Gadgetory

so Dan you are here because you have a very special project you recently published a book yourself I have a letterpress at my house and I just stamp them out he's been out for six months doing why it took so long here is the book a shot of this it is called the tetris effect the game that hypnotized the world congratulation thank you thank you very exciting it's a very big deal oh you can get this wherever wherever you buy Barberie Bibles so I want to talk to you a battle and just a little side note this is the UK version and now the UK and the US version are like fighting each other it's right by both I'm sure both right cuz like we said before the show all the all the use and all the weird grammar is in this pound symbol I wasn't a one with the Cold War angle they did well there's a lot of that there they're still paranoid about that so I want to talk to you about the the book what is it about Tetris because I would have liked interesting but it's not that interesting by itself okay and I looked and I said okay there's an interesting history there if you know anything about the history of video games or technology you may know that Tetris came from the Soviet Union right there in the Cold War and there are a lot of fights over who owned it and let you know legal battles and things like that that's fine the more I looked into it though I realized this isn't a game story it's actually a startup story very similar to the startup stories that we have set about over at Silicon Valley and elsewhere sure but it's a startup story from the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War in Moscow and that's what made it super interesting to me that we were taking this modern you know startup story that we talked about but finding the most unlikely version of it possible that's had a huge global impact over 30 years so I mean the way you describe it like that almost makes it sound like it was this sort of accident or at least its popularity oh of course it is how is a little software program some guy makes in a Russian you know Science Academy all of a sudden become a billion-dollar global business it's the most lightly of success stories so like how and I don't want you to give away too much about what's what's in the book but like how does ownership work they're like huh and I'm sure obviously that you get into that but like how did that play out that's a huge part of it it's almost like like a Cold War you know business spy thriller with all these big companies backstabbing each other and trying to make deals with these secret Russian groups Alexey Pajitnov the guy who created Tetris he was a he was a computer scientist at the Russian Academy of scientists he was actually working on some very advanced stuff things like artificial intelligence voice recognition for the Soviet Union the 80 if that's like super cutting-edge yeah in his spare time he used his ancient computer ancient even for them at the time to make this a game that mimicked this puzzle game we used to play as a kid any friends liked it he passed it around and to go viral back in the Soviet Union in the eighties that means making a big five inch floppy disk and walking it over to the other people in Moscow who have a computer at the time ago and hey check this out yeah it's it's sneakernet it's we still call that sneaker net but that's all they had and somehow him probably it just spreads and spreads because what else you gonna do for fun and in Moscow in 1984 they got a lot going on you're not unless you just want to like stand on a red line or yeah and then it makes its way to hungry which is an Eastern Bloc country but a little more open to to commercialism and the West ok that's what comes from that was also a Eastern Bloc invention that made it out into the West they love their square and a business guy from the UK saw it and said hi wonder if I can sell this somehow maybe I'll try to talk to I'll find out it's from Rush I'll try to talk to the Russians but they don't understand intellectual property rights or licensing their communist right yeah sorry it's good all right blows well we're gonna deal with these guys but in the meantime I'm just gonna start selling this out of the back of a car ok and that led to you know many many intersecting lawsuits and this huge tangle that takes us through this whole you know legal and business thriller cool all right sounds like you're ready working on like the movie adaptation I feel we're just gonna act it out right I feel like I feel like there's their substance their stage a stage show now now I've read half of the book don't spoil the ending for me the ship sinks in the end here's the spoiler its lens exact pieces the murderer well I there's no point of me reading the rest of it anymore but I think one of the interesting things though you put a lot of detail into the losers in the Tetris race and you know most books it's essentially just alright here's this guy who did a really cool thing that's their story but you know how did you get into contact and you know why did you decide to put so much to like focus on you know people that didn't like when the rights to Tetris when you were telling a history story or good non-fiction story I think it's really all about it's not just about what happened it's about the character do you really need characters that that make the history come alive what I found was this story had so many fantastic characters in it Alexey Pajitnov and Hank Rogers on one side but also the guys you talked about who lost out in the end guys like Robert Maxwell and and Robert Stein and a lot of the other Russians and the guys that like Kangin and Atari and spectrum holobyte and they were all so interesting I thought it was a great sort of you know large cast of characters that I could walk through and a lot of them were very you know happy to talk to me and tell me you know their stories and a lot of like interesting anecdotes that hasn't been you know published anywhere else before so I found it was a great it was a great human story behind it and that's what really helped me to kind of put it together in that way and make it make it a character piece what was the most surprising