Alexey Pajitnov in his Moscow apartment, 1993. All photos courtesy Tozai GamesThis article originally appeared on Motherboard.I’m at the wheel of a Tesla with a license plate that reads, simply: TETRIS. Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of that legendary video game, rides shotgun."Push the gas, push the gas!" whoops Pajitnov, bearded and jean jacketed. "Faster!"Earlier that day, after lunch at a mutual friend’s house, Pajitnov, 58, was eager to have us take turns driving his Tesla through the placid suburbs of Bellevue, Washington, where he lives, urging us on to bursts of acceleration that left momentary feelings of weightlessness in my chest every time the road dipped.
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Over lunch, we had discussed Russia’s fight against the Nazis in World War II, Pajitnov's longstanding love for classic puzzler game Lode Runner, his time developing artificial intelligence and speech recognition platforms during the Cold War, and the many other games, such as Yoshi’s Cookie, he's worked on that aren't Tetris. Among other things.A quick web search for "Alexey Pajitnov" brings up pages of articles and interviews that fixate only on his creation of Tetris—a work that remains, far and away, the best selling video game of all time. Meeting Pajitnov himself led me to wonder about, well, everything else. What was the Tetris-less life of Alexey Pajitnov?
If there's one constant to his story, it's a penchant for hauling ass. Sheila Boughten, president of Tozai Games, gave me some insight regarding the psychology of Pajitnov's motor vehicle operation. Boughten entered the video game industry through the now-defunct Bullet-Proof Software, where her very first task was to coordinate with American and Russian immigration in the early 90s so that Pajitnov could move to the US and join the team at Bullet-Proof, which sponsored his work visa."Everyone drove like mad people," Boughten told me of her experience at the time in Moscow, riding white-knuckled with Pajitnov in his Soviet-era Fiat clone. "And Alexey was not excluded. He drove like a madman. I was fearful. I said, 'Alexey, I don’t want to die in Russia. Be careful.'"
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