<i>>Ironically, Tetris’s success began because the totalitarian Soviet regime did not recognize what we take for granted in the West: the freedom to publish. After Pajitnov adapted Golomb’s geometric discoveries for the nascent digital world, he had no choice but to distribute his game as a samizdat</i><p>Samizdat very specifically refers to <i>censored</i> texts. Yeah sure various versions of Tetris informally circulated around on floppies/tapes just like all other games and software, but that's not samizdat and had nothing to do with freedom to publish or censorship, there just weren't many viable ways to distribute the software to private users (and not many of those to begin with). It was way too long ago and I don't remember if any Soviet magazines like <i>Radio</i> had actual listings, but Tetris was a popular game in them.
<i>did not make it fast enough</i><p>The parent comment already removed the part about vinyl recordings, but I still really want to point out that people in the USSR had to be creative (have to be even now) to bypass censorship.<p>This created things like roentgenizdat or "ribs" (gramophone recordings made from polyester X-ray films)<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribs_(recordings)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribs_(recordings)</a>
Yeah I edited it out because it had a different name, and more importantly there were totally different circles of people. It wasn't a single underground community or something like that. Later on there were VHS clubs ("video salons"), completely different people again. Some describe all that as samizdat but it really wasn't. Article's mention of Solzhenitsyn in the same sentence with Pajitnov makes little sense.
> What’s more, it had been designed and coded in a state artificial-intelligence research lab tightly controlled by the KGB<p>Hmm, according to Wikipedia this happened in the Computational Centre for the USSR Science Academy. As far as I know it was never a "closed" institute, so the article is over dramatising it at least.
A sort of oddly opinionated article despite having little citation to it and being rather vague on events and timelines compared to some other pieces out there. I’d love to know why for example, the author finds it so clear that Pajitnov should not have won a copyright. I don’t have any stake in it myself, the claim just isn’t supported in the article. I think this is the 4th or 5th retelling of this story I’ve come across now.
> A major instrument of that victory had been the spread of Western culture<p>That's the political fluff. The important thing was the spread of capitalism and its accompanying legal institutions such as trademark and copyright - which Tetris definitely represented.
> the Trump administration released a politically charged clone of Tetris called Build the Wall.<p>Knowing that the principle of Tetris is to destroy the walls that form when the shapes land, I start to wonder what was the winning condition of this version