donald trump may absolutely convince the readers of your newspapers or the viewer of c-span but they never believed him in the first place, probably they believe in the elite media. >> you can watch this and other programs online booktv.org.

good evening everyone. thanks for coming out to with us tonight. we are thrilled to have dan ackerman with us to launch the tetris affect, the game that hypnotize the world. dan is a native new yorker and moved into the neighborhood a few years ago and we are very glad to have him there. he is section editor at nina and runs the gadget testing lab over there. he has been a talking head on just about every news program imaginable and appears regularly as it in-house technology expert on cbs this morning. this is his first book before i

invite him up i'm going to read a quote. tetris affect is a thrilling, globetrotting history book charting the creation of the greatest game ever played. without further ado, please welcome dan ackerman. [applause] >> thanks for coming everybody. my name is dan ackerman and this is not only my first book but my first book reading. it took me 20 years to come up with a story i thought was really worth telling in this more expanded format. we will read a little bit tonight and talk and take some

questions and have some fun. i think the number one question i get, before we get into too far is why this story about this videogame, this retro game. i think anyone who has a history in the interest of games or history knows a little bit about this story. tetris is the game you played, your mother played, everybody played. they may know there's some russian background in the red box that would come in and the backwards are on the box in the russian music that you hear on the game. they may know there was some legal battles over who owned it and things like that. that is interesting, to be sure, but when i started looking at it in more depth is this is not a videogame story, this was a start up story. he really had great parallels to the start up stories that we talk about today, that we obsess

over out of silicone valley and elsewhere. it has a loan creator that comes up with something great that goes viral. it has different people competing for ownership, business business deals, shady business deals, backstabbing, globetrotting, a lot of the things we expect. there was a movie that was about the founding of facebook and i found so many parallels and it made it feel fresh and relevant for today. beyond that it's the story about the west and russia. it was a different russia back then. in the 80s it was the tail end of the soviet area and the time of great mistrust but tetris built bridges between cultures. we go into a lot of that in the

book. once again were at a time of great tension between russia and the west and that made it feel very relevant to me. back in the 80s we were talking about western companies appropriating software and they try to get there piece of the money. being this was the very end of the soviet era, currency was very valuable and hard to come by and this became an issue that went up to the highest levels of the state, up to gorbachev. course today we are dealing with russia trying to influence american election through technology and hacking and that is something we've talked about a lot recently. that's another step that parallels there. that one only began very recently. there's a lot about the story. most of the book takes place between 19841989 and there's a

lot that is really relevant today if you are interested in how it crosses cultures. the other thing that drew me into this once i realized that if you wanted to tell a good history story when you wanted to tell it in a way that resonated with people, you had to make it a story. to make a you have to have great characters. i was not expecting to find this when i started my research but i found a cast of the most amazing characters you can imagine. most of the people, i was was fortunate enough to. >> guest: as i wrote this book and they really came alive because this book is about them and their globetrotting adventures that still have impact on us today if you've ever played tetris were mario brothers or nintendo wii or any handheld game like that, you've

been influenced by these events. when a start off with the person i think is the hero of the story, someone who's not well-known if you're not well versed in history of games and technology and that is rogers. he becomes the entry point to the book. he was born in the netherlands and came to the u.s. as a young child i went to high school here and went to college in hawaii. he became very interested in computer program. were talking back in the 70s with mainframe computers. he moved to japan and single-handedly revolutionize the videogame in the history by not even speaking any japanese. he created the first japanese role-playing game who criticizes this dutch american guy and he

went on to become a software anthropologist. we open the book with hank rogers as he is flying to moscow as part of this very complicated business deal where companies are already making money off tetris and the russians want to know where that money went and everyone is trying to see if they can get in there to become the preferred broker for texas for the world. have to find a secret government organization and that is called the lord, sounds sounds like something out of a james bond villain movie. so hank rogers literally has to go to moscow for the first time, uninvited with no meeting set up. they don't know where the officers are and they have to

