3 ms·

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-cyber

• gxqoz 6y 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.”"