Samizdat very specifically refers to censored texts. Yeah sure various versions of Tetris informally circulated around on floppies/tapes just like all other games and software, but that's not samizdat and had nothing to do with freedom to publish or censorship, there just weren't many viable ways to distribute the software to private users (and not many of those to begin with). It was way too long ago and I don't remember if any Soviet magazines like Radio had actual listings, but Tetris was a popular game in them.
The parent comment already removed the part about vinyl recordings, but I still really want to point out that people in the USSR had to be creative (have to be even now) to bypass censorship.
This created things like roentgenizdat or "ribs" (gramophone recordings made from polyester X-ray films)
This is a plot point in the excellent Star City, a spin-off of For All Mankind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_City_(TV_series). Also see this project by English musician Stephen Coates: https://www.x-rayaudio.com/
No, samizdat was not just about censored texts. The larger point of samizdat is specifically about viable ways to distribute your stuff even if it was not seen even by a single censor. It was even used for cooking recipes and fanzines.
The point is that in USSR it was not possible for an ordinary person to publish anything because the equipment and how to use it was a state secret tightly controlled by KGB. If you wanted to publish something you made and didn't have a cozy relationship with the communist party, samizdat was the only option.
That's another extreme and just wrong. Of course if you were a dissident or just had wrong friends you couldn't even publish a cookbook, but plenty of non-members of either the party or the writers union were publishing their stuff, see Kir Bulychev as a notorious example or an ordinary guy with the disdain for the party (and his father was a lawyer thrown out of the party and his grandfather fought in the White Army, so he was certainly "на карандаше") who nevertheless was one of the most popular Soviet science fiction writers. Or Genrikh Altov (known to some HN users for his TRIZ) who was a political prisoner and had a conflict with the union.
So yeah, it was possible. Before 1987 your stuff had to pass the editorial board and литование by the censorship body, and of course you must not have been viewed as disloyal or suspicious. Travelers, beginner writers, critics, etc. all published their stuff. I have a 1982 fungi reference book written in Ukrainian by a non-member of either the union or the party, just a long-time amateur outdoorsman.
In any case, games were freely published. Magazines in particular routinely published listings sent by random readers.
It's not really publishing as a private person. Which was impossible/illegal as people didn't have access to printing equipment. Yes you could publish it by sending it to a newspaper or magazine.
My dad had a bunch of samizdat books and periodicals. Some were typed on a typewriter, some were printed on a dot matrix printer (closest to what you can call directly accessible mass printing in the USSR). None of those were recipe books, these were all texts impossible to publish.
Hmm, according to Wikipedia this happened in the Computational Centre for the USSR Science Academy. As far as I know it was never a "closed" institute, so the article is over dramatising it at least.
And the copyright on tetris pieces is just ridiculous given the Colomb's publication and probably others.
I personally appreciated the write-up as it presents an alternative to the glossed up candy narrative that I have read and seen more than once.
Didn't know about Gerasimov either (who single-handedly coded up the DOS version it seems).
> Contrary to the claim attributed to Henk Rogers there were no "straightforward business arrangement" between Pajitnov and myself. In the Soviet Union, where private business was outlawed and the concept of intellectual property was not defined, people could not make private business arrangements of this kind. The Computer Center of Academy of Sciences owned everything we made. Several years later the situation in the Soviet Union changed, but this was a different story. When I worked on Tetris, even a government organization could not formally hire me because I was underage. I worked on Tetris just for fun. I don't remember Pajitnov ever paying me for anything related to Tetris either. Pajitnov started fixing the business aspects of the situation a few years later when he and Henk Rogers participated in negotiations with Elorg (the only government organization in the USSR that could sell software abroad). Pajitnov stopped by my home and asked me to urgently sign a paper "to get lots of money for us from game companies". He didn't leave me a copy of the paper. As far as I remember the paper was saying that I agree to only claim porting Tetris to the PC, agree to give Pajitnov the right to handle all business arrangements, and refuse any rewards related to Tetris. I did not entirely agree with the content, but I trusted Alexey and signed the paper anyway. In a few months my name disappeared from all newly released versions of Tetris and all Tetris-related documents. Alexey registered a US copyright (R/N PA-412-170) referencing the free PC version of Tetris (original version 3.12) we developed together.
Also I wonder how Vadim Gerasimov managed to obtain an IBM PC-compatible computer: where he got the money and what store would be selling that. This shows how unequal and unfair the society became when reforms began at the late USSR. In earlier USSR, everybody would equally and fairly have no computer.
Knowing that the principle of Tetris is to destroy the walls that form when the shapes land, I start to wonder what was the winning condition of this version
That's the political fluff. The important thing was the spread of capitalism and its accompanying legal institutions such as trademark and copyright - which Tetris definitely represented.
1. [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1836974/]
Meanwhile the Tetris film was awful. The Tetris rights negotiations were all about the various sides wrestling for power and the Soviets trying to play them against each other. The film basically goes "nah that's too boring for our target audience" and tries to make it into a Cold War spy thriller, but the hamfisted modifications to the events that transpired make the plot nonsensical (especially for general audiences that would be unfamiliar with what actually happened).
> Meanwhile the Tetris film was awful. The Tetris rights negotiations were all about the various sides wrestling for power and the Soviets trying to play them against each other. The film basically goes "nah that's too boring for our target audience" and tries to make it into a Cold War spy thriller, but the hamfisted modifications to the events that transpired make the plot nonsensical (especially for general audiences that would be unfamiliar with what actually happened).
It was definitely a bit much in places, but it was a fun dramatization. Having been very familiar with the background, they at least did a good job of keeping it interesting enough where even a non-gamer would stay interested through the film as far as theming/story/etc.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fQtxKmgJC8