Origin
As a child, he was a fan of puzzles and played with pentomino toys. In creating Tetris, he drew inspiration from these toys. 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.
Alexey Pajitnov is a Russian video game designer and computer engineer. In June 1984, while working for the Soviet Academy of Sciences at Computer Center in Moscow, Pajitnov was testing the capabilties of new hardware by writing simple games. One of those games became Tetris, which he initially based around pentominoes, then backpedaled to tetrominoes as he felt that twelve different shape variations would be too complicated.
As he was designing the game, Pajitnov realized that completed lines resulted in the screen filling up quickly, so he decided to have the program delete those lines, which became a key part of Tetris' gameplay.
Distribution
By 1989, about half a dozen had already claimed rights to create and distribute Tetris software for home computers, game consoles and handheld systems.
Nintendo
Tengen (the console software division of Atari Games) applied for copyright for their Tetris game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, loosely based on the arcade version, and proceeded to market and distribute it under the name TETRIS: The Soviet Mind Game.
Nintendo released their version of Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), developed by Gunpei Yokoi. This version went on to sell 8 million copies worldwide.
Sega
In 1988, an arcade version was released by Sega in Japan for the Sega System 16 and System E arcade boards. It won the Japanese Gamest Award for Game of the Year the following year.
In 2014, in conjunction with the 30th anniversary of the series, Sega released Puyo Puyo Tetris, a multi-platform game that blends gameplay elements of both the Tetris and Puyo Puyo franchises.
The Tetris Company
In 1996, the rights to the game reverted from the Russian state to Pajitnov himself, who previously had made very little money from the game. That year, The Tetris Company was founded, claiming to hold copyright registrations for Tetris products in the U.S. and taking out trademark registrations for Tetris in almost every country in the world.