Tetris was the very first entertainment software to be imported by the United States from the USSR. In 1987, three years after it’s launch in the Soviet Union, the game was released in the United States by Spectrum Holobyte for the IBM PC and Commodore 64, the largest selling computer of all time.
Tetris was developed by Alexey Pajitnov, a Russian computer programmer, when he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science. One of his responsibilities was testing the capabilities of new hardware. And for this, Pajitnov came up with the idea of designing a game.
Since he was working on the Electronika 60, a text-only terminal, the original Tetris game had letters instead of graphics. The game proved to be a hit with his colleagues and soon became popular in the Soviet Union. Tetris then found its way to Budapest, Hungary, and was picked up by Spectrum Holobyte who developed a version of it and started to market it in the United States.
