Beyond Tetris: The Other Games of Alexey Pajitnov [video]

**TL;DR:** Beyond Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov left behind two nearly unknown games from his time at the Soviet Academy of Sciences—*Shaw* and *Magnetic Crane*—as well as everything he did afterwards leveraging his name as the "Father of Tetris." ## Question: What other games has Pajitnov made? If you ask what games Alexey Pajitnov has created, the answer is too simple: Tetris. Then someone will shout out various Tetris sequels—it's worth clarifying that Pajitnov wasn't involved in all of them, only a few. Someone else will call out Hexic, which is obscure but a good answer. In fact, the question "which games has Pajitnov worked on?" is a bit vague, because he's credited on a large number of games in which he wasn't actually very involved: - Sometimes he drafted an initial design document, and someone else built the game; - Sometimes it was an existing game, and he developed additional modes for it; - And sometimes, he was simply paid so the company could put his photo on the box. ## Two things to get straight first **First, lower your expectations.** There are good reasons you haven't heard of most of these games. As a game designer, Pajitnov is really more like an excellent computer scientist—many of his designs are essentially computer science problems or tech demos with a game shell wrapped around them, and the results are often not great. Not all of them are terrible, though; there are only a few here that I'd call complete failures. **Second, there's absolutely nothing wrong with him using his fame to make money.** More than any game designer in history, he's earned it. He made a game that has a very strong claim to being the greatest video game of all time, and that game made billions of dollars for everyone except him. So if Pajitnov wants to make some money by enthusiastically recommending Puyo Puyo, or by taking a high-paying contract from Microsoft (which was trying to gain legitimacy at the time), more power to him. I won't begrudge him and Hank Rogers lounging around in the mountains of money they made from Tetris either. Whatever I say about him next, keep this in mind: he created Tetris, and sometimes that one hit is all you need. There are also some games that have become lost media; in a few cases, Pajitnov later recreated those lost concepts, two of which are mobile games I simply can't access—sorry, I'm not buying another phone for this video. ## Early years: Dorodnitsyn Computing Center Imagine Pajitnov right after Tetris was created. His colleagues at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center quite liked the game; copies were handed out to a few people and shown around. Tetris started spreading across Eastern Europe and would eventually be discovered by Western publishers and become a global phenomenon, but at this point he still had a full-time job and still made small games from time to time. As far as I know, during his time at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, only two games besides Tetris survived in anything close to their original form. ### Shaw (1986) It appears that Shaw was developed in 1986, more than a year before the first Western-published version of Tetris hit shelves. The DOS version I have is a single file of just **26,976 bytes**—to give you an idea, the audio I'm recording right now, I could generate that much data in less than one-sixth of a second; with compression and uploading to YouTube, you'd get roughly a second and a half of audio. Shaw is very small, and of course a simple game. - Press space on the title screen to jump straight into the game—no fanfare, no "ready?" - Everything is randomized and will likely put you through the wringer from the start; all you need to know is the arrow key controls. - You control a line that looks somewhat like the kicking motion from the arcade game *Tido*, and your goal is to score by popping balls. - When you hit a ball, your stick turns the same color as that ball; if you hit a ball that matches your stick's color, you lose all your lives/energy/countdown. - Suits can accumulate more energy; collecting all four suits will level you up. But if you collect a suit you already have, the collection status at the bottom of the screen regresses to that suit. You can use this to clear out some bubbles that match your most recently acquired suit—for example, if you got hearts, keep hitting hearts. - When you hit a bubble, a new bubble appears with a completely random color, which means sometimes you have no good choice: either let your suit regress, or eat damage to pop same-colored bubbles. - When your energy runs out, a text screen prompts you to enter your name on the leaderboard. **Verdict:** A decent time-waster—not something I'd play for more than ten minutes straight, but exactly the fast-paced arcade style Pajitnov was going for. The roughness comes from one guy tinkering in his spare time in a computer lab: the randomness sometimes forces you to lose, and there's a lack of pressure mechanics—you can just spin your stick in place and stall the game forever. Not a big problem for PC games, but an arcade cabinet would need more. As a simple little game from 1986, it's too simple and wouldn't have caught on with a wider release. But if Pajitnov had remade it as a mobile game in 2010, people might still enjoy it. ### Magnetic Crane (1989) The other surviving game is Magnetic Crane, a game where you control a magnetic crane—yeah, the title isn't exactly creative. The earliest version I could find is dated 1989, after Tetris became a global phenomenon. This is likely the last game Pajitnov made before becoming "the guy who created Tetris." **Core mechanic:** You maneuver the crane around and toggle the magnet on and off, with limited **magnetic energy** (that's what the documentation calls it)—run out and it's