The NES Tetris (1989) is the version most Americans grew up on, but its real story is a legal thriller.

Alexey Pajitnov wrote the game in 1984 at a Soviet state computing center, which meant the state owned it and Pajitnov personally earned nothing from it for a decade. The rights then passed through a chain of licensing deals so tangled that two different companies ended up believing they owned the same thing. Atari's Tengen label shipped an NES Tetris. Nintendo shipped one too. Nintendo's lawyers went looking at the original contract and found that the license Tengen was relying on covered computers, not consoles.

Nintendo won. Tengen's cartridges were pulled and destroyed, though around a quarter of a million had already sold, which is why that black-boxed version is a collector's prize today. The consensus among people who have played both is annoying for Nintendo: the Tengen version has two-player simultaneous mode, better music options and a cleaner rotation system. Nintendo's is the one that survived.

The same fight is why Tetris ended up bundled with the Game Boy, which is the deal that actually made both of them, and Pajitnov finally started receiving royalties in 1996 when the rights reverted to him.

The game needs no introduction. Rotate the tetrominoes, clear lines, chase the four-line Tetris. The NES version tops out at level 29, where pieces move faster than the game will let you slide them, and for twenty years that was considered the end of the game until a generation of players worked out hypertapping and rolling and pushed past it on stream.

The Type-A theme is "Korobeiniki", a 19th-century Russian folk song about a peddler, and it is now one of the most recognizable melodies on Earth.

I keep the Nintendo cart. The Tengen one is the white whale.