32th anniversary of "Tetris", behind which there was a muddent play about licensing

A game developed in the former Soviet Union in 1984Tetris"Celebrated its 32nd birth on June 6, 2016. Tetris is now well known as it is known all over the world, but there have been brawls of muddy bodies of companies over complicated licenses.

Tetris: the remarkable, weird story behind the game | Den of Geek
http://www.denofgeek.com/games/tetris/30840/10-remarkable-things-about-tetris

It was Russian game developer Alexei Pasitnov who developed "Tetris", a world famous puzzle game. In 1984 the former Soviet Union was in the cold war situation, it was illegal to conduct a private business in the country. Mr. Pazitonov seems to have been uneasy about conducting commercial deployment with Tetris under development, but he has advanced development with his colleagues working at the Soviet Socialist Republic Federal Academy of Sciences (present Russian Academy of Sciences) and finally Complete the PC version of Tetris.


In 1985, Mr. Pazitonov said he had played secretly the PC version of Tetris for his friends, but Tetris is smuggled to Hungary afterwards, and it gets explosive popularity throughout Europe.

Because private business was forbidden, the copyright of Tetris was owned by the former Soviet Union and transferred to the Foreign Trade Association (ELORG) of the public institution. Mirrorsoft in the United Kingdom will sell the first version of Tetris in 1987, but the company Andromeda, which Mirrorsoft purchased a license, owned the Foreign Trade Association (ELORG) and Mr. Pazitonov 's consent It seems that it was an invalid license which did not get.

After Mirrorsoft sold Tetris, ELORG investigated the license, it turned out that the license owned by Andromeda was invalid, and the company forcedly entered into a license agreement with ELORG. After that, game company Atari acquired licenses from Mirrorsoft which sold Tetris, began to develop and sell Tetris for arcade and home game machines.


When Tetris' licensing problem occurred in England, Mr. Genk Rogers, a broker who signed a contract with Nintendo planning to sell Tetris for Game Boy, talks directly with ELORG to Moscow to negotiate licenses I came. The negotiations advanced in a very tense mood for the cold war, but Mr. Rogers got an exclusive license for superb home video game machines. In response to this, Tetris for Game Boy was released in 1989 from Nintendo.


By Nintendo releasing Tetris, Atari and its subsidiary Tengen sued Nintendo (Nintendo of America) for copyright infringement, but Atari's license obtained from Mirrorsoft is considered to be for PC games and lost . In addition, Atari is ruled that it does not have the right to manufacture and sell Tetris, and Tetris, which had already been sold, will be discontinued. Also, in response to the tilt of this, the license of Sega which had been licensed from Tengen was invalidated, and the situation occurred that the sale of Tetris for mega drive which had been finished was suddenly canceled.


Then Tetris was licensed to various game production companies, it came to be played by people all over the world, not only on Nintendo's platform but also on PlayStation, Xbox and even mobile phones. However, it is said that Atari's Tetris, which has been discontinued in production and release, is only 100,000 pieces in the world, and it seems to be a rare item among collectors.