Alexey Pajitnov created one of the most played games in human history and did not see a penny of royalties for more than a decade. This deep dive follows him from a Moscow childhood split between an art critic father, a film journalist mother, and his own hunger for pure mathematics, through a cramped one-room apartment after his parents' divorce, to applied mathematics at Moscow State University and a job in speech recognition at the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Dorodnitsyn Computing Center.

Using hardware testing as an excuse to write games, and inspired by the memory of cramming pentomino pieces back into their box, Pajitnov built the first prototype in two weeks on an Electronika 60 that could only display text, drawing blocks with bracket characters. Colleague Dmitry Pavlovsky and 16-year-old intern Vadim Gerasimov ported it to the IBM  ...