The scientific group that Alexei worked for we're approached once Tetris became really popular and was spotted in a Belgian software house (being played in the corner). Mirrosoft then bought the rights from whoever bought it from Alexei, but it wasn't Alexeis to sell. The Russians changed the contract so that console and handheld rights were up for grabs, and an agent secured them for Nintendo by visiting Russia and proving trustworthy - becomming friends with Alexei did'nt hurt either. The handheld and console rights were secured for a handsome $500,000 plus $0.50 per sale! - considering how many GameBoys were sold, you can imagine the income on that. Maxwells son had a meeting, but dilly-dallied and forced his dad to kill himself because he never got the rights to Tetris. Well that's sorta what happend, Maxwell tried to force the Russians to sell the rights to him by complaining to Gorbachov, slimey little wretch that Maxwell was, deserved to loose the battle anyway. I did feel a bit sorry for Atari/Tengen because they did'nt realise they had no rights until they had the games ready to ship! - they must have lost a fortune. It is a nice story though, because the cool friendly guy who went to the trouble of meeting Alexei won, he even took the boring Russian delegate on a tour of San-Francisco after they won a court battle with Atari/Tengen. If anyone remembers, Atari later released Klax in the arcades and on home computers, which was mildly similar to Tetris.
It is repeated tonight, it's well worth watching if you have BBC4.
Van-B
The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!.
