Alexey Pajitnov, the architect of the falling-and-rotating-block puzzle game Tetris, is one of the industry’s most illustrious designers. The calming and chaotic formula he developed as a computer engineer in the Soviet Union has resulted in dozens of variants — Tetris Plus, Tetris Worlds, Tetris Effect, Tetris 99 — and more than 520 million sales.
But Pajitnov, 69, is not that interested in talking about that legacy. He prefers conversations about his canceled and ignored games, the past designs that now make him cringe, and the reality that his life’s signature achievement probably came decades ago.
“I don’t like to talk about success,” he said, “because everybody else does.”
Pajitnov’s contributions are a key component of Tetris Forever, a new game that also serves as a documentary and an interactive museum. Players can watch interviews with Pajitnov and Henk Rogers, his longtime business partner; review artifacts from Tetris’s development; and sample more than a dozen versions of the game, starting with a facsimile of the 1984 original as coded on a Soviet-era computer. It also documents the convoluted commercial release of the game beyond the Iron Curtain.
In Tetris Forever, Pajitnov acts like a guest star fulfilling his duties, equal parts smiling and stoic. But in a recent discussion near his home in Bellevue, Wash., he opened up on life beyond Tetris, including his nine-year tenure at Microsoft and his aspiration to release another hit some day.
Pajitnov said that even if his current design experiments never take off, he is happy to be doing them his own way.
“I decided that I will do the game myself,” he said about one unreleased project. “Me, myself, enjoyed it a lot. And I don’t care whether the other people will like it or not.”
As a child, Pajitnov gravitated toward card and board games like Russian bridge and Nim, and loved collections of puzzles and riddles available in Soviet libraries. In high school, books by the mathematicians Martin Gardner and Henry Dudeney were life-changing discoveries.
Tetris Forever chronicles the confluence of mathematical study, computer science and puzzle design that resulted in Tetris. A beloved math book (“Polyominoes: Puzzles, Patterns, Problems and Packings”) and a related wooden-block puzzle stayed with Pajitnov during his Soviet computing career, where he adapted the physical puzzle to work on a screen. The result had the same infinitely challenging quality of assembling his wooden blocks.
“I love a strong feeling of pleasure for accomplishment,” Pajitnov said. “I love to solve the puzzle. I like the beauty of it.”
Even so, Pajitnov was rankled by how journalists framed the news that a 13-year-old boy had crashed the Nintendo Entertainment System version of the game with a score of 999999. He said that the accomplishment was “wonderful and I support it” but that it was only possible because of software limitations.
“You can’t beat Tetris,” he said.
Pajitnov is not sure exactly how many non-Tetris games he has worked on since emigrating to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union. Many of them originated during his career at Microsoft, which he began in 1996 after dissolving a software company during an economic downturn.
He said he did not apply to Microsoft by simply trotting out his Tetris credentials: “I was kind of stupid Soviet person, but I wasn’t that stupid.” Rather, Pajitnov noticed that its MSN website was emerging as an early online portal and pitched a series of visual click-and-drag puzzles called Mind Aerobics. They acted like a games section in a newspaper.
He eventually assembled an internal team to remix the puzzle types, create new ones and attach a globe-trotting theme for the 1999 game Pandora’s Box. Microsoft released other games by Pajitnov, including the match-three puzzle series Hexic, but the company rarely used his name for marketing.
“I didn’t care,” Pajitnov said. “I’m very famous with Tetris. I didn’t need anything else.”
Pajitnov can be critical when looking back at the games he created at Microsoft. “I probably do my usual mistake overcomplicating the title,” he said of Pandora’s Box. “So everything is too hard for people to digest.” But he otherwise defends his game’s originality and creativity: “The title was very good.”
He added that Hexic looked “so kind of abstract, overcomplicated and whatever that I can’t play it myself for more than 10 to 15 minutes.”
As Microsoft’s gaming division shifted to the console market, starting with the Xbox in 2001, Pajitnov grew disillusioned. “It was very wrong company to start a new platform,” he said. “If I could imagine something more wrong, I would be very surprised.”
Pajitnov said four or five games he worked on were canceled, including a semi-sequel to Mind Aerobics that he said had a Universal Studios film property attached.
Microsoft was “an absolutely perfect organization” in terms of its approach to large-scale programming, Pajitnov said. But he thought it took the company too long to figure out an ideal audience for the Xbox. “Very kind of rocket-science-oriented people,” he said, “and they so don’t care about the public, the audience and the gaming.” (Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment about Pajitnov’s assessments.)
Pajitnov decided in 2005 to semi-retire, with the intent of writing poems and reading books while participating in major decisions with the Tetris Company. He still aspires to release a title he began developing at Microsoft that involves “playing with exotic blocks in some kind of shape, and interesting tasks inside.”
His description is richer through the lens of failure: “Every time I show it to somebody, they say, ‘Wonderful, beautiful, excellent, but too complicated.’”
Reaching the heights of a global hit like Tetris is improbable for anyone, even the creator of Tetris. But that has not stopped Pajitnov from trying.
He has spent nearly 20 years designing and producing free-to-play smartphone games with a small Russian studio called WildSnake Software. Some have glimmers of brilliance but are brutally difficult, like the color-matching tap-to-clear Dwice. Others feel less original, like a pair of games that borrow mechanics from the touch-screen puzzler 2048. All of them have modest production values.
When asked why his WildSnake games have not seemed to capture an audience, Pajitnov said that marketing was not his strength. He has collaborated with Rogers, the president of the Tetris Company, for decades but does not seek his advice on other games.
Pajitnov said what interests him about a game — “this kind of really sharp mind stuff, kind of more mathematical and abstract solution” — does not interest Rogers as much. They often do not agree on what projects are worth pursuing.
Rogers used a mid-1990s example to explain their creative divergence. Pajitnov had built a Tetris alternative whose playfield extended across a cylinder, meaning that players could not see all of the pieces. Rogers considered that untenable and recalls telling Pajitnov, “OK, go and build it, but don’t get me involved in that, because I already know that it’s not going to sell.”
Rogers said he had to stay focused on Tetris while Pajitnov came up with new games.
“Alexey had his own musical career where he wanted to do some solo albums, and he did that at Microsoft,” Rogers said. “That was his way of, how can I say, releasing his creative juice.”
The history told in Tetris Forever, which will be released on major consoles and the PC this week, is comprehensive even if the games in the collection are not. (Versions published by Nintendo for the N.E.S. and Game Boy are glaring omissions.) A new variant sends players time-traveling to older games where the mechanics worked differently.
Pajitnov accepts the marketing responsibility that comes with creating something so popular, gesturing to the “TETRIS” license plate he has transferred from car to car since moving to the United States. He still reads fan mail from all over the world. “It’s my job and my mission,” he said. “Tetris is my kid, and I take care of my kids.”
But his passion is toying with new puzzles, mathematical proofs and games. Tetris allows him to fail comfortably. Attaching the established brand to a new game is always a safe bet.
“Maybe not great pleasure,” he said, “but at least guaranteed pleasure.”
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