PicoBlog

Robert Maxwell, father of the infamous Ghislaine Maxwell, was one of the entrepreneurs vying to control Tetris, and even tried (and failed) to get Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev involved. Maxwell died shortly after, conveniently falling off his yacht as his various financial misdeeds were about to come to light.

Nintendo's Howard Lincoln was sent to Star City, Russia's secret cosmonaut training center, in an attempt to get Nintendo to sponsor the Soviet space program. Russia also offered to paint a Nintendo logo on the side of a Soyuz spacecraft at one point.

Soviet and Russian images and music were only added later by western game marketers to make Tetris feel more mysterious and give it an air of Cold War intrigue. 

Atari's Tengen brand version of Tetris for the NES was recalled and all copies ordered to be destroyed after a legal battle between Nintendo and Atari. 

Henk Rogers showed up in Moscow in 1989, on a tourist visa, and talked his way into the headquarters of the powerful Soviet trade and licensing group called ELORG. 

That Soviet technology trade group, ELORG, was shocked to find console versions of Tetris being sold in Japan and the West. It had neither signed a deal for those rights, nor seen any money from them. 

The head of ELORG ended up personally "owning" a chunk of the rights to Tetris after the Soviet Union collapsed. He had to be bought out years later by Henk and Alexey. 

Tetris is one of science’s most-studied games and has been shown to counteract the effects of PTSD and also make brain functioning more efficient. 

Henk Rogers talked Nintendo exec Minoru Arakawa into packaging Tetris with the new Game Boy handheld, amazingly winning out over more obvious choices like Mario and Donkey Kong.

Russian student Vadim Gerasimov, later an engineer at Google, created the first "IBM-compatible" version of Tetris and added features like the game's colored blocks. He was briefly listed as a co-creator or designer on some versions of the game…before being retconned out.