Replay: The History of Video Games (34 page)

Rogers explained the web of
Tetris
deals to Belikov, who then showed him the contract agreed with Stein that gave him only the rights to the home computer versions. “It was a horrible contract,” said Rogers. “It was like spanking a baby or something like that. Elorg was getting a percentage of a percentage of a percentage, so by the time it got to Moscow it was nothing.”

Rogers sensed an opportunity and told Belikov he wanted to put things right. He handed Elorg a $40,712 royalty cheque for the 130,000
Tetris
cartridges already sold in Japan and said he wanted to buy the console rights. Expecting legal action from Mirrorsoft and Atari Games if he got the deal, Rogers asked Belikov to hold off from making any deals until he returned with backing from Nintendo.

While Rogers got on with bringing in Nintendo, Stein faced an angry reception at Elorg. Belikov shoved an amended version of the home computer contract under his nose and told him if he did not sign it immediately, the arcade rights deal was off. Desperate to get the coin-op deal, Stein homed in on a clause about fines for late royalty payments and negotiated on that. After signing it, Belikov sold him the coin-op rights. Only later did Stein notice the crucial change that the late payments clause was designed to distract him from: a clause defining a home computer in such a way that it was completely clear he did not have the home console rights.

Maxwell, meanwhile, was hoping to use the influence of the Maxwell Communications empire to win all the rights to
Tetris
. But when Belikov handed him Rogers’ Japanese
Tetris
cartridge and demanded to know what it was, Maxwell stumbled. Unfamiliar with the details of Mirrorsoft’s dealings, Maxwell said it must be an illegal copy. Eventually Elorg offered Mirrorsoft the option to bid for home console rights in return for the rights to publish Maxwell Communications’ reference books in the USSR.

Keen to get the lucrative
Tetris
rights, Maxwell agreed and signed over the reference book rights. And when Rogers and Nintendo returned with their offer for the console rights, Belikov gave Mirrorsoft 2
4 hours to make a better offer. Mirrorsoft couldn’t respond fast enough and the next day Nintendo and Rogers walked away with the deal. Atari Games, which thought it had the US home console rights and was about to release its NES version of
Tetris
, suddenly found itself served with a court injunction and left with a warehouse full of games it was barred from selling much to Nintendo’s delight.
[5]

Pajitnov’s game proved crucial to the success of the Game Boy. It became the must-have game that drove the handheld’s massive sales across the world. More than 40 million Game Boys with copies of
Tetris
were sold worldwide. It made Rogers rich and let Nintendo gain a level of dominance in the handheld games market that was even greater than its hold on the home console business.

Maxwell and his father were furious when he discovered how Rogers and Nintendo had grabbed the rights they thought were theirs. The Maxwells were well connected with the Gorbachev regime and decided to use political influence to try and scupper Nintendo’s deal. “They put pressure on the Politburo. That pressure came down on the ministry and Belikov, who had made the decision to go with me rather than Kevin Maxwell,” said Rogers. “Belikov thought he was a dead man. Nobody talked to him. It was like he had a disease or something. He was like an untouchable.”

Government officials turned up at Belikov’s offices unannounced and rifled through Elorg’s files searching for evidence to use against him. The Elorg director feared he was under KGB surveillance. As a former Communist Party official he knew full well what he was up against: “I was afraid because I understood that it was like trying to stop a tank with your hands. They had switched on that soulless state machine, which is totally uninterested in any reasons.”

Luckily for Belikov, communism was fading fast and Gorbachev’s reforms were already changing attitudes in Moscow. Eventually the Kremlin decided that ministries such as Elorg should be free to make decisions independently and the soulless state machine was switched off.

For Pajitnov, the success of
Tetris
brought him little wealth, but it did give him and his family a new future. In 1991 he moved to Seattle to open his own video game company and later joined Microsoft to make puzzle games such as
Hexic
. And when Elorg’s rights to
Tetris
expired in 1996 he teamed up with Rogers to form The Tetris Company, a business dedicated to managing the global rights to Pajitnov’s game and exploiting its on-going appeal. In particular
Tetris
has reaped the benefits of the growth of mobile phone games, selling more than a 100 million copies on myriad models. “It’s amazing and very strange for me. I didn’t expect it to live that long,” said Pajitnov. “But then the game did not change too much and the human brain remained the same so I don’t see any reason why the game should be less popular.”

By the time Pajitnov left Moscow for Seattle, the communist regimes of Eastern Europe had come crashing down; their demise hastened by Gorbachev’s economic and political reforms. Although these countries were now free of communism, its legacy proved hard to shake off. It was a legacy that would have profound implications for video game development in the former Eastern Bloc. Decades of communist rule had left the economies of the Eastern Europe in tatters and these nations spent the 1990s making an often-traumatic metamorphosis into free market economies. Those that tried to make a living creating games faced not only a hostile economic climate, but also rampant piracy and a lack of home computer owners to sell to. In communist times piracy was the only way computer owners could get hold of games, but in the new capitalist world this cultural inheritance only undermined efforts to build a video game industry. “There was nothing in the way of software on sale under communism and 99 per cent of games were pirated,” said Spanel, who formed Czech game company Bohemia Interactive in 1999. “It is still a big problem and there is still the mentality that games are free.”