find either lord and that's where we join in at the beginning of the book. the first chapters called the great race. the airplane lurched into the final descent toward moscow. hank rogers gripped the warm arm rest wedged against him. he was circling the globe and chasing business deals with new technology and left him feeling like a well-traveled citizen of the world but this was altogether different. he was shaking with an trepidation pity spent the last 11 hours on a flight jointly operated by japan airlines in the soviet airline that allowed the russians a hand in curing the passengers across the pacific and onto the russian continent. with his seatback in front of him, he asked himself what was worst, going in blind to a strange city and strange country without speaking any of the

language or entering a country under false pretense. the paperwork felt heavy in his pocket. he had no doubt that if he was caught lying, the powerful business interest would cut him loose without a thought. heat appeared to be just another opportunist slapping on. [inaudible] he wondered how a simple deal had taken them from japan to the ussr, tasked with chasing down the government while staying one step ahead of powerful mercenaries who would stop at nothing. to fly into the heart of the soviet union in the late 1990s was to take an uncertain step beyond the feared iron curtain. a political and psychological barrier that kept 280 million

citizens locked away from the rest of the world. secret police years were everywhere in moscow during the final year of the cold war. journalists could expect their phone to be tapped in their hotel rooms to be bugged and to be tailed around town. new reality started to show the east versus west rivalry. with it came influence that was craved in feared western money. it was into this environment that hank rogers flew in 1989. he was one of three westerners distending on moscow almost simultaneously chasing the same price. they were having a profound impact on people around the world. that technology was perhaps the greatest cultural export.

they circled the globe numerous times in multiple formats and an on past source of much needed cash. street after street, buildings flew by the window of his task taxi into the heart of moscow. could this be the epicenter of the feared empire,. [inaudible] shadows of the city's history of art and commerce. it was commerce that brought him here despite the tourist visa. he hoped the checkbook in his pocket and the promise that a hefty bankroll from his unofficial sponsors would be enough to smooth things over if his legal status became an issue pretty was only entering one of

the most closed off societies on earth looking at dropping as well partners in favor of an uninvited guest. suggested it might be the exact tool he needed to get through the wall with the russians. despite the media reports, the soviet empire was hanging by a thread. a brief era of prosperity was over. this is a time of frustrated citizens with little money and even less to spend it on. one half of the ussr bureaucracy was tasked with luring hard currency behind the iron curtain. the other half was on a mission to have local privilege and power by any means necessary. there was a sign on the front yard that set open for business and someone had scrawled now go away. in less than three years this would be gone, dissolved by

mikael gorbachev, the final leader of the ussr. it's cutthroat capitalism. intellectual property replace state secrets to be fought over and even stolen. a hotel room reservation had been a minor victory. customer service remained a novel idea in russia. an idea that has changed little in a 25 years since since. the pages of his notebook include russian, mostly in the form of questions rogers new little, finding this man could be the key to the multimillion

dollar deal away from his adversaries. the privilege son of a hard core media mogul. anyone who has taken on maxwell and his father proved the old adage of starting a war for anyone who buys ink by the barrel. robert stein had a street hustlers player. he stumbled across the lucky break but rogers knew there was more to stein than simple life. during this final week of february, 1989, all 89, all three men were in a race to moscow aiming to undercut the others and strike a deal worth millions with the increasing paranoid russian state as the unlikely prize. tetris was the most important technology to come out of the country. that was something i was questioned about several times. everyone says the same thing. the most important since

sputnik. i said think about it. whatever technological advances can you remember from the cold war era. hank rogers plays a big role in our story. we will talk to him again but will give you a heads, he grew up in new york, went to a high school back in the 60s and they had access to one of the very early mainframe computers. it's one of the only high schools in the country that you could have computer access to his xts as a high school student. in in order to program on it you had to basically create a punch card, an old school punch card, drop it in a draw in a room somewhere in the technicians would come and take the draw that each class had and they would run them through and go

