Tetris has turned twenty on Wednesday. The highly addictive game developed by the Russians - Alexey Pajitnov and Vadim Gerassimov became a major hit when it was released.

Pajitnov's idea was a simple adaptation of a board game called Pentamino. The 29 year-old programmer made the first prototype from a glass and little blocks to drop inside it, each of which consisted of four cubes. You got extra points for completing a row.

Pajitnov's friend, Gerassimov, was sixteen at the time, and did the programming to allow the game to run on western IBM computers. The blocks hit the fan after that.

Copies of the game spread like bird flu in a poorly ventilated aviary. By the end of the 1980s, no less than six different companies claimed to own the rights to Tetris, although none of them did.

But Pajitnov and Gerassimov have moved on. Today, both of them live in the U.S. and develop video games.

Sources:
The Inquirer and the Gaming Blog.