Gaming Historian
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2022–2023
59:31 · 4.9M views · Feb 2, 2018
Gaming Historian recounts how Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris in the Soviet Union and how a fight over publishing rights spanned the West, Mirrorsoft, Nintendo and the Cold War. It runs about an hour with chaptered parts.
HN recommends it as an excellent documentary on Tetris and its tangled licensing history.
4 comments from Hacker News
This is what capitalism is: intermediation, rent-seeking and creating a regulatory moat around a monopoly. Some time ago I watched this excellent video on the history of Tetris [1]. The only "innovation" of capitalism in this entire story are layers of licensing agreements. Again: intermediation, rent-seeking and regulatory moats (through intellectual property). A domain is nothing more than a digital record. The cost of providing that service is essentially zero. The cost should be pretty much zero. You'd have to do something about squatting but, hey, that's already an unaddressed problem. [1]: this video
[1] is an excellent and fascinating documentary on the history of Tetris, how it came about and the different business struggles in the West to license the game, which was challenging given that it originated in the USSR [1] this video
The creator, Alexey Pajitnov, was eventually able to see some money from his creation after emigrating to the US and cofounding The Tetris Company. The Gaming Historian channel has a great documentary video on it here: this video
A lot of the story regarding the Tetris split between Nintendo and Tengen is covered in the great Gaming Historian video [The Story of Tetris]( this video ).