through the results several days later and see if your output was what you expected. if not you have to go through the whole process again. hank got really tired and weak between runs for his punch card so he figured out how to hack the punchcard queue system by making multiple card and putting him in every classes draw so every time they came to run cards, his card would get run and he'd go and make changes and put the card and all the drawers. i was hearing this from hank, i said that's really great story. the other big character that we should talk about, we mentioned briefly is alexey pajitnov, the guy who actually created tetris. many people thought he was the original programmer. the version he created will be

familiar to you in some ways but not in other ways. the interesting thought process that he goes through as a teenager, he broke his leg, he was laid up for months. when you break you break your leg as a teenager in the u.s. is they put a cast on and you go home. in the soviet union back in the 70s, you go into the soviet hospital. you'll be here for a long time. you have this giant cast halfway up your body. he was bedridden for months with a simple fracture. some of his friends brought him some puzzle in math books and he went from being a regular teenager to being obsessed with math and puzzles and became a real math whiz and had a very high level of education decided to become a computer programmer. he wanted access to the small handful of computers you could get access to in the early '80s in moscow. he went to the russian academy of sciences. i will tell you a little bit about his early experience was

trying to create a game on his. primitive computers which were basically russian knockoffs of american computers from ten or 15 years before. they were working on artificial intelligence, voice recognition, things people still struggle with today. if you re-create game experiences on his electronic computers, alexey pajitnov found inspiration in the isle of children's books. the shop have been a landmark for decades. it's a corner building with breathtaking stone arches. only a short different from kgb headquarters. it off a chant offered the latest tools and entertainment for store children. there was a simple set of puzzle pieces that caught his eye.

he spent hours fitting the pieces together trying to bridge the connection between these simple geometric designs and the computer platforms that it worked on. he knew he could transform these [inaudible] even to us in the western is incredibly advanced, but especially in russia. the basic idea of what would become tetris started to take place. the problem was that his hardware was close to a decade out of date compared to what amateur programs in the rest of the world had access to. re-creating the effect of the puzzle, it had five sides instead of four, it required his computer but it had no ability

to draw the most primitive computer graphics. his initial and prophetic solution was to create a stand-in using the alphanumeric on his keyboard using punctuation keys. he carefully quoted multiple display lines to come up with a shake. he had a bracket. it wasn't pretty but it worked. it was crafted in six days and the five shapes were cut down very quickly to four segments that we know from tetris. then he formed seven basic shapes. the first was a very basic recreation of the puzzle. he move the pieces around and you fit them into a box like a puzzle until they fit and that was it. after an initial attempt at spatial manipulation, it was a

breakthrough but even he could tell after a couple times of playing it was just dull and needed something else computer puzzles were different than wood or paper or plastic puzzles. it created a more manipulative relationship with the player. it deemed light and demanded action. the game played on the computer had a be more of a game than a puzzle in the game required timing, danger and a push towards action. for professional programmer like tran1, the mechanics of creating the game were easy but the idea of simply dropping these shapes into a box lacked the quality of a good game. alexey pajitnov continued to

work taking time here and there over the next several weeks to pare his new game down to its most basic enema elements. he had to strictly enforce design minimal code and that led to an idea. what if it didn't need the entire computer screen. just because the monitor was a square didn't mean that everything displayed on it had to fit into the square. the small innovation changed the game just as he had originally trimmed the shape from five segments to four segments, it ran from the top to the bottom and you could be focused on making fast accurate choices. once all of the spaces along the horizontal row were filled in, the space was filled up in any area underneath it was out of reach. the game ended too quickly leaving little reason to play it more than once or twice. he looked at the display, hating

to see all of that wasted space on his newly created field. a horizontal row is filled with segments, leaving no gaps left to right, the road manages and it opens the downward path for the next pieces to fill. the goal becomes not only putting things together but causing as many lines to disappear as possible. where he had spent countless hours at the computer center working on an academic project or testing new hardware, he now spent similar hours working on tweaking and playing this new game. sometimes he pretended to work on a software debugging project while playing round after round of tetris unable to keep his fingers up keyboard.

