30 Years Ago, the Game Boy Carried Tetris to the Whole World — and Gave Humanity One More Way to Get Hooked | QDaily Business History

From games to gamification: it took 30 years for pixels on a screen to start steering human behavior

In February 1989, three video-game executives — one American, one British, one Japanese — arrived in Moscow at almost exactly the same moment.

Tetris had been selling for months on consoles and personal computers, but its rights were a mess. The game came from the Soviet Union, a country that did not recognize copyright, and its distribution rights were scattered across regions and platforms, held through different channels. The three men had come for the same thing: an official license from Tetris's true owner, the Soviet government agency ELORG (the All-Union Foreign Trade Organization).

1989 was a year of dramatic change in the Cold War. The Soviet economy was mired in stagnation, the revolutions across Eastern Europe were under way, and the Cold War no longer looked as though it would last forever — even if the CIA hadn't anticipated that the USSR had barely more than a year left. Tetris, a product born behind the Iron Curtain, was the first Soviet video game ever exported to the United States.

The talks dragged on for a month. In the end, Henk Rogers, president of the Japanese game company BPS, secured for Nintendo the exclusive console rights to Tetris for more than $10 million — about $200 million in today's money.

It was one of the most consequential business decisions in Nintendo's history.

On April 21, 1989, the Game Boy launched. Two months later the exclusive title Tetris shipped, and what was effectively the console's only bundled game went on to sell alongside the Game Boy all over the world.

The pairing made Nintendo. The Game Boy sold more than 100 million units — the first console ever to reach that number.

Before the Game Boy, you needed a personal computer, a home console, or an arcade cabinet to play a video game. Gamers had no device they could keep on them at all times. Several companies had tried handheld consoles — including Nintendo's own Game & Watch — and all had failed fast.

After the Game Boy, and right up to the birth of the smartphone, only Nintendo truly owned the portable gaming market.

A low price and long battery life were both reasons the Game Boy stood out. Just as important was its bundled "killer app," Tetris.

The game was a natural fit for a handheld. The rules were simple, it asked little of the processor, and it had no language barrier. Super Mario Bros., by contrast, came to the Game Boy as a special edition with many features and elements stripped out to keep play smooth.

Tetris is the best-selling video game of all time. By its 30th birthday in 2014, it had sold more than 150 million copies across all platforms, outselling second-place Wii Sports by 50 million.

"We all have an inherent desire to create order out of chaos, and Tetris satisfies that desire at the most basic level," said Alexey Pajitnov, the game's creator.

That same desire made Tetris the first digital product to use changing pixels on a screen to shape human behavior — and to make people addicted.

People had never seen anything like it. The public's obsession with Tetris was mockingly dubbed the "Soviet secret weapon" by game writers, and for a time politicians and commentators discussed it on television as a genuine threat. In a report headlined "New Software Game: It Comes From Soviet," The New York Times worried not only about video-game addiction but about the chance that, as the Soviet software industry rose, a "Soviet Steve Jobs" would sooner or later appear.

Thirty years on, it looks like a pure and harmless addiction. Its designers wanted only to keep people playing a few more minutes; they did not squeeze a single extra cent out of them along the way.

And no one could accuse it of using addictive mechanics to spread hatred, split society apart, incite killing, or meddle in elections — all of which are the real problems now facing digital addiction as it has spread onto the internet, to the point where Mark Zuckerberg is preparing to pay $3 billion in government fines. But the practice of using changing pixels to engineer gamified addiction begins with Tetris and the Game Boy.

From a Soviet research benchmark to the world's most addictive game

In 1984, a 29-year-old programmer named Alexey Pajitnov was living a life of dull routine. Every morning at ten he reached the office and squeezed into a cramped desk at the Computer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. A room meant for four or five often held fifteen, and four people commonly shared a single desk.

Pajitnov studied artificial intelligence and speech recognition — still in its infancy at the time, but the KGB (Committee for State Security), the Soviet government's intelligence agency, hoped to use it to improve its eavesdropping.

Yet Pajitnov had access to a scarce resource most Soviet citizens never touched: computers. Tetris started out as nothing more than software for measuring machine performance.

Pajitnov drew his inspiration from the block puzzles he had loved as a child. This was the first version of Tetris, and it took him just six days to write. But as a game it was dull — basically a digitized block puzzle in which you fit differently shaped pieces into a grid until the game ended.

The second version dropped seven differently shaped blocks at random from the top, and players had to rotate them before they landed. The trouble was that the blocks piled up at the bottom and quickly filled the screen, ending the game.

One more revision produced the basic rules of Tetris as we know them today: blocks fall and stack up; when a row is complete it sinks away and vanishes, freeing space at the top of the screen. If the player is good enough, the game theoretically never ends.

