Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov was born on April 16, 1955. He is a Russian and American computer engineer and video game designer. He is most famous for creating, designing, and developing Tetris in 1985 while working at a research center in the Soviet Union (now part of the Russian Academy of Sciences).

In 1991, he moved to the United States and later became a U.S. citizen. In 1996, Pajitnov started The Tetris Company with Henk Rogers, a Dutch video game designer. Before this, Pajitnov did not receive money from Tetris sales because the Soviet Union ended in 1991.

Early life

Pajitnov was born on April 16, 1955, in Moscow, Russia. His parents were both writers. His father worked as an art critic, and his mother was a journalist who wrote for newspapers and a film magazine. Through his parents, Pajitnov learned about the arts and later became interested in movies. He often went with his mother to watch films, including events at the Moscow Film Festival. Pajitnov also enjoyed solving math problems and puzzles.

In 1967, when Pajitnov was 11 years old, his parents separated. For several years, he lived with his mother in a small apartment owned by the government. When he was 17, the two moved into a private apartment at 49 Gertsen Street. Later, he studied applied mathematics at the Moscow Aviation Institute.

Career

In 1977, Pajitnov worked as a summer intern at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. After graduating in 1979, he began working at the academy’s Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre, where he studied speech recognition. When the centre received new equipment, researchers often wrote small programs to test its abilities. Pajitnov said this gave him a reason to create games. He found computer games interesting because they connected logic and emotion. He was interested in math, puzzles, and the psychology of computing.

Looking for ideas, Pajitnov remembered playing pentominoes as a child, a game where players use shaped pieces to create pictures. He recalled the challenge of putting the pieces back into their box and decided to make a game based on that idea. Using an Electronika 60 computer at the Computing Centre, he started creating what became the first version of Tetris. He finished the first prototype in two weeks but spent more time testing and improving it. He completed the game on June 6, 1985. This early version had no levels or scoring system, but Pajitnov knew it had potential because he could not stop playing it at work.

Coworkers, like programmer Dmitri Pevlovsky, helped Pajitnov connect with Vadim Gerasimov, a 16-year-old intern at the Soviet Academy. Pajitnov wanted to make a color version of Tetris for the IBM Personal Computer and asked Gerasimov for help. Gerasimov created the PC version in less than three weeks. With help from Pevlovsky, they added features like scorekeeping and sound effects over the next month. The game was first released in the Soviet Union and later sold internationally by Mirrorsoft and Spectrum Holobyte in 1988.

Pajitnov later created a sequel called Welltris, which used the same rules as Tetris but in a 3D environment where players viewed the game from above.

Tetris was managed by the Soviet company ELORG, which controlled all computer hardware and software imports and exports in the Soviet Union. ELORG used the slogan "From Russia with Love" (on NES: "From Russia with Fun!"). Because Pajitnov worked at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, he did not receive money from Tetris sales.

After the Soviet Union ended in 1991, Pajitnov and Vladimir Pokhilko moved to the United States. In 1996, Pajitnov and Henk Rogers founded The Tetris Company. This allowed him to finally collect money from Tetris sales after the rights returned to him in 1995 or 1996. He helped design puzzles for the Super NES version of Yoshi’s Cookie and created the game Pandora’s Box, which used traditional jigsaw-style puzzles. Pajitnov and Pokhilko also started AnimaTek, a 3D software company that made the game/screensaver El-Fish.

From 1996 to 2005, Pajitnov worked at Microsoft. He helped develop the Microsoft Entertainment Pack: The Puzzle Collection, MSN Mind Aerobics, and MSN Games. His improved version of Hexic, called Hexic HD, was included with every new Xbox 360 Premium package.

In August 2005, WildSnake Software announced that Pajitnov would work with them to create a new line of puzzle games.

Personal life

Pajitnov moved to the United States in 1991, became a U.S. citizen, and now lives in Clyde Hill, Washington. He and his wife, Nina, have two sons named Pyotr and Dmitry (November 4, 1986 – July 3, 2017). Dmitry died in a skiing accident on Mount Rainier in 2017.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Pajitnov said the war was wrong. He believed that Putin and his government would fall, and that peace would return to Ukraine and, hopefully, to Russia.

Awards and recognition

In 1996, GameSpot listed him as the fourth most important computer game developer ever. In March 2007, he won the Game Developers Choice Awards First Penguin Award. This award was for helping to start the casual games market.

In June 2009, he received a special award at the LARA – Der Deutsche Games Award in Cologne, Germany. In 2012, IGN added Pajitnov to their list of 5 Memorable Video Game Industry One-Hit Wonders, calling him "the ultimate video game one-hit wonder." In 2015, Pajitnov won the Bizkaia Award at the Fun & Serious Game Festival.

In the 2023 movie Tetris, Russian actor Nikita Yefremov played Pajitnov. The movie is a story based on real events about the licensing bidding war for Tetris in the late 1980s.