Inside Alexey Pajitnov's Philosophy — Building Order in a Game That Never Ends

Introduction

Alexey Pajitnov is the person who, in 1984-85, wrote Tetris on an Elektronika 60 — an old text-only Soviet computer — in his spare time while researching speech recognition and artificial intelligence at the Computing Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Stack falling four-cell blocks, and a row with no gaps disappears: this single invention created the whole 'falling-block puzzle' genre and became one of the most widely played games in the world. Yet while everyone knows the name Tetris, its author is rarely read closely for what he actually thought, fixated on, and stumbled over.

What draws me (Kizuki) to him is that he repeatedly insists his work is 'a psychological product, not a technical one,' and that the man who says he built it 'purely for joy' later became the strictest guardian of a rigorously managed commercial brand — a knot that only shows up when you lay his interviews across the decades. Reheating my bancha, I want to consider Alexey Pajitnov the designer rather than how to play his game. Every quotation below is checked against its source, and I confine my own reading to the final section.

Background: the only game designer in the Soviet Union

Pajitnov worked as a programmer on speech recognition and AI at the Academy of Sciences. Tetris was something he wrote in his free time — 'an extremely simple program,' built in 'about 3 weeks,' by his own account. And it was not his first game: 'I made about 20 other games while working at the Academy of Science,' he said; they 'weren't very interesting, but I did it' (1993 interview, via shmuplations). In an era when the USSR had neither packaged game products nor a profession called 'game designer,' he half-joked in 1989 that 'I'm the only game designer in the Soviet Union' (1989 interview, same source).

Tetris spread abroad by word of mouth and bootleg copies, triggering an international fight over its rights. Into that came Henk Rogers, who travelled to Moscow to secure the rights for Nintendo; the two became lifelong friends. Pajitnov emigrated to the United States in 1991, stayed after the USSR dissolved, and eventually co-founded The Tetris Company, moving to the side that manages the rights. The maker became the custodian — and the second half of that biography is the ground for the knot I describe later.

Philosophy: a psychological product, made for joy

The most consistent claim across his interviews is that 'games are a psychological, not a technical, product.' In 2010 he put it flatly: 'Games are much more psychological product rather than technical. I knew it for my entire life. That's what helped me to stay in the industry' (Game Developer, 2010). Betting not on hardware but on what happens inside a person's head sits at the core of his design decisions.

Second, he frames the motive as joy, never commerce. Of the first prototype: 'I did it in maybe two weeks. But then, when it started breathing on the screen, without score [or] any decoration, I couldn't stop playing' (Digital Trends, 2015). Now semi-retired, he still tinkers with new games as things he does 'just for my own joy, time to time' (Game Developer, 2010). Back in 1993 he said he wanted 'to make more intellectual games,' and criticised the output of his day as 'simply produced to meet the needs of the market, not because they're interesting in their own right' (1993).

Third, his love runs almost entirely to puzzle and casual play. 'I'm not very involved in the kind of heavy action games... I'm still in love with all the puzzles and casual games. That's my favorite genre for all the time' (2010). And he describes play itself as close to meditation: 'Playing Tetris for me is like a zen activity: I think about myself, I meditate a little bit while I am playing, and I just enjoy myself' (The Shortlisted, 2023).

Obsessions: the learning curve, and randomness as the heart

One obsession running through the work is the shaping of difficulty — the design of learning. 'I was very concerned with the levels, how you change them. So my main challenge was to have this learning process [last] as long as possible... keep people inside the game as much as possible. That was my original goal' (Digital Trends, 2015). The slow-then-accelerating speed curve was, for him, not a device to make things hard but a device to keep the player growing.

Another is placing randomness — unpredictability — at the heart of the work. Asked why it succeeded, he answered that 'the gameplay has a good balance of real-time and randomness. The sense of rhythm created by the falling blocks is a big part of it too' (1993). His partner Rogers framed it as 'the universe is about entropy... what Tetris does is, you are creating order out of chaos,' and Pajitnov agreed: 'We're working against entropy, that's true' (Digital Trends, 2015). The fall is disorder; only the player's hand makes order — and that opposition is the source of the pleasure.

The attention to small things is his too. The tetromino colours were originally different in every version — 'a complete zoo' — until he standardised them when building the brand, fixing the palette so 'people have a very strong association between the tetrominoes and the colours, no matter which version they play' (The Shortlisted, 2023). Simplicity is a point of pride: he keeps calling the original 'an extremely simple program' (1993).

Failure and how he lived with it: a decade on multiplayer

The biggest shortfall he publicly admits is that he has never built a satisfying multiplayer Tetris. In 2010 he confessed: 'We are working on multiplayer versions for more than 10 years — I've been trying to design it. I should admit that we are not quite there yet' (Game Developer, 2010). The author of the world's most famous puzzle, spending a decade on its extension and still saying he hasn't cracked it. I rate that candour highly.