Then came the addiction. Pajitnov was the first person hopelessly hooked on Tetris. All at once he found he couldn't stop — he would steal games at work and lie that he was fixing bugs.

Much of this came down to the low barrier to entry. The rules of Tetris are so simple that you need no instructions or guidance at all. There are no levels and no background music. When the game was later ported to IBM computers, the blocks gained different colors to sharpen the visual effect.

Pajitnov named the game Tetris — "tetra-" from the Greek prefix for four, and the rest from "tennis," his favorite sport. The game's seven pieces represent every possible arrangement of four connected cubes. And the move players love best — clearing four rows at once with a single straight bar — is itself called a "Tetris."

Pajitnov's friend Vladimir Pokhilko, a clinical psychologist and one of Tetris's three early developers, was the first to pin down what made the game addictive: when a row of blocks vanished, the brain produced a surge of motivation that pulled the player straight back in.

Pokhilko made several copies of the game and brought them to the Moscow Medical Center, planning to use Tetris in addiction research. He asked Pajitnov to build a two-player version.

Tetris showed a frightening power. Pokhilko's colleagues proved just as helpless against it — it began to dent their work — and in the end he had to delete every copy.

Tetris first spread on floppy disks passed among academics and computer engineers. In 1986, several computer experts in Budapest, Hungary, ported it to the Apple II and Commodore 64.

A British man named Robert Stein bought up these pirated ports and resold them to the British game company Mirrorsoft (not Microsoft) and the American company Spectrum HoloByte, carrying a game from the Soviet Union across the Iron Curtain and into the North American market.

Tetris had begun its world tour, and it had already sold millions of copies before the Game Boy was born.

In the American market, "made in the USSR" became a selling point. Spectrum HoloByte's 1988 release came in bold red packaging, and the game itself was full of Soviet imagery — music lifted from Soviet songs, landmarks like Moscow's Red Square, and so on.

The Spectrum HoloByte version sold 100,000 copies in its first year. The British edition, through Mirrorsoft, sold tens of thousands more.

In January 1988, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Henk Rogers — an American who ran a game company in Japan — played Tetris three times at the Spectrum HoloByte booth and decided to bring it to the Japanese market.

Rogers bought the console rights to Tetris from Tengen, but the launch sold only 40,000 copies — a dismal result. He then talked Nintendo into releasing the game on the Famicom, and sales jumped from 40,000 to 200,000.

By the end of 1988, Rogers's company, Bullet-Proof Software, had sold 2 million copies of Tetris in all — the most successful game in its history. It was after this that Rogers traveled to the Soviet Union on Nintendo's behalf to negotiate the exclusive rights.

Human tastes and weaknesses are much the same the world over, and Tetris's magic kept radiating well beyond the Soviet Union. After trying the game, a Chicago Tribune journalist wrote, "You should always keep a spot on your game shelf for Tetris." He also voiced a half-joking worry:

"You'll spend a very long time in front of the computer, and it's hard not to read this as an evil Soviet plot to drain American productivity." The piece ran under the headline "TETRIS IS TERRIFIC."

The Game Boy became the first hit portable console, and it and Tetris made each other

Before the Game Boy, Nintendo already stood at the top of the gaming world. The Famicom (FC), launched in 1983 and lifted by Super Mario Bros., was selling 7 million units a year. Nintendo had broken into the American market, turning itself from a century-old Japanese maker of traditional games into a video-game giant with annual net profit above $500 million.

Tetris was to the Game Boy what Super Mario Bros. was to the Famicom — each made the other. The Game Boy was the first true handheld in gaming history.

Nintendo had tried handheld gaming as far back as the 1970s with Game & Watch, which used fixed dot-matrix patterns instead of pixels to produce very simple animation. A character's limbs were the only things that moved, and each arm or leg amounted to a single pixel. That eased the demands on the screen and on game development, but it also sharply limited what you could play. Games were pre-installed; to switch games, you had to swap out the whole screen unit.

America's Milton Bradley had launched the Microvision handheld in 1979, which even took interchangeable cartridges. But the LCD technology of the day wasn't mature enough, and with too few games to play, the Microvision was discontinued after just two years on sale.

The 1989 Game Boy made portability its core selling point. The Famicom belonged in the living room; the Game Boy could go anywhere. When it reached the American market, The New York Times called its most important quality the fact that "now you can take video games on the road." The Game Boy was like a pocket computer — a green LCD screen, controller buttons and a speaker, a 3.5 mm headphone jack — and it ran for 15 to 30 hours on just four AA batteries.

Nintendo's American advertising in the 1980s pushed the portability angle relentlessly. A family is about to leave on a trip — a little boy tries to haul the Famicom and the television into the trunk, and in an instant the bulky gear shrinks to a Game Boy in the palm of his hand.

