radio had actual listings, but Tetris was a popular game in them.