Soviet Blocks: The Bizarre Puzzle of How Tetris Embraced Western Values

A geopolitical and legal history of the bestselling videogame Tetris—the stunningly successful game that began in a Soviet research lab monitored by the KGB.

Tetris—the game that would take the world by storm—was formally introduced to the West in 1987, at a time when Soviet technology exports were minimal and the Berlin Wall was still standing strong. Far from being a capitalist cultural product, the game had actually been designed in a Soviet computer lab tightly monitored by the KGB, at a...