But first, the fun part! For those unfamiliar, Tetris is a puzzle game of falling pieces. The goal is to arrange the geometric shapes as they fall so that they

fit into one another in a solid line and disappear before the colorful mountain of pieces gets too tall.

It sounds pretty simple in theory, but like a lot of games from the 1980s, things get hectic pretty quickly. One bad twist of a piece and you’ve royally screwed

yourself.

Especially as you progress through the levels and the pieces start to fall faster! You try to think two steps ahead but your eyes and hands can’t keep up. It’s

fun, but so damn stressful.

There have been several versions of Tetris released over the years and hella knockoffs, but it’s the PC and arcade versions from the ‘80s that the world fell in love

with and that changed the gaming world forever.

OK, now let’s rewind for a second and start at the beginning. 

Tetris was created in June of 1984 by a Russian researcher named Alexey Pajitnov while he was working for

the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Inspired by the mind game pentominoes, Pajitnov modified the pieces to have four squares instead of five, and came up with the name Tetris by

combining the Greek “tetra” (four) and tennis.

Very brief history lesson for context: The summer of 1984 fell during the Second Cold War. The USSR and its allies boycotted the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, and President

Reagan’s jokes about bombing the Soviets were leaked to the press, which had the USSR on high alert. 

It was a pretty tense time, and to say that international relations were tricky would be an understatement.

That’s the world that Tetris was born into, but it was never intended to be a global success and Pajitnov never dreamed it would become the best-selling game of all

time.

The game was a hit with his friends, but Pajitnov couldn’t sell it because he lived under the rule of a communist government. He instead gave it away for free.

“Back in those days of the Soviet Union, we didn’t have computer stores that you could visit to buy programs, so everything was copied and distributed via floppy disk,” he

told TIME in 2014. “I gave my friends copies of the game on a floppy, and before long, it seemed like everyone knew about it, and was playing it.”

The game spread across Europe and Asia and landed on the radar of Robert Stein, president of a British software company named Andromeda. Stein wanted to buy the rights to

Tetris, but instead of going to the government agency in charge of distribution, he found Pajitnov.

Stein offered Pajitnov and his employer £100,000 for the rights, then turned around and sold those rights to several companies to distribute the game in the United States, Japan, and

the UK. The problem is that Stein had never written Pajitnov a check, so the rights weren’t his to sell.

In 1989, Nintendo was meeting with the Russian company Elektronorgtechnica (Elorg) over international rights and a release of Tetris on Gameboy. What Russia learned was that the game was already

being sold for the NES on bogus distribution rights through Stein.

Henk Rogers, friend of Pajitnov and the man partially responsible for making Tetris is a major smash, spoke with TIME about his role in making the Nintendo x Tetris

deal happen.

Having played Tetris at a Consumer Electronics Show, Rogers got the President of Nintendo to take a chance on it. Later with the launch of the Game Boy, Rogers saw

an opportunity for something big.

“After Nintendo released Game Boy in Japan I realized that this was the best platform for Tetris. NCL (Nintendo Company Limited) had no policy of including games with the hardware,

but NOA (Nintendo of America) did,” said Rogers. He met with NOA CEO Minoru Arakawa and convinced him that the way to get boys to buy the new handheld console

was to include Tetris with every unit.

“I secured the rights to handhelds by going to Moscow (at that time the Soviet Union) and tracking down Elektronorgtechnika (Elorg) in 1989 and negotiating with them an exclusive license

for those rights,” Rogers explained. “A month later I was back, this time with Minoru Arakawa and Howard Lincoln [of Nintendo] to secure the console rights for them.”

Over the years, the legal battles between gaming companies and rights holders got really complicated. Distinctions were made regarding what  “computer games” were and who could profit from their sale,

Nintendo got exclusive rights to console version, and others fought for their slice of the Tetris pie.

Robert Stein’s contract meant he couldn’t profit from home console and arcade sales because they didn't fit the definition. Nintendo made bank by including Tetris with every Game Boy sold,

Atari got screwed, and Pajitnov was still left in the cold for years.

In the mid 1990s, the agency that handled distribution rights in Russia dissolved, and the man who orchestrated the Game Boy deal had the rights transferred to Pajitnov. Together they

created The Tetris Company, which still licenses the brand worldwide.

You can now buy various Tetris-themed products, from lapel pins and t-shirts, to card games and tote bags. At least

the guy who gave us the game is finally getting paid.