Mailland, Julien. Soviet Blocks. The MIT Press. 2026. ISBN13: 978-0-262-05458-4. $35.00. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262054584/soviet-blocks/
I worked in the academic computing labs at Syracuse University from 1986-1990. My job consisted of checking out floppy disks in exchange for the borrower’s student ID card (WordPerfect, XYWrite, and Excel were popular), adding paper or toner to the few laser printers we had, and changing a lot of ribbons on the dot matrix printers.
Then, in 1987, Tetris arrived.
As Julien Mailland notes in Soviet Blocks, published by The MIT Press, Tetris snuck past the Iron Curtain via Hungary and changed gaming in the West immediately. I don’t remember my high score—it wasn’t very impressive—but several of my fellow lab rats had to take Tetris off their personal computers to avoid flunking out. The game’s deceptively simple controls and random shape generation made Tetris easy to play and quite addictive. This game, developed in a government research lab in the Soviet Union, irrevocably changed the character of casual gameplay.
Many authors have written or filmed popular histories of Tetris, though Mailland approvingly notes Jaroslav Švelch’s characterization of those works as “descriptive rather than interpretive, celebratory rather than critical.” Mailland’s goal is to offer a more complete history of the game and how it evolved from an uncopyrighted, freely shared computer program into an aggressively protected intellectual property.
The middle chapters of Soviet Blocks rely on contracts, legal proceedings, and interviews of the protagonists to trace how rights to the game were claimed, sold with and (according to Mailland) without actual ownership, and how the 2012 case Tetris Holding v. Xio Interactive allowed the rights holders to expand their protection to include the use of pentomino shapes in computer games.
The fight for the rights to Tetris peaked in the United States for the first time in 1989 when Tengen, a Nintendo licensee, went rogue and published their own version of the game. Financial considerations aside, personal animosity between the respective heads of Tengen and Nintendo of America guaranteed a fight to the finish. Nintendo ended up being granted summary judgment, a ruling that many commentators, including Mailland, call into question. The judge’s reasoning centered on a distinction between gaming consoles and computers that seems quaint now but could have been plausible in the late 1980s.
After the Tengen ruling rights sales, assignments, and contracts continued apace. The 2012 decision in Xio Interactive cemented the entity now known as The Tetris Company’s hold on intellectual property rights that seem to protect public domain shapes (the pentominoes) and arguably functional elements such as spinning blocks to reorient them on the playfield.
Mailland offers thorough coverage of his topic, though his writing shifts from the overly casual (doing someone a “solid”) at the start to an approachable but more academic tone later in the manuscript. My impression is the author changed his mind about how far to take the looser language and didn’t catch every instance. It was a bit jarring to switch from very informal to more formal prose, but the book’s evidence and argument are of high quality throughout.
Soviet Blocks is an interesting book. It reveals much more about Tetris than the standard origin story and refuses to gloss over the hard-nosed battles to secure rights and revenues for the immensely popular game. As such it’s not as entertaining as the popular histories and documentaries, but it’s a worthwhile read for anyone interested in Tetris itself, the history of the Soviet Union, and how court decisions affect intellectual property rights in gaming and beyond.
Highly recommended.