Alexey Pajitnov

Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov (Алексей Леонидович Пажитнов, transliterated as Aleksei Leonidovich Pazhitnov,

born April 16, 1955) is a computer engineer from Russia living in the United States, who developed the popular game Tetris while working for the Computing Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a Soviet government-founded R&D center.

Despite being the developer of Tetris, Pajitnov did not profit from his creation; in accordance with USSR copyright law at the time of the game's publication, rights were owned by the government and it was thus distributed freely throughout the USSR and Eastern Bloc countries. He only started profiting from his creation by 1996 when he and formed.

Biography
Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris with the help of Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov in 1985. The game, first available in the Soviet Union, appeared in the West in 1986. Pajitnov also created the lesser known sequel to Tetris, entitled Welltris, which has the same principle but in a three dimensional environment where you see the "board" from above. Tetris was licensed and managed by Soviet company Elorg which had been founded specially for this purpose, and advertised with the slogan "From Russia with Love" (on NES: "From Russia With Fun!"). Because he was employed by the Soviet government, Pajitnov did not receive royalties. Pajitnov, together with Vladimir Pokhilko, moved to the United States in 1991 and founded The Tetris Company with Henk Rogers.

He helped design the puzzles in the Super NES versions of Yoshi's Cookie and designed the game Pandora's Box, which incorporates more traditional jigsaw-style puzzles.

He began working for Microsoft in October 1996. Pajitnov worked for the Microsoft Entertainment Pack: The Puzzle Collection, MSN Mind Aerobics and MSN Games groups. Pajitnov's new, enhanced version of Hexic, Hexic HD, was included with every new Xbox 360 Premium package. He left Microsoft in 2005.

On August 18, 2005 WildSnake Software announced Pajitnov will be collaborating with them to release a new line of puzzle games.

Awards and recognition

 * On March 7, 2007, Alexey Pajitnov received the Game Developers Choice Awards First Penguin Award]]. The award was given for pioneering the casual games market.
 * On June 24, 2009, Alexey Pajitnov received the honorary award at the LARA - Der Deutsche Games Award in Cologne, Germany.