Originally programmed in 1984 by Alexey Pajitov, Tetris soon became a wildly popular game and was an international sensation during the latter part of the Cold War. Tetris should've made Alexey Pajitov millions of dollars... But due to the fact that the game was designed under Soviet rule, he was not able to make any profit off of it.
It wasn't until 1996 that Pajitov began to be paid royalties for his work, over a decade after its initial release and development. The Soviet Union was the recipient of the vast majority of the money generated by the game.