sort of maybe even shady thing I mean a lot of shoes there's a lot of shady my favorite surprising thing was a little bit later when Nintendo was finally negotiating with the Russians for various Tetris rights for the Famicom and NES a lot of Tetris just with Nintendo true and Nintendo was a was kind of a johnny-come-lately to that but they're the guys who really mainstreamed it after it was a kind of a cult hit on PCs and of course we go to CES every year there's a big scene set at CES in like 1987 where the game is just on PCs but when Nintendo Howard Lincoln who's a famous you know figure he later went on to become the president of the Seattle Mariners I think he just retired a few months ago Minoru Arakawa who was the founding Nintendo of America they're in Russia trying to do some of these negotiations and then they're sitting in the room and the Russians come in with a cosmonaut they go oh comrades this is comedy so-and-so Kozma he wants to talk to you about Nintendo sponsoring the Russian space program maybe we could send the Soyuz capsule up it'll have a big Nintendo logo on the side these were very forward-thinking right yeah right uh and then later they take everything right then later they take Howard Lincoln and his son took the secret top secret Soviet space training town the whole town they have set up to train astronauts and they show them all like the training you know modules and everything so so the fact that they tried to do that I think that was the the coolest surprise thing huh yeah because I you know most people I feel like a lot of people don't even realize it is a Russian sort of institution where like this came out of oh yeah oh yeah go ahead but you think about the game that you remember with that the Russian plinky music when the back words are in the title and the and the Cathedral on the Fox that's all the invention of Western publishers mirrorsoft in the UK and spectrum holobyte in the US the sister companies owned by the Maxwells they said you know what we have this kind of plain-looking game let's do it but it's from Russia let's play that up let's make it the first big import from the Soviet Union make it kind of scary sort of forbidden and that's really what what causes huge mainstream breakthrough how is it that such a simple game like this has a backstory that's more complicated and like the Jason Bourne movies because we were dealing with at the time this time incredible tension between Russia and the West and we were dealing with the very beginning of the computer era and and the beginning of people starting to this is just before Gorbachev came in and we moved from this very strict communist system to collapse missed and perestroika and this opening up so it was really the exact right time for people to start testing the waters mixing these two cultures finding things that's what Hank Rogers did he was kind of a software anthropologist he would go around to different countries he was a naturalized American from the Netherlands living in Japan at the time and he would go around and find software from other countries that he thought would sell well in Japan you know without a lot of localization so he said Tetris this is going to be this will work any country you don't have to read the instructions you don't have to understand any story you could just watch it for 30 seconds and you know how to play it so that and the Russian stuff and that just the arrow computer stuff we're at and the birth of the NES and the Gameboy yeah this perfect storm came together and that's why you know instead of just being an 80s you know curiosity ei just sold 500 million Tetris downloads on smartphones and that's blows my mind thirty years later yeah like Tetris really ended the Cold War oh boy yeah this was right this was like the Silent Assassin it was the first Russian thing that a lot of people were exposed to that actually was from Russia right it kind of gave us the it's like the old sting song we're like oh the Russians are just like us they like video games too right no yeah it's it's an amazing story you can get the book wherever books are sold I think we might be giving one away I'm happy we're happy to give one away I don't know if it's designed it for you to do the excellent know if it's this one in my hand it could be but we'll figure it all out so we're gonna pass this along to someone in who was watching live but you'll have rules on how to do that I think they're gonna be up on screen or something like that awesome one of the things very quickly I was super happy to do which was finally be able to get some cool blurbs from other people I really admire I think the most fun thing was to get I got Steve Wozniak word a little blurb on the back and Ernest Cline who wrote ready player one into the fantastic book duck rushkoff is a great tech author he actually can't coin the term viral media back in the 90s so I was able to send all those guys early copies and I'm super excited today that they were what's that like when like you're you're looking for a quote like literally cold email woz yeah I was like because he was a big Tetris fan back in the eighties he would send his high scores into game magazines oh no they would stop and they stopped running them at some point because he was in there every month you're always the one we're always in here we started sending his scores in under an anagram of his name and they started running it again and I knew that beforehand so I just said after the fact that that you know what I bet he'd like to realize that great sent it to me and we got a nice we had a nice blur problem doesn't even verify those scores now that I'm thinking about can I just you just have to take a photo of your TV screen get into Villa when you're dealing with a camera how you gonna do that on an old dirty five millimeter camera travel back and do it that was so we are looking for our 100th win follower for the handle of the show that's her that's a big accomplishment that's seen it open tab if you are our lucky winner you will get a signed copy of the Tetris effect by mr. Dan Ackerman thank you so much for being here really appreciate it my pleasure and good luck to everyone