they worked with programmers to translate it onto other platforms. any added color and more shapes in scoring and all the things we think of as being part of the game now. these guys were very entrepreneurial at the time. alexi and his friend had an idea, even back in the 80s to find a way to package them together, but the problem was there were no role models to look up to figure out how you can start a business and do that, especially in this era right before gorbachev took over , the country would change radically in a few years but at this point there was no way to do that. even if he did, as you find out as you read the book, the soviet state comes in and says, i can't believe you're trying to sell

something. we actually own everything. we don't know what intellectual property rights are, but whatever they are, that's hours also. the game is really addictive it and now are to take a little sidetracked here. to tell you little bit about that addiction as told through the story of a writer named goldsmith who wrote for wired and a bunch of other magazines and he had a unique experience with tetris in the '90s. it actually gives us the title and he's the guy who coined that phrase. he's a writer and he lived in mexico for a while and moved to japan and there was a 1990 trip and something caught his eye in the city.

he watched man in a parked car. he was unaware he was being watched. but he was engrossed with something in his hand. he could see he was handing a nintendo game boy device. it was a new invention. after this initial encounter, he was seeing the game everywhere. he continued to see people with their heads staring down at the screen. kinda like pokémon go today. he returned to japan pretty wanted to retreat to the countryside to work on his novel but first he arranged to stay with the german friend in tokyo for a week. to pass the time while his friend was at work, he picked up a japanese version of the game boy machine which he had seen

people playing in new york. at the time, the game boy came packaged with a single game cartridge tetris. the moment he fired up tetris on his very own game boy, things changed. his one week visit lead pastor mug. he was chained to the gamepad he sat in a small guest room and ventured out only for food and batteries. he was self-aware to notice the effect the game had on him pretty when he would visit a convenience store, he would would buy snacks and other items and then nonchalantly toss a pack of batteries on at the last minute even though read punishing the power supply for his game boy was the real reason he was at the store in the first place. he wasn't quite sure what he hoped to get out of the experience nor did he think about it in terms of achieving a certain high score. instead he progress level by level battling the games after day but on his occasional walks around tokyo, he does discovered he was mentally putting cars, people and buildings together.

not only does the game have an addictive hold over him, but it, but it was altering the way he saw a reality. this was not strong enough to blur the line between real and fantasy. he was not alone in his observations. in the following year groups of researchers discovered tetris as a perfect tool for cognitive research. then, after six weeks of an addiction, he discovered something on expansive. after he said passed a high score with puzzle pieces, the game ended. the tiny screen informed him he had one. he had been tetris. the game celebrated the achievement with a short animation of russian dancers kicking their way through a folk dance followed by another animated scene with the space

shuttle, an american looking space shuttle lifting off the launch pad and going into the sky. that was it, tetris was over. he felt a great weight lifted from him. he couldn't believe there was nothing left to accomplish in the game. the game provided a high and a wired feeling. once that was conquered, the need to play was over. from that moment on the spell was broken. he went to countryside seeking solitude and he didn't turn on the game boy again. he has played it a few times since then but only in the most casual way. that experience had such an impact on goldsmith that a couple years later he pitch the

story to wired about the game and he ended up talking to alexey pajitnov and scientist and he wrote a profile that is still well known and it's called this is your brain on tetris. in that he coined the phrase the type tetris effect. he said that's when you look at a blank wall and you close your eyes and if you play bejeweled or candy crush or anything else and you have the same effect. scientist have also studied this in the term they used was the term he coined. he wrote in into a grocery store clerk years later unaware that this term was so wildly used and he said you're packing groceries so expertly and he said you ever see this shapes in your mind and she said no i don't get the tetris effect from this. she he said i think i created that phrase. he knows he's a part of history. he also.another phrase in that

same article which he describes as a technology that has the same addictive effect is a drug is not the term people also use now you get that endorphin rush from hearing that paying on your phone when you get a mention somewhere. were all very familiar with it today. i am going to jump forward and tell you about a couple of my other favorite characters and we'll talk about whatever you want to talk about. this is one of my favorite antidotes because it's about my buddy hank rogers and i bring in other characters. a guy who was the chief counsel for nintendo of america for many years and after that, he retired after 15 years with the mariners who is also owned by nintendo.