There were a few more reasons the Game Boy was so addictive:

• It was cheap: $89 in North America, against $179 for the Lynx and $149 for Sega's Game Gear.
• It took cartridges, so you could swap games just as you could on the home Famicom — proof that a handheld could keep players buying and coming back.
• It had the killer game Tetris, whose exclusive rights Nintendo held on to through copyright litigation.

All of this made the Game Boy addictive enough — the console became a device you carried everywhere, giving players more spare moments to pick it up and play. The ultra-low barrier of Tetris and its ease of use pushed Nintendo's audience well beyond the home-console crowd.

One survey found that by 1995, 46 percent of Game Boy users were women, against just 29 percent for the classic Famicom. Its reach crossed lines of gender and age.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton once posted on Instagram a 1990s photograph of Hillary Clinton in a plane cabin, a Game Boy in hand, deep in a game.

The Game Boy all but monopolized the handheld market throughout the 1990s. Nintendo rolled out more models in turn — the Game Boy Pocket, the Game Boy Color, and others — each with higher performance and a smaller body, and all of them with Tetris. Even later, Sony's PSP and PS Vita never managed to unseat Nintendo.

In June 2000, the Game Boy passed 100 million units sold — the first game console in the world to do so.

In March 2003, the Game Boy was officially discontinued. With a lifespan of 14 years, it still holds the record as the third best-selling game console in the world, at 118 million units sold. The only two consoles ahead of it are Sony's PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo DS, the successor to the Game Boy family.

Yet Pajitnov, Tetris's creator, earned little from his own game at first.

The game was built on government computers. The copyright to the original version — and the millions of dollars in royalties it generated — belonged to ELORG (Elektronorgtechnica), the Soviet government's trade agency.

At least a dozen companies released versions of Tetris, and the game's copyright fell into extraordinary tangle and chaos. The lawsuits fought over it, large and small, in a sense reshaped the law around video-game copyright.

Through all of this Pajitnov became a world-famous game developer, yet he remained a Russian government employee. Only after the Soviet Union dissolved did Russia return the copyright to him, in 1996. He and Henk Rogers then founded the Tetris Company together to manage the game's copyright and the development of later works. Pajitnov obtained a work visa and moved to the United States with his family.

For ten years Pajitnov had not seen a single cent of copyright income from the government. In an interview with Time the previous year, he said: "Rather than fight for personal rights — which didn't exist in the Soviet Union at the time — this arrangement [giving the copyright to the government] was easier and wiser for me."

Digital addiction becomes a serious subject, and the debate reaches far beyond games

Tetris, which swept the world, holds several world records, including "most platforms for a video game." It is also the game most directly responsible for the longest cumulative prison time served by its players.

In 2002, a Briton so absorbed in his game ignored repeated warnings from the flight crew and refused to stop playing on his phone. He was sentenced to four months in prison. There are also stories of the game wrecking families.

And the Game Boy's anytime, anywhere nature made Tetris all but impossible to resist — players found they simply couldn't escape its grip.

The Japanese government even tried to ban Game Boy sales after a string of traffic accidents caused by pedestrians staring at their games in the street.

During the Gulf War, frontline soldiers killed time on their Game Boys. A charred Game Boy was later dug out of the rubble of the conflict — and it still worked when switched on. Nintendo made heavy use of it in advertising.

Why does Tetris keep you coming back?

Tom Stafford, a professor of cognitive development and psychology at the University of Sheffield, offers a representative answer: Tetris addiction is a case of the "Zeigarnik effect." This is a human instinct toward "completion" — you remember unfinished tasks vividly, feel driven to return to them, and quickly forget the ones you've already done.

Tetris works exactly like this. In this pixel-built world you have one task: fill the bottom of the screen with blocks. Each time you pull it off, the brain delivers the pleasure of a completed task — a dopamine rush.

But every time the gaps are filled, the "result" instantly disappears, replaced by a new task, forever. And so your brain falls into the endless loop Tetris engineers — anxiety, satisfaction, anxiety — a cycle no different in kind from a heroin or cigarette habit.

Over 30 years, gaming grew into a vast industry worth $140 billion a year. The technology kept advancing — from pixel LCD screens to HD displays, 3D animation, and now virtual-reality games — and the virtual worlds games build grew ever more lifelike.

Content rating systems, beginning in the United States, took shape across most of the world. In most places, games now sit around people as a serious thing.

Worry about game addiction began with Tetris. In 1994, Wired reporter Jeffrey Goldsmith described a strange experience in his piece This Is Your Brain on Tetris: the heaviest Tetris addicts, he wrote, would start to hallucinate, losing the line between reality and the game. Any object in the real world became linked to the blocks — streets, buildings, boxes — and they would even see bricks falling from the sky. "Tetris enslaved my mind," the piece declared.

