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Video, timestamped captions and an explicit research status.
Alexey Pajitnov and Tetris
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Timestamped caption record
Automatically generated captions, reproduced as a record of the video—not as independently verified reporting. Timestamp links open the relevant point on YouTube.
Read the caption record (25 lines)
- 0:00He made one of the best selling video
- 0:01games in history. For 12 years, he
- 0:03didn't get paid for it. Moscow, 1984.
- 0:07Alexey Pajitnov is a researcher at the
- 0:09Soviet Academy of Sciences. On a
- 0:11computer that can barely draw pictures,
- 0:12he builds a puzzle out of falling
- 0:14blocks. He calls it Tetris.
- 0:16Colleagues copy it onto floppy disks. It
- 0:18spreads across the Eastern Block, then
- 0:20through the Iron Curtain.
- 0:22But Pajitnov worked for the state, so
- 0:24the state owned his game.
- 0:25Western companies fought over the
- 0:26rights. Nintendo won and put it on the
- 0:28Game Boy. 35 million copies.
- 0:31Pajitnov got nothing.
- 0:33Then the Soviet Union fell.
- 0:35In 1996, the rights came back to him and
- 0:38he started the Tetris company.
- 0:40Today, Tetris has sold more than 520
- 0:42million copies.
- 0:44The man who built it finally got paid.
- 0:4612 years later.
- 0:48Follow Visual Capitalist for more.
Original publication and evidence scope
Original YouTube title: “He made Tetris. For 12 years he didn't get paid.”. The original title may contain claims not confirmed by this companion.
Upload date, duration and captions were retrieved from the public YouTube record on 2026-10-16. Dates are day-level, not an asserted exact upload time. Market values, audience totals and references to “today” belong to the original publication context.
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