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In the late 80s, I started seeing Tetris in computer stores. Created by Russian engineer Alexey Pajitnov while in the employ of the Soviet state agency Elektronorgtechnica (ELORG), the first version of Tetris to hit the US was published by Spectrum Holobyte for the Mac, under license from ELORG. As such, Pajitnov never saw a penny of royalties, these going straight to the Soviet government (he finally gained legal rights, and therefore royalties, to his creation in 1995, after the USSR collapsed and Pajitnov himself had moved to the United States.) A rather bare-bones version of the game, it nevertheless set the standard for the series going forward, including copious Russian imagery and music. It was kind of interesting seeing this blatanty Russian game in computer stores, it being five years since the infamous Able Archer 83 incident and two years since Gorbachev instituted the glasnost policy. 

The game was, nevertheless, a phenomenon due to its simple, yet intricate and addicting design. And while knockoffs sprung up everywhere, companies began jockeying for the lucrative console and arcade rights to the game.  After seeing Tetris running on the Atari ST, longtime Atari engineer Ed Logg convinced his bosses at Atari Games to license Tetris from its official Western representative.

Logg's arcade version was the first version of Tetris I ever played, and was the basis for one of the most contested rarities in gaming. The Atari version was written as "TET?IS," which does not actually mean anything in Russian. It would be pronounced something like "Tetyiaz" by a Russian speaker. Atari just used it to replace every "R" in the game so it would have some cool "Cyrillic" text. Logg added a two-player head-to-head mode and a number of other game modes for the Atari version of Tetris. It didn't have the Russian panoramas shown in Spectrum Holobyte's computer version, instead choosing to prominently display the onion domes of St. Basil's Cathedral, Russia's most famous landmark that is erroneously thought of as the Kremlin by a lot of Americans. 

In1988, Atari developed a NES verson of Tetris, based very closely on the arcade version, to be sold through its subsidiary, Tengen. To tthis day, there is debate over which NES Tetris is better, Nintendo's official version, or Tengen's. Nintendo's version is generally considered to have better visual design compared to Tengen's rather austere presentation, though Tengen has solid blocks that hold their shape until removed from the board, and frequent animations of Russian dancers similar to the arcade version. Tengen's version also has a feature Nintendo's version didn't: the Tengen version kept the head-to-head simultaneous two-player mode, where Nintendo's version was strictly single player. Head-to-head play would become a defining feature of the Game Boy version of Tetris, which was meant to show off the Game Link cable. Tengen's version also had a gentler difficulty curve and could theoretically be played forever, while Nintendo's version got too fast for anyone to play after level 30 or so. Ed Logg claimed Nintendo's version was not as well-tuned as Tengen's version.

One thing I liked about Atari and Tengen's Tetris was the music. Arcade Tetris had four distinctive tracks which are generally not heard in other versions of Tetris, and Tengen's home version rendered these tracks pretty faithfully on the NES sound hardware. I wish modern versions of Tetris would consider using these tracks, as they're better than a lot of the "official" Tetris music out there, but as two of the main four tracks were original compositions by Atari composer Brad Fuller in imitation of Russian folk music (NES/GB Tetris's Type-B music was similarly an original composition by Nintendo maestro Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka), there would probably be more copyright problems involved in what has already been a messy IP.

"Loginska" was composed by Fuller, and incorporates the name of Ed Logg.

"Bradinsky" was also an original composition by Brad Fuller. Guess how it got its name...

"Kalinka" was originally composed in 1860 by Ivan Larionov. As an authentic Russian composition, it has appeared in some Tetris games since.

"Troika" is a traditional Russian folk song. Fun fact: the famous "Korobeiniki" (Type-A) theme from the Game Boy version is actually a combination of parts of "Korobeiniki" (which is now trademarked by The Tetris Company) and parts of "Troika."

Two things doomed the Tengen version of Tetris. Tengen, a subsidiary of Atari Games, was notorious in the late 80s for their efforts to circumvent Nintendo's lockout chip so they could publish whatever games they wanted as often as they wanted, using cartridge media sourced from companies other than Nintendo itself. They also published NES games for Namco and Sega, two other companies that also had grudges against Nintendo and didn't want to feed cash into Nintendo's coffers when they could avoid doing so. They had at first considered including a mechanism in their cartridges that would fry the 10NES lockout chip (the real basis for the Nintendo Seal of Quality), but wisely decided that potentially bricking millions of NES systems if something went wrong would have the entire United States howling for their blood, not to mention every penny they had. Instead, they somehow obtained Nintendo's patents for the NES lockout chip from the U.S. Patent Office and started making their own games, constantly under threat of legal action from Nintendo, in distinctive black cartridges that looked more like Atari cartridges than Nintendo Game Paks. So that already had Tengen's Tetris on Nintendo's radar.

Atari also mistakenly assumed that when they got the rights to the arcade version of Tetris from the Soviet government, that meant they could make home console versions. The company which had been the original Western licensor for Tetris who had granted arcade rights to Atari had not paid what it agreed to ELORG, so ELORG pulled the agreement and signed an agreement with Nintendo instead that gave Nintendo exclusive console rights. Atari and Nintendo went to court, Nintendo won, and 260,000 copies of Tengen Tetris were recalled and destroyed under court order. 100,000 copies had been sold before the gavel dropped. The surviving copies are one of the great rarities of the game-collecting world, fetching high prices on eBay and in used game shops.

So that's some of the unexpectedly messy legal drama surrounding the world's most successful computer game save perhaps for Minecraft. Today, Pajitnov and Henk Rodgers have a firm grasp on all things Tetris from their Las Vegas headquarters. It's always kind of interesting to see some of the backdoor shenanigans from the earliest days of gaming, though.