Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Human Tetris

Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov (Алексей Леонидович Пажитнов, born 1956) is a computer engineer from Russia now living in the United States, who developed the popular game Tetris while working for the Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a Soviet government-founded R&D centre. Pajitnov was to leave his mathematics school (#91) in Moscow. Pajitnov created Tetris with the help of Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov in 1985. The game, first available in the Soviet Union, appeared in the West in 1986. Pajitnov also created the lesser known sequel to Tetris, entitled Welltris, which has the same principle but in a three dimensional environment where you see the "board" from above. The Soviet bureaucracy licensed and managed Tetris, and advertised it with the slogan "From Russia with Love", Pajitnov did not receive royalties.