he was an attack dog lawyer who basically won a case with nintendo who was being sued for donkey kong which was too much like king kong but he won the case and even got the other company to pay nintendo for legal fees. he eventually agreed to join the family business, came to america and was responsible for getting the system into toy stores in the 80s which became an american phenomenon. he even brought over a japanese engineer that had a junkie game that nobody wanted on it. put it on all these cabinets that we have in a warehouse somewhere and they came up with donkey kong which gave way to

every mario game and everything else nintendo you can think of. he was actually aghast of apple talking about the new mario game that's finally coming to ios. this little story right here comes when nintendo executives are in russia for hard-nosed negotiations, tensions are high, there's, there's not a lot to do in moscow in the 80s if you're visiting foreign business persons, there's a couple restaurants you can go to but that's about it. the tension continued into the evening hour because there was precious little to do in moscow for uninitiated visitors. lincoln had grown weary of finding a restaurant and at one point he said it would be nice to go to the theater that represented russian culture too much of the outside world. not long after, rogers pulled him aside.

he said we could go to the theater. he drove the two partners to the theater that night in his flashy rented mercedes, drop them them off in front of the pillars of the main entrance. a pick you up right after the show he promised as they were pulling away into the night. they entered the theater, originally built in 1821 that houses expansive ballet and opera companies not knowing what to expect. despite being acquired at the last minute, the tickets work very good. we can looked out over the crowd as the performance was about to start and a ball headed figured strolled through the audience who is instantly recognizable. that's gorbachev. he strained to see for himself and there is another man who inserted himself into the

conversation and confirm the identity. he sat by himself briefly until a long line of official looking men sat down and joined him in the same row leaving the entire row behind him empty. they explained that the group were all members of the central committee. sitting in their premium seats, they they realized they had no idea what the nights entertainment would be. they simply wanted to attend and never bothered to ask what the show tickets were actually four. as they played, lincoln's mood soured. he was already planning an exit strategy. he whispered, there's no no way we will ever find hank rogers again. he smiled, zero yes, he'll, he'll be right outside. he said he would pick us up. >> that's the general secretary of the communist party, the the head of state. you think they're gonna let him anywhere near, there's no way he's going to find a.

>> oh yes, it's not problem he insisted. as the last range of music faded, they made a break for the theater just as the applause began to swell. they raced down trying to get ahead of the crowd finding a block of limousines waiting. one at the head of the line was a specially's extravagant and looked like it sat low to the ground. that must be gorbachev's mo. part right in front of it was the mercedes. i have no idea how he did that. they dove into the backseat and sped away tearing through red square late at night as if the country were his two by himself. that's one of my favorite stories in the book about hank who is just this extraordinary figure. that was my attempt to give you guys some flavor of the characters in this book because it's a very character driven story. i think we have a few minutes if

anyone wants to ask a question or two and then i'm happy to chitchat some more or sign books. i believe there's a microphone floating around back there. >> thank you very much, that was very interesting. i'm just curious if there was any interesting back story that was involved with the music that accompanied, you mentioned it was rush and folk music and that's the first time i heard that but it so linked to the gameplay in the sense of urgency that you get heard the music in the game, it's so recognizable when you hear it. it's funny, in the '90s there was a dance remix that was a uk chart hit by an artist named doctor spin and it turns out doctor spin was a stage name for andrew lloyd webber.

it was actually on the top charts again. the red box, the backwards are in the box, the russian imagery and the music were all added by russian programmers. the game was from russia, they played it, they knew it was from russia. they didn't need any of that tell the map, but the uk and american company said let's put all the stuff on it and that's going to make it feel like forbidden fruit, something secretive from behind the iron curtain. that's really how they sold it as something maybe you weren't supposed to play, and that's why the imagery in that music is still linked to the game today. >> this is super interesting. is there still a russian crowd for the game today, wasn't as popular there as it is here.