game over. Note: magnetic energy drains at a rate tied to your CPU speed; in DOSBox you need to set the speed very slow to play properly, and with default settings you can sometimes barely get past the first level. #### Level 1: Organize the Train A train has been scrambled, and you need to get the cars in order. The cars start in random positions. Key points: - The magnet drains magnetic energy when it hits things, so don't let it crash around. - Once the locomotive is placed on the wheels, it drives forward. When it exits the left side of the screen, it passes through a gate that requires all cars to be in the correct order; if you're not ready, it reverses and you lose a life. You only get three chances in Level 1. - The correct way to rotate a car: position the magnet just far enough away that it can't lift the car, then turn the magnet on, and after a moment the car will rotate. If obstacles prevent rotation, you get small pulses that drain magnetic energy. - Another way: drop a car—if it clips the corner of another car on the way down, it rotates as it falls. - Place the cars in the correct positions so the text displays **"dialogue 89"**, then move the locomotive to the front, rotate it to the right direction, and the train departs with everything attached. Remember to turn off the magnet so you don't accidentally spin a car as you pass by. #### Level 2: The Workers Moving Stones The claim that had been floating around online was "that's all the game is"—far from it. Level 2 requires transporting all the stones on the right side of the screen to the loader on the left, except the problem is: **the workers don't want to work.** - They don't yield to each other; workers walking in opposite directions bounce off each other on collision. - A worker wandering to the end of the train will jump off and run to the bar to drink vodka; one carrying something to the end of a car will just dump it there. - The magnet can pick up flatbed cars and move them, including the people standing on them. So the game becomes a sorting efficiency problem: a worker who's already picked up a bundle of stones has to carry it through all the other workers and across a missing car. **Strategy:** The obvious play is to send a few people to the bar first to unclog traffic. But a label spanning the screen appears at the bottom, and when it completes its journey across the screen, the game is over. The people in the bar will eventually come back, and after a few vodkas they're in perfect shape. (Incidentally, this is a game made by Soviet citizens inside the USSR for a Soviet audience—the "Russians are drunks" jokes are their own.) Two other options: 1. **Trap the workers**: Corral a group of workers onto an elevated platform, possibly the most efficient method. Stack another car on top of a car, and workers will walk down one step but not two, so you create a little island in the middle to trap a group and make the rest do all the work. 2. **Hit people**: If the car the crane is moving isn't high enough, you can hit people, and they get (taken by a nurse, or maybe a devil) to the hospital in the upper right corner of the screen. Losing two employees is fine; lose a third to the hospital and you get shut down for unsafe conditions. When big stones appear, the task is nearly complete—you don't have to move the big stones, and don't even have to move all the small ones. Once the big stones are loaded, the train departs, and things get complicated. #### The Question of a Third Version I found two versions: - **Version with 1989 file dates** (presumably the original release): Completing Level 2 finishes the game; you enter your name on the leaderboard and return to the DOS prompt. - **Version with 1996 file dates** (the file date may just indicate it was copied to a different file system): Same title screen and first two levels, but there's also a Level 3—use the **5 key** in the middle of the numpad to change the tilt direction, using the crane to block trash items or move platforms. Items fall too fast to manage, and it's easy to put the wrong item in the wrong car and lose. My current guess is that what was distributed was probably a two-level work in progress, but there's no way to confirm whether Level 3 was part of the original design. **Verdict:** Magnetic Crane has the feel of 1980s DOS shareware—more like an exploration of an idea than a finished game. Each of the three levels has its own clumsiness: Level 1 has the train running on rails with little room to properly arrange the cars; Level 2 has too many workers and ends up boring, until you clear out a few and have one person hauling rocks back and forth between the pile and the funnel; Level 3 has too many falling items to sort properly. It's not bad, but it feels more like a draft of a game. As far as what's playable, Pajitnov's games during his time at the Soviet Academy of Sciences were just Tetris, Magnetic Crane, and Shaw. I'd love to explore his attempts at puzzles and other simple arcade games, but that'll have to wait. ## Skipping Ahead Past the Copyright Wars Tetris reached the West and became a massive hit on computers, arcades, and consoles. Then all the parties involved realized that whoever sold them the rights to Tetris didn't actually own Tetris—and you already know what happened next. Bulletproof Software won the Moscow contract by minutes in the bidding, securing the console and handheld rights that would soon become extremely valuable; Spectrum HoloByte held the computer rights, equally valuable; Atari held the arcade rights, worth far less than the other two. Tetris became the most popular game in the world, the publishers made enormous sums of money, and then they all looked at Alexey Pajitnov and asked: "Do you have anything else?" Source: Beyond Tetris: The Other Games of Alexey Pajitnov (zdw) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH_LPimUJMs)