The author who owned nothing
Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris in 1984 as a side project while working at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Under the arrangements of the USSR, that made the game the property of the state rather than the programmer. The rights sat with ELORG, a government body established to handle foreign trade in Soviet software — an organisation whose staff had no particular interest in video games and every interest in not being taken advantage of by Western businessmen.
This is the fact that generates everything that follows. Every Western party in the story approached Tetris with the assumption that somewhere there was an owner who could sell them rights, and that having paid someone, they had bought something. In an ordinary commercial context that assumption is safe. Here it was not, because the entity that actually held the rights was a Soviet trade bureau most of them had never dealt with, and the man who wrote the game could not sell it to anyone.
Licences from people who did not have them
British entrepreneur Robert Stein discussed licensing Tetris with Pajitnov and came away convinced he had the rights. He did not — as ELORG informed him once it learned the game was being sold internationally, because the Soviet government owned the intellectual property and Stein had never obtained anything from the party that held it. By then Stein had already been dealing onward, and Mirrorsoft had sold Atari the rights to develop the game for home consoles and coin-operated machines before those rights had been properly secured.
The result was a chain in which each link had been sold in good faith by someone with nothing to sell. Companies had paid money, signed contracts, begun development and made manufacturing commitments on the strength of a licence that traced back to a conversation with a programmer who had no authority to grant it. Nobody in the chain was obviously a villain. Everyone had behaved roughly as Western business practice suggested, and the entire structure rested on air.
The Moscow room
Henk Rogers, an agent working with Japanese gaming companies, played Tetris at a Las Vegas trade show and became convinced of it. In early 1989 he went to Moscow, hired an interpreter on 21 February, and found ELORG — arriving, as it happened, at roughly the same time as the other claimants, each unaware of the others' presence and each expecting to confirm rights they believed they already held.
What ELORG did next decided the matter. Stein's contract was amended to exclude console rights, and he left the negotiation unaware that the document he had signed no longer covered what he thought it covered. Nintendo took the console rights. The detail that makes this more than a procedural footnote is that ELORG was not outmanoeuvred by sophisticated Western dealmakers; it outmanoeuvred them, using the precision of contract language against parties who had been sloppy about what they actually owned. The Soviet trade bureau read the paperwork more carefully than the businessmen did.
The landfill
Nintendo sued Atari. Atari's position was that it had licensed the rights through Mirrorsoft in good faith, which was true and legally irrelevant, since the rights had not been Mirrorsoft's to convey and Stein's contract had been quietly amended out from under it. A San Francisco judge sided with Nintendo. The 500,000 Tetris cartridges Atari had manufactured in anticipation of launch went to a landfill.
Half a million cartridges destroyed is the kind of number that invites comparison to the E.T. burial, but the causes are opposite. Atari's 1983 landfill held games nobody wanted. Its Tetris cartridges were a perfectly good version of the most compelling puzzle game ever made, destroyed purely because of who had signed what. Nintendo went on to sell 35 million copies, bundling it with the Game Boy and turning a Soviet programmer's side project into the definitive portable game. Pajitnov, whose name was on none of the contracts, saw no money from any of it for years.