Goldsmith named the phenomenon "the Tetris effect," and ever since, academics have seriously studied the mechanism behind it.

Research into Tetris addiction eventually turned in another direction: the game came to be seen as a treatment for psychological trauma, reaching effects similar to those of psychedelics. Some studies suggest that practicing Tetris helps adolescents activate specific brain regions and work more efficiently — a kind of brain-training effect.

Other research has concluded that Tetris can treat PTSD, cutting the frequency of distressing flashbacks in patients.

Yet next to the gaming industry's own flourishing, research into game addiction has made fairly little progress. We have worked out the neuroscience of why games are addictive, but whether game addiction counts as a mental illness is still genuinely disputed, at least in the medical definitions.

In November 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) included "gaming disorder" for the first time in the mental and behavioral disorders chapter of a test version of the eleventh edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).

Another standard, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association, holds that there is not yet enough clinical evidence to set unified diagnostic criteria for gaming addiction, and no consensus on how much gaming should count as addiction. It recommends further study.

The controversy has never gone away — the debate over whether this is addiction, or whether it induces criminal behavior, continues even in the United States. But the conversation about addiction long ago moved past games: social networks and video apps are now charged with being the new psychoactive drugs.

As Pajitnov himself said in 2007: "It [Tetris] really is addictive — it was designed to be. From the very start, our goal was to make it a game you could spend 100 hours playing." Tech companies designing social networks and video apps go to similar lengths to stretch out the time users spend on their platforms.

Take pull-to-refresh, invented by Twitter but now used by Toutiao and nearly every other app.

Tristan Harris, formerly Google's "design ethicist," says Twitter's refresh design exploits the same psychology as a slot machine. One of the most basic principles of a gambling machine is that it hands out sudden rewards under uncertainty: it gives you the goal of winning, then makes sure you never know whether the next pull will pay off.

When you keep refreshing a social feed, what comes up might be interesting and welcome, or it might be utterly boring — and that uncertainty keeps you refreshing. It works the same way on Facebook, Instagram, and Douyin. "Tension that needs resolving but hasn't yet been resolved" is the basic shape of addictive behavior.

Or take the Like button, invented by Facebook and now everywhere on the internet.

Sean Parker, an early Facebook investor, has said that every time someone likes your photo or leaves a comment, you get a hit of "dopamine" — satisfaction and pleasure.

The Like button's color, position, and animation all quietly tempt you to keep checking. Font size matters too. At the TED conference held this month, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that the design deliberately used large numbers to play up follower counts, nudging people to try to say something interesting and draw in more followers.

Aza Raskin, the inventor of pull-to-refresh, says tech companies always find the best way to hook users, endlessly tweaking the color and shape of the Like button. "Behind your phone screen, there are a thousand engineers working as hard as they can to maximize your addiction."

Then there's the next video that plays automatically when the current one ends…

And of course every mechanism rests on smart recommendation. Internet services gather information about users from different channels and push back the content most likely to provoke a reaction and hold the gaze longest — and what provokes the most reaction is, most often, negative emotion.

All these design choices exist because they can prod users into spending more time and so seeing more advertising. The trillion-dollar giants were built on this, and the panic over the new generation of addiction has begun. Starting with the Silicon Valley leaders who drove the tech revolution, one tech executive after another has said they don't let their young children use phones or tablets, and bar them from social media.

Last February, a group of former employees from Google, Facebook, Mozilla, and other tech giants formed the nonprofit Center for Humane Technology. They launched a campaign called The Truth About Tech, aimed at "reversing the digital attention crisis and realigning technology with humanity's best interests."

They charge that the attention economy of tech companies — the race to capture users' attention — has eroded the mental health of the public, and of young people above all. That creates problems at a wider social level: misinformation harms democracy, and human relationships and children suffer.

When the design logic of games seeps into the real world, something more troubling happens. The company that has pushed the "gamified management" of the gig economy furthest is Uber. It hired social scientists and data scientists to experiment with video-game mechanics, graphical cues, and non-cash rewards — cheap techniques that push drivers to work harder and longer. These forms of psychological manipulation have led drivers to willingly put in overtime for rewards that aren't actually worth it.

People once delighted in the mathematics inside Tetris. Today, games are no longer the only digital doorway into another world, and the people who can step into the digital world at any moment are no longer the 100 million owners of a Game Boy.

Today, more than half the planet enters a more complex, more lifelike digital world through screens more than twice the size of a Game Boy's, spending an average of 3.3 hours a day on their phones.

Everything good and bad in the real world is here too — only faster.

Cover image from Metro and Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash