The story of bringing Tetris to the Western world is a tale fraught with aggressive lawyers, sluggish government politics, desperate races against time, and some Finnish beer. It began with a young man named Alexey Pajitnov, a resident of Moscow, Russia. As a young man, he excelled in mathematics (he was a finalist in a citywide mathematics competition at age 14), and he created his first computer program at 15 — a number game. Though he enjoyed the worlds that math held, he also hung out with his friends to play cards, drank vodka, and was a normal schoolboy in every sense of the word. After his university studies and graduation, he took up a job at a technical Moscow university where he worked in the field of math applications. Though he enjoyed his work, he soon discovered his passion f