Education
Moscow Aviation Institute.
programmer computer scientist game designer
Moscow Aviation Institute.
He only started to get royalties from his creation in 1996 when he and Henk Rogers formed The Tetris Company. Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris with the help of Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov in 1984. The game, first available in the Soviet Union, appeared in the West in 1986.
Pajitnov also created the lesser known sequel to Tetris, entitled Welltris, which has the same principle but in a three dimensional environment where the player sees the playing area from above.
Tetris was licensed and managed by Soviet company ELORG which had been founded specially for this purpose, and advertised with the slogan "From Russia with Love" (on NES: "From Russia With Fun!"). Because he was employed by the Soviet government, Pajitnov did not receive royalties.
Pajitnov, together with Vladimir Pokhilko, moved to the United States in 1991 and later, in 1996, founded The Tetris Company with Henk Rogers. He helped design the puzzles in the Super NES versions of Yoshi"s Cookie and designed the game Pandora"s Box, which incorporates more traditional jigsaw-style puzzles.
He was employed by Microsoft from October 1996 until 2005.
While there he worked on the Microsoft Entertainment Pack: The Puzzle Collection, Master of Science in Nursing Mind Aerobics and Master of Science in Nursing Games groups. Pajitnov"s new, enhanced version of Hexic, Hexic HD, was included with every new Xbox 360 Premium package. On August 18, 2005, WildSnake Software announced Pajitnov will be collaborating with them to release a new line of puzzle games.
In 1996, GameSpot named him as the fourth most influential computer game developer of all time.
In 1996, GameSpot named him as the fourth most influential computer game developer of all time. On March 7, 2007, he received the Game Developers Choice Awards First Penguin Award. The award was given for pioneering the casual games market. On June 24, 2009, he received the honorary award at the LARA - Der Deutsche Games Award in Cologne, Germany. In 2012, IGN included Pajitnov on their list of 5 Memorable Video Game Industry One-Hit Wonders, calling him "the ultimate video game one-hit wonder.".
