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Many game fans have enjoyed the Tetris movie, which chronicled the creation and licensing of Tetris, the addictive game that Alexey Pajitnov created behind the Iron Curtain. His friend Henk Rogers went through a great deal of trouble to license the game in Russia and even get Pajitnov out of the Soviet Union decades ago.
But there’s one more chapter to the tale unfolding.
Today, Pajitnov and others who unearthed a forgotten game in the Tetris canon talked at the Game Developers Conference about Tetris Reversed, a prototype for a game that was considered lost.
But little did Pajitnov know that an engineer in charge of the game, Vedran Klanac, had kept a copy of it. Through the help of intermediaries, he showed it to Pajitnov and the two shared their memories of what happened to the lost game.
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Pajitnov, originally from Moscow, became famous as a computer engineer and inventor of the legendary computer game Tetris, which he created in the 1980s while working for the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Rogers got the rights to the game and eventually got Pajitnov out of the country. They retold some of this story at our GamesBeat Next 2023 event last October. (Be sure to sign up for GamesBeat Summit 2024 on May 20-21; you can use a 25% discount code: gbs24dean25.)
Pajitnov has lived in the U.S. since 1991, where he has been involved in the development of games such as Pandora’s Box and worked with companies such as Microsoft and WildSnake Software. In addition to his iconic Tetris game, he is behind titles such as Hatris, El-Fish, and Hexic among many others that have deepened and expanded game design. He was awarded First Penguin Award at Game Developers Choice Awards in 2007 for his breakthrough in the world of games. And his story was the subject of the Tetris movie.
Klanac is the CEO of Ocean Media, and he is originally from Zagreb, Croatia. He was an aerospace engineer who started his career in the games industry with Croteam where he built the physics engine for Serious Sam 2.
Since 2006, he has been running Ocean Media, a game publishing company with a focus on consoles. During the last 20 years, he was involved in production as a programmer and executive producer in more than 200 projects. And it turns out he was the programmer who created the Tetris Reversed code based on instructions from Pajitnov, who had passed them on through a middleman.
More than a decade ago
In 2011, programmer Vedran Klanac went to the NLGD Festival of Games in Utrecht, The Netherlands. He listened to a talk on a charitable effort from Martin de Ronde, a cofounder of game studio Guerrilla Games. Klanac said in an interview with GamesBeat that he listened to De Ronde’s talk and offered to help. De Ronde came back months later saying he had an agreement with Pajitnov about creating a new prototype for a Tetris game.
De Ronde asked if Klanac if he wanted to make Tetris Reversed by Pajitnov.
“Are you kidding me?” Klanac reacted.
They started the project. De Ronde served as the go-between on the project, mediating between designer Pajitnov and engineer Klanac. De Ronde wanted to create a title for OneBigGame and donate most of the proceeds to charity. It was a side project that was separate from Guerrilla Games, and he wanted the games to come from famous game developers like Pajitnov.
“We discussed this recently but I never knew who Vedran was during the project,” Pajitnov said during the panel. “Most of the players all concentrate just on the profile in the game. All that matters is the profile of the garbage in the playfield. The placement of the specific pieces in Tetris. If you remember similar board game, the player tries to use all the space. I thought maybe this could be done, to attempt to use all of the playfield. I found a way to do it by reversing the game. Instead of putting the pieces in the playfield, I used them to eat the items in the game. That was the main concept of the game.”
De Ronde would receive instructions from Pajitnov about the design of the game and then pass them on to Klanac, who would turn around and code the game. Then he would pass a note back through Pajitnov about what had been completed. It took a month to do the first prototype.
“I had some questions about how it should work. And then we started the iterations which the communication group” undertook, Pajitnov said.
They did most of the work from March 2012 to November 2012. Klanac did the work in his own game engine, on his own time. And, fortunately, he had a good archiving system.
Notes would be passed back and forth, and Pajitnov never actually met Klanac. And it was just a side hustle for Klanac. Pajitnov said he remembers the prototype and he played it lot.
“Martin was in the middle. And this is one of the reasons why Alexei actually never communicated with Klanac,” he said.
“Then we started doing iterations on how to create the first version,” Klanac said.
As the fall approached, Klanac said everyone was busy. de Ronde was in the process of selling his studio, Guerrilla Games, to Sony. Then the project slowed down and de Ronde said it was dead in the water. Communication became more sporadic.
Three years later, Klanac emailed De Ronde about what was the status of the program.
“Is this dead in the water?” Klanac asked.
De Ronde had no answer but thought it was likely canceled. Then the game sat fallow. Klanac tried one more time to get clarity a year later. But de Ronde never responded to that message.
A playable prototype
So Klanac stopped working on the project and moved on. But he knew the prototype was complete and it could be played.
And so it was lost.
Tetris Reverse unearthed
