Inventory Tetris

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

In 1987, Andromeda Software executive Robert Stein approached Alexey Pajitnov with an offer to distribute Tetris worldwide, and secured the rights to license the game. He sub-licensed the rights to Mirrorsoft for Europe and Spectrum HoloByte for North America. Programmer Ed Logg petitioned Atari Games to license it for an arcade version, and approached Stein. Atari Games produced an arcade version, and under its Tengen subsidiary began to remake it for the NES in June 1988. It was released in May 1989. Mirrorsoft later sub-licensed the rights to Henk Rogers of Bullet-Proof Software to distribute Tetris in Japan. Bullet-Proof Software gave Nintendo a proposal of developing Tetris for the Game Boy, and Rogers traveled to Moscow to secure permission. Because Stein had secured the rights from Pajitnov directly and not from the Soviet authorities, the Ministry of Software and Hardware Export stated that the console rights remained unlicensed, and that Atari Games had only an arcade license. In April 1989, Tengen sued Nintendo claiming rights to distribute Tetris on the NES, and Nintendo counter-sued. In June 1989, U.S. District Court Judge Fern Smith issued an injunction barring Tengen from further distributing the game, and ordered all existing copies destroyed. As a result, approximately 100,000 to 150,000 Tetris cartridges were recalled and destroyed after only four weeks at retail. The Tengen cover has an airbrush painting by Marc Ericksen featuring St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square, Moscow, with a falling stone concept. Ed Logg said the Tengen version was built from scratch, using no source code or assets from the original. Tengen president Randy Broweleit requested that the black-and-white pieces be colorized, and Logg complied.

In Their Own Story

Production difficulties at Astec in Malaysia delayed the machine's introduction, forcing Acorn to look to other manufacturers such as AB Electronics in Wales and Wongs in Hong Kong (an original equipment manufacturer making over 30 million circuit boards a year, along with power supplies and plastic housings, for companies such as IBM, Xerox, Atari, and Apple, including units made for Acorn for the BBC Micro). By the time the Electron was launched at the Acorn User Exhibition in August 1983, the company expected to ship before Christmas and sell 100,000 by February 1984. The price at launch – £199 – remained unchanged from that stated in an announcement earlier in the year.

Reader's Guide

Players must stack differently shaped falling blocks to form and eliminate horizontal lines from the playing field. It has several difficulty levels and two-player simultaneous play. The two-player mode replaces the statistics display with another playfield. There is also a mode where two players (possibly one player and the computer) attempt to form lines in the same playing field, which is wider than usual.

Did You Know?

• The Tengen version of Tetris for the NES was at retail for only four weeks, with approximately 50,000 to 100,000 copies sold, until Atari was legally required to recall and destroy any remaining inventory.
• Various publications have described Tengen's version as superior in some ways to Nintendo's official NES release, especially for its two-player simultaneous mode.
• Ed Logg stated the Nintendo version for the NES 'wasn't tuned right' due to a lack of logarithmic speed adjustment, yielding overly steep increases in difficulty.
• The Tengen release has since become a collector's item due to its scarcity.