Tangled in Tetris

 Where you left feeling bamboozled after watching the film Tetris that was released on 31 March 2023? 

Or did it just make you reminisce playing the game on your Nintendo Game Boy many moons ago?  Let us break down what happened for you.

For most of us when we think about Tetris, we think of a highly addictive game that will pull you through any long-haul flight. What a lot of us don’t know about is the legal battle over the ownership rights for one of the most popular video games of all time… its baffling and fascinating!

Let’s begin with Henk Rogers who is a Dutch Indonesian video game designer and faced many challenges in bringing Tetris to the West and securing the rights to the game. Rogers was successful in securing the rights to Tetris in Japan but faced challenges in securing the rights in other countries… a common problem for businesses that operate in multiple jurisdictions.

Securing the rights is one thing, but what specifically have you secured? Intellectual Property is made up of many different types, for example: Copyright, Trademark, and Patent Law…, to name a few.

Then you need to consider…what’s the point of securing these rights? The point is to prevent those rights being exploited by infringers. You must be prepared to take legal action to enforce those rights because otherwise what was the point in protecting them in the first place?

This is exactly what Rogers was trying to achieve.

The first prototype of Tetris was created in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, a researcher at the Soviet Academy of Science’s computer centre. Pajitnov soon became addicted to his own creation and after showing Tetris to his colleagues the game quickly spread through Moscow and the addiction became so widespread that the Moscow Medical Institute banned the game due to decreasing productivity…but anyways back to the legal issues.

Tetris soon made its way to Hungary where it caught the attention of Robert Stein of Andromeda Software. Stein contacted Pajitnov making a cash offer to get the license to sell the game and upon acceptance, Pajitnov relinquished the rights to Tetris to the Soviet Academy for 10 years. As Tetris was created in the Soviet Union, Tetris was technically property of the USSR.

Stein then sold licensing rights to Mirrorsoft and Spectrum Holobyte, both of which were divisions of Maxwell Communications, one of the largest publishing companies in the UK. But the USSR caught wind of this and contacted Stein claiming that Pajitnov had no authority to give licensing rights and demanded that all future negotiations must be done through the USSR.

This is when the licensing web began to spin and a flurry of sublicensing spokes made the licensing rights over Tetris a sticky mess.

In the background, Nintendo were getting ready to release their first handheld console…the Game Boy. Rogers believed that Tetris would be the ideal game for the Game Boy and that’s when his voyage to securing hand-held rights over Tetris began.

After a long and gruelling battle in Moscow, Rogers eventually secured the handheld rights over Tetris and set up the Tetris Company with Pajitnov; this is when Pajitnov finally received royalties for his own creation.

The takeaway here is that protecting intellectual property rights in a globalized marketplace can be extremely challenging, so don’t underestimate them and don’t leave it to chance, get protected and get legal advice.