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The Gaming Historian has an excellent video on the history of Tetris. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fQtxKmgJC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fQtxKmgJC8

• gxqoz 7y ago
  Another excellent source is this 8-part series in The Digital Antiquarian. https://www.filfre.net/2017/06/tales-of-the-mirror-world-part-1-calculators-and-cybernetics/ https://www.filfre.net/2017/06/tales-of-the-mirror-world-par... Basically like a short book on the context of Soviet computing, how Tetris got to the West, how Nintendo got the rights, what happened afterwards. It's an excellent read. With all the shady deals and fun period details I almost feel this would make a great movie.
  • gxqoz 7y ago
    By the way, here's just one great quote from that series: "Yet Stein found the game to be a harder sell than he’d anticipated. For all that everyone who sat down to play it seemed to have difficulty standing up again, Tetris was just so different from anything else that marketing departments didn’t know quite what to do with it. It was all just so abstract. There was no obvious hook: no starring character, no story line, no explosions. What would they put on the box? Even Brøderbund, home of The Print Shop and Carmen Sandiego, whose instinct for selling software to Middle America was normally unparalleled, took a pass, despite the Tetris Effect taking place right there in their offices. “I don’t think Brøderbund is going to publish it,” wrote Mechner in disgust. “The knaves.” A Brøderbund executive, seeing his programming staff so consumed by the game, had allegedly called it “a game only programmers could like.”"