Ethical Issues

The Game Boy’s Flagship game Tetris was at the centre of a number of court cases, as previously mentioned the game was invented in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov who was working for the Computer Sciences Department at the Soviet Academy of Sciences which in 1986 they then loaded into the IBM PC first in in Hungary. The rights to the game were swiftly obtained by a company called Spectrum Holobyte who just beat a British company called Andromeda to the post. After failing to obtain the rights from Pajitnov, Andromeda gained them from the Hungarian IBM company. From this point it seemed that two spate companied owned the rights to the game, Andromeda apparently owned the rights to the home PC version and Spectrum Holobyte. The issues to the rights and who were the true owners got even more complicated by the time Nintendo came along and wanted to use it in their Game Boy and in 1989 more than a dozen different companies laid claim to the legal rights to the game.

Even after Tetris became as popular as it did and became a household name and gamers of all ages were engrossed by the game, Pajitnov saw very little in the way of royalties for his creation. In fact the Game Boy version sold over 33 million copies and Pajitnov did not receive a peny for them.

It was only in 1996 when the rights for the game reverted back to Pajitnov himself and he created the Tetris Company that he began to have some true financial income from the game.