alt Hacker NewsLooks like he developed the original on his employer's equipment during work hours.
And the copyright on tetris pieces is just ridiculous given the Colomb's publication and probably others.
I personally appreciated the write-up as it presents an alternative to the glossed up candy narrative that I have read and seen more than once.
Didn't know about Gerasimov either (who single-handedly coded up the DOS version it seems).
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Oh sure, I don’t necessarily disagree at all. I was mostly hoping for more detail in why - was the original court’s decision that the game’s production as work material or work hours wasn’t valid because it was in Soviet Union and that was either no longer in existence, or perhaps there was some other line of reasoning. I also think there’s been a tendency to create a bit of a narrative out of the whole situation, and I appreciate another view. I have heard of Gerasimov, you might like this short article (Edit: also linked below and quoted as I was typing this up, sorry) he wrote from I don’t remember how long ago, but I think I’ve read it before. For his part, he seems to feel here that pajitnov cut him out unfairly.
Gerasimov wrote his own account of the Tetris story here: https://vadim.oversigma.com/Tetris.htm
> Contrary to the claim attributed to Henk Rogers there were no "straightforward business arrangement" between Pajitnov and myself. In the Soviet Union, where private business was outlawed and the concept of intellectual property was not defined, people could not make private business arrangements of this kind. The Computer Center of Academy of Sciences owned everything we made. Several years later the situation in the Soviet Union changed, but this was a different story. When I worked on Tetris, even a government organization could not formally hire me because I was underage. I worked on Tetris just for fun. I don't remember Pajitnov ever paying me for anything related to Tetris either. Pajitnov started fixing the business aspects of the situation a few years later when he and Henk Rogers participated in negotiations with Elorg (the only government organization in the USSR that could sell software abroad). Pajitnov stopped by my home and asked me to urgently sign a paper "to get lots of money for us from game companies". He didn't leave me a copy of the paper. As far as I remember the paper was saying that I agree to only claim porting Tetris to the PC, agree to give Pajitnov the right to handle all business arrangements, and refuse any rewards related to Tetris. I did not entirely agree with the content, but I trusted Alexey and signed the paper anyway. In a few months my name disappeared from all newly released versions of Tetris and all Tetris-related documents. Alexey registered a US copyright (R/N PA-412-170) referencing the free PC version of Tetris (original version 3.12) we developed together.