[kj]

on BBC 3 the other night. It was fantastic. I didnt think there was so much behind the game... apparently Robert Maxwell, Michael Gorbachev (spelling), Nintendo, Atari and a whole load of lawyers were fighting for the rights to distribute it in the West. In those days communist Russia owned everything you created. Tetris was owned by them. The dude that created it made nothing, until recently when the patent ran out.

But anyway, he's now working for microsoft... which is kinda ironic cos his game was a massive success on Nintendo's Game Boy console.

Atari apparently thought at one point that they had secured rights to distribute Tetris. They made 300,000 cartridges for distro, until they found out that they didnt really have the rights and were therefore selling the game illegally, so in the end they ended up with thousands of useless carts. They almost went bankrupt.

Nintendo secured the rights.

But even before all this, apparently Robert Maxwell went mental at his son for not securing the rights for Atari to do the game, then killed himself a few years later. He threated to get the russian president involved in order to stop the game leaving Russia if he coudnt get the rights for himself, and this in turn made the lawyer who represented the creator of the game recieving death threats, he later moved to America with one of the guys from Nintendo.

It was on for about 2 hours or something, amazing programme. The guy is now making royalties from the game, but not as much as he should have got in the first place, but he wasnt bitter about it.

Hope all that made sense.