The economic problems facing Eastern Europe and the high levels of piracy also dissuaded western game companies from investing in the region. “Our countries were seen as part of the socialist bloc and, after the Iron Curtain fell, time had to pass before people realised the bad image was no longer true,” said Gábor Fehér, managing director of Hungarian game studio Digital Reality. Console manufacturers made no attempt to expand into the new democracies, figuring that the impoverished population could not afford to buy expensive luxuries such as video game consoles. As a result, Eastern Europeans saw little of the video game consoles that were common in Japaand the West beyond a few shops where people could play Sega Megadrive and Super Nintendo games on a pay-per-minute basis. The only consoles on sale were illegal clones such Steeler Company’s Dendy, a Russian copy of Nintendo’s Famicom. The absence of consoles meant home computers became the de facto game platform for the former communist nations of Eastern Europeans. At first low-cost ZX Spectrum clones that ran a Russian operating system called TR-DOS proved popular, but by the mid-1990s people switched over to PCs as price reductions and increased wages made these affordable.

These factors, along with a lack of people with the skills needed to make video games, slowed the growth of Eastern European game studios to a crawl. It would take until the late 1990s before a games industry of any significance formed. Only a few of the video games created during the immediate post-communism period stood out.
Filler
, a 1991 abstract colour-matching game created by Russian programmer Dmitry Pashkov, was one of the few to reach an international audience after French publisher Infogrames released it as
7 Colours
in Western Europe.

But as home computer sales in the former communist bloc increased towards the end of the 1990s, more and more game studios began to form. These ambitious new companies wanted to make their mark on the international stage, not just in their homelands. They wanted to show the world that the former communist bloc had more to offer than
Tetris
. Their emergence coincided with a change in attitude towards Eastern Europe among western game publishers. Although the growing sales of games in the region helped change attitudes, saving money was the primary motive. By the turn of the century, the cost of creating video games was soaring into the millions and big-league game publishers hoped Eastern Europe’s pool of cheap talent could help cut costs. The interest from western game firms further fuelled the formation of Eastern European game studios as more and more amateur programmers went professional hoping to make it big in the video game industry.

And when Czech game studio Illusion Softworks’ military action game
Hidden & Dangerous
became a million-seller in 1999, any lingering doubts about Eastern European studios’ ability to deliver vanished. Illusion Softworks’ breakthrough was followed by a succession of hit games from Eastern Europe including Ukrainian strategy game
Cossacks: European Wars
and Bohemia’s intense military combat simulation O
peration Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis
. Although these games appealed globally, the legacy of communism still lingered within the subject matter of the games forged in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Operation Flashpoint
drew on designer Spanel’s experience of communism. It cast the player as a frontline soldier who is part of a NATO attempt to counter a fictional military rebellion against Gorbachev shortly after his rise to power in 1985. “We’ve experienced communism from the inside and now live outside it and so we know what both are like and this influenced the story of
Operation Flashpoint
,” said Spanel.

Unlike most military games,
Operation Flashpoint
showed warfare without the glamour of Hollywood heroism. The full-on assaults that typified other military games would almost always result in death in
Operation Flashpoint
; planning, discipline and patience were a necessity. Spanel’s game also left players in the dark about the overall state of the conflict, instead there were simply the orders and need-to-know information provided from on high. It was war at its most unheroic, paranoid, confusing and dangerous. There was no room for Rambos in this game.

Spanel was not alone in drawing on his nation’s history for inspiration.
IL-2 Sturmovik
, a flight simulation designed by Russian game studio 1C: Maddox Games, recreated the air battles between Soviet and Nazi forces in the Second World War usually overlooked by western flight sims. Ukrainian studio GSC Game World, meanwhile, looked to the fenced-off zone surrounding the exploded Chernobyl nuclear reactor that lies 110 kilometres from their Kiev offices. They used this unpopulated zone and the ghostly abandoned city of Pripyat, which lies within the area, as the template for the irradiated world of its 2007 first-person shooter
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
.

By the mid-2000s, Eastern European studios had completed their journey from communism to globally successful video game creators. But while the move to making games for a global audience resulted in British and French game designers playing down their national influences, Eastern Europe’s games made few concessions to US audiences. Having fought for years to free themselves from communism, Eastern Europe’s game developers were not about to hide their cultural distinctiveness. That desire to ensure Eastern European culture was not extinguished was the real legacy of communist attempts to erase the national identities of the countries once under its control.

[
1
]. Pajitnov also reduced the number of different shapes from
Pentom
inoes
’ 12 to just seven.

[
2
]. No official records confirming exactly when the
Poly Play
machine launched appear to have survived the fall of communism in East Germany.

[
3
]. Again there is no clarity about the exact year of release, although it is certainly some point in the 1980s prior to the co
llapse of communism in Eastern Europe.

[
4
]. A company headed by Gábor Rényi, the son of Peter Rényi, who was the deputy editor of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’
Party newsper
Népszabadság
.

[
5
]. Atari Games had refused to sign up to Nintendo’s NES licensee system and the two firms were engaged in a number of tit-for-
tat legal spats about Nintendo’s control of the NES market. Atari Games wasted millions promoting, developing and manufacturing its unreleased version of
Tetris
.