On Tetris & its music

[Eino Keskitalo]

Here's an interesting quote from Alexey Patijnov in an article from June regarding the history of Tetris (source):

Spectrum HoloByte, the US company who produced one of the earlier versions, had a big influence on how it was marketed. I found all those matryoshka dolls and churches a bit tacky, but they helped sales. They chose Korobeiniki, a 19th-century Russian folk song, for the music; and Nintendo later included Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker theme. It was very embarrassing for me: when kids of the world hear these pieces of music, they start screaming: "Tetris! Tetris!" That's not very good for Russian culture.

It kind of irks me personally how OCR allows the Game Boy Tetris music to be arranged for the site - because when I hear the music, I don't hear "Tetris" or game music but indeed that one Russian folk song (maybe it's because of living in a neighboring country). The final sentence in the above quote though - surely Tetris is a part of (or at least a product of) Russian culture too!

[Chernabogue]

Interesting article, thanks for sharing!