>> yes, it was very popular there as well. everyone had a copy of tetris. back then, you literally had to make a copy on an old floppy disk and walk it over to someone because there was no internet to speak of. we call that sneakernet. eventually, it propagated out and it actually got into the web because a copy made it to hungry and their little more open to business and a businessman sat there and it started the whole back and forth about who owns the game and can we publish it and it's a big part of the story there. alexi, even though he lives in the u.s. now is proud of his russian heritage. he is really number one star russian programmer. that was great. it's really interesting. how did he come to be, i remember playing it mostly on game boy and mostly because it came free with your game boy. how did it come to become free on the game boy and did anyone

ever get paid for that. >> that's a great example of what we call the killer rat, the the match of the perfect hardware and software. it was like a secret r&d project at nintendo for years. hank rogers actually went and talked to them and said, i know you're working on the secret project. instead of putting on mario or something like that, that's great, but only, but only kids who like mario are going to buy it. what you put this game that i'm working on a computer version of for the japanese market. it's kind of a risk, i know that, but trust me on this. everyone eventually bought into the idea and that's part of the whole race to moscow for the handheld rights for that game. there's a lot of fights about money in the book. eventually the russians did get a lot of the money however alexi didn't get any of it because he was just an employee of a russian research institute and they said we own everything. one of the nice things as, if you read through it, hank and

alexi who formed this lifelong partnership, they're still friends and business partners 30 years later, they were able to pull back his portions of the rights. they both have done very well for themselves. >> it's so awesome to hear you read this. my question is, the story could have been told very dryly and it's not. it's like really juicy. all these little he said that and even the thing you said about the show, i just wonder how much of it is your imagination running away with it and little tiny details that you are adding, how much of that did you actually know and how much do you have license to add in from your imagination. >> a lot of nonfiction these days is narrative nonfiction,

almost like the accent of alien errors, they tell a lot of stories. i actually try to stay away from that and every little fun interaction i try to base on an actual conversation that i had with one of the people involved and i use their version of the story and i draw the details out of them to try to get some the little bits about gorbachev and the guy in the booth with him and the armored car to try to then tell it in a fashion so maybe it comes out a little more narrative feeling than the way it was told to me, but i was always looking for those details. a great example is one time i was talking to alexey pajitnov and he said as a teenager he broke his leg and was laid up and he learned to love puzzles and games. i said okay that's a good story and then my wife heard that and she said how did he break his leg. i said i don't really know. she said you gotta call him back and find out how he broke his leg. the next time i talk to him i

said listen, you told me the story about breaking your leg, i have to actually hear what happened. i don't think he had ever told anyone the story, but he was cutting school and he went to get a haircut and he was crossing a street and saw the shuttle bus that he had to take back to his neighborhood and he ran to catch it when he slipped into a slushy puddle and fell sideways and broke his leg and that's the whole back story about the how he ended up made up. i looked through all these opportunities to try to drag out the stories and make it as narrative as possible. it strikes me is the way people like to read history nonfiction these days so i try to come up with a version that was very readable but still very rooted in fact. >> awesome. it sounds like our questions but i feel like we've run through most of our time anyway. thank you everyone for coming. it's so great to be here. [applause]

[inaudible conversation] thank you everybody. >> thank you so much everybody. [applause] [inaudible conversation] >> this is book tv on c-span two, television for serious readers. here is our primetime lineup. starting shortly, nobel prize-winning economist discusses the future of the euro then eight, dan slater reports on the war on drugs through the eyes of two texas teenagers employed by a mexican drug cartel.