He also treats failure not as personal shame but as the natural yield of creation. 'In my profession... no more than 15 percent of your original ideas came to even the project... As far as product is concerned, I think it's about 10 percent, so it's kind of natural' (2010). His pre-Tetris puzzles 'weren't very interesting, but I did it,' he admits (1993). Make many, discard most, and the one that would not disappear was Tetris — that is his framing.

He is honest, too, about the countless imitations and sequels by others: 'Unfortunately, none of those versions come close to the original. I don't know what the reasons were' (2010). He accepts the difficulty of surpassing the original by likening it to the difficulty of a good movie sequel.

Design dilemmas: intensity, and the refusal to end

The dilemma Pajitnov articulates most clearly is the one around multiplayer. 'The game is very intense. If you play on the high level — and that's where you want to play usually — you play on the edge of your abilities, in terms of speed and reaction. So you kind of have no brain resources to observe what the other people are doing' (Game Developer, 2010). From there he draws a bind with no exit: 'If we lower the intensity of personal game playing, we lower the excitement a little bit. But if we keep it at the same level, the players don't have resources to really do some kind of multiplayer actions, to observe, to analyze' (2010). The very appeal of Tetris resists shared play — and he faces that structural wall head-on.

The other, as far as I can read it from his own words, is the tension that 'it is a game about making order, yet it can never be completed.' In the play Rogers summarised as 'creating order out of chaos,' the version Pajitnov himself most loves is the one that never ends: 'my favourite version is the unlimited game that never ends' (The Shortlisted, 2023). The reaching for victory-as-completion, and the randomness that in principle forbids completion — he does not resolve the contradiction; he savours the endless side of it.

Influences: pentominoes, board games, and a scientist's mind

The influence most widely reported is the pentomino (a puzzle of shapes made from five squares) he enjoyed as a child. Interviewers describe him as having drawn the idea for Tetris from the pentomino toys he played with when young (Digital Trends, 2015). In his own words, he acknowledges a lifelong love of puzzles and board games: 'I was very interested in games. I liked to play every game. I like board games and everything' (Game Developer, 2010). The received account is that Tetris is what happens when you drop pentominoes down to four-cell tetrominoes and clear completed lines.

Easy to overlook, but his very career as a speech-recognition and AI researcher reads, to me, as the wellspring of his 'games are a psychological product' philosophy. A mind trained on human cognition and reaction is one that would bet on the felt response in the head rather than on flashy hardware. Notably, he refuses to accuse the many who followed with falling-block games of copying: 'When I see them, I don't automatically think "oh, they copied Tetris!" ... their similarity to Tetris is simply the fact that they are "falling block" games' (1993) — the quiet generosity of the man who handed the genre over.

Kizuki's reading

From here is my own reading, one step beyond his words. I read Pajitnov as 'a designer who guarded only the core and let the surface go.' In 1993 he dismissed games mass-produced to meet market demand as 'not interesting in their own right.' Yet in later years he standardised colours, vetted licenses, and became the custodian of the most heavily branded puzzle on earth — seemingly at odds with his younger words. Lay the two side by side, though, and you see what he was protecting. What he standardised was colour; what he vetted was ports; the 'heart' — randomness and the fall — he let no one touch. He surrendered the skin to the market and refused to yield the one psychological sensation of making order out of chaos. The man who most loves the board that never ends, zen-like, is not selling completion but guarding the pleasure of what can never be completed. That is how I frame him — a quiet consistency worth watching until the bancha goes cold.

Closing

If you want to understand Pajitnov, start with a version close to the unadorned original — the Game Boy build, or an endless mode you can play without minding the score — and approach it not to win but to keep it from ending. His philosophy condenses to a single point: zen inside difficulty. As a related thread, there is Tetsuya Mizuguchi, already covered on this site. Read Mizuguchi — who expanded Tetris into an experience of sensation, sound and light in Tetris Effect — against Pajitnov, who guarded the core of randomness and psychology, and you will see the same falling block reflecting two entirely different philosophies. Other designers standing at the origin of the puzzle, such as Sokoban's Hiroyuki Imabayashi, I hope to cover in this series in time.

Sources

Primary sources referenced in this article (all quotations checked against the source):

・Tetris – 1993 / 1989 Developer Interviews (English translation by shmuplations; Pajitnov's own remarks)

・Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra), 'Alexey Pajitnov - Tetris: Past, Present, Future,' Christian Nutt, 2010

・Digital Trends, 'Meet the men who built the only perfect video game: Tetris,' Adam Rosenberg, 2015

・The Shortlisted, 'Interview with Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov,' Silvia Pingitore, 2023