Stories Behind
the Games

In the summer of 1984, a 29-year-old Soviet computer scientist named Alexey Pajitnov sat at an Elektronika 60 terminal in Moscow's Dorodnicyn Computing Centre and built himself a game to kill time. He was fascinated by pentominoes — geometric puzzles using five connected squares — but found them too complex for a computer. He simplified to tetrominoes, four squares each, and made them fall. He called it Tetris — a fusion of "tetromino" and "tennis," his favourite sport.

What followed was one of the strangest intellectual property sagas in technology history. Because Pajitnov worked for a Soviet state institute, the game legally belonged to the USSR. He gave it away to colleagues freely, never imagining it would escape the country. It did — passed hand to hand on floppy disks, ported to dozens of machines, arriving in Hungary, then spreading to the West.

The game's licensing became a corporate battlefield. Robert Stein of Mirrorsoft and Robert Maxwell's media empire, Atari, Nintendo, and the Soviet state export agency ELORG all claimed rights simultaneously. When Nintendo secured the rights for the Game Boy in 1989, Tetris shipped with every unit — and the Game Boy became the best-selling portable console of its era. The combination was electric: people played Tetris for hours on buses, trains, and planes. It was the first software product commercially exported by the Soviet Union.

Pajitnov himself earned nothing from the game's early success — all royalties went to the Soviet government. It wasn't until 1996, after the Soviet Union dissolved, that he finally gained control of the rights and founded The Tetris Company. He has said he holds no bitterness; the fact that his puzzle brought joy to hundreds of millions of people was reward enough. Today, Tetris is the best-selling paid video game of all time, with over 500 million copies sold across all platforms.

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The year is 1979. Toru Iwatani, a 25-year-old designer at Namco, is staring at an empty lunch table. He has been tasked with creating an arcade game that appeals to women — a revolutionary concept in an industry dominated by Space Invaders and shooting games. Iwatani wanted something non-violent. Something cute. He thought about eating, about fun, about the mouth. Then he looked down at his pizza with one slice removed. There it was.

Iwatani's original name for the character was Pakkuman — a Japanese onomatopoeia for the sound of a mouth opening and snapping shut. Western distributors anglicised it to Pac-Man, and an icon was born. The ghosts — Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde — each have distinct AI personalities. Blinky chases directly. Pinky targets four squares ahead of Pac-Man. Inky uses a complex calculation involving both Blinky and Pac-Man's position. Clyde pursues Pac-Man but retreats when he gets too close.

The ghost AI contains a deliberate flaw: on the very first frame of each scatter phase, the ghosts make a random decision rather than following their rules. Iwatani intentionally introduced this randomness because perfect AI would make the game unbeatable and frustrating. The art was in the ghost being almost predictable — giving players the satisfying illusion of outsmarting them.

Pac-Man became the first video game to cross from gaming into mainstream pop culture. In 1982, at the height of its popularity, there were Pac-Man breakfast cereals, lunchboxes, a Saturday morning cartoon, and a US number-one pop song called "Pac-Man Fever." The character's silhouette is so simple and recognisable that it requires no caption in any country on Earth.

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Dong Nguyen built Flappy Bird in two to three days in his Hanoi apartment. It was a side project, one of several he'd been releasing quietly on the App Store without much reaction. He uploaded it in May 2013, where it sat silently for months. Then, in January 2014, something happened that nobody — least of all Nguyen — could explain. The game went viral.

By February 2014, Flappy Bird was the most downloaded free app on the App Store in 98 countries. Nguyen was reportedly earning $50,000 per day from advertising revenue. Phones with the game installed began selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars. Journalists flew to Hanoi to find him. The attention was overwhelming, relentless, and — for a quiet developer who had made the game as a hobby — completely unwanted.

On February 9, 2014, after a 22-hour warning on Twitter, Nguyen deleted Flappy Bird from both the App Store and Google Play. He never sold it. He never licensed it. He simply took it away. Overnight, a game earning its creator $50,000 a day ceased to exist — by choice. The move generated more press than the game's release. Millions of players who'd been mocking its difficulty were suddenly desperate to play it again.

The genius — or the curse — of Flappy Bird was its punishing simplicity. One button. Physics so tight that every death felt like your fault. Psychologists later pointed to it as a near-perfect example of variable-ratio reinforcement: the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive. The bird didn't need a storyline, characters, or progression. The loop of attempt, failure, and one-more-try was sufficient to hold millions hostage. Nguyen understood this better than most, and it troubled him deeply.

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In 2014, Google Chrome's offline error page was a dead end: a grey screen, a cable icon, and the message "There is no internet connection." A small team at Google decided this moment — frustrating by definition — deserved something better. Their answer was T-Rex Runner, and its backstory is a masterclass in design thinking hidden inside a corporate product.

The dinosaur itself was chosen deliberately. The team — including designers Sebastien Gabriel and Alan Bettes — wanted a mascot that represented the prehistoric, pre-internet era. A T-Rex stood for a time before connectivity, when the world was different. Being offline felt, in a small way, like going back to that time. The sprite was drawn in a chunky pixel style by Gabriel to echo classic 8-bit games.

The game launched in Chrome 35 in September 2014 — but it was hidden. Google's management reportedly worried it would encourage people to go offline deliberately, harming Google's ad business. The game was invisible unless you pressed the spacebar on the error screen. The Easter egg nature of it only amplified its appeal once discovered; players felt like they'd found something secret.

By 2016, Google estimated that roughly 270 million games of Dino Run were played every month. The game has no end state by design — it simply gets faster until you die. The current world record stands above 99,999 points, at which point the scoreboard rolls over to zero and the run continues. The little grey dinosaur has been clocked, drawn, tattooed, and cosplayed across every corner of the internet — the unlikeliest mascot for the world's most powerful technology company.

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In October 2014, Australian studio Hipster Whale — two developers, Matt Hall and Andy Sum — launched Crossy Road on the App Store. They had built it in three months, inspired by a deceptively simple premise: what if Frogger was infinite? What if instead of the river and road being finite obstacles, the world just kept going — endlessly, procedurally, forever?

The game's aesthetic was a deliberate choice. Voxel art — chunky, colourful 3D blocks — gave the game a toybox warmth that contrasted with the increasingly realistic graphics of mainstream games. The characters were rendered like little plastic figurines. The chicken protagonist was chosen as a direct callback to the world's oldest video game joke: why did the chicken cross the road? The game is literally the punchline.

Within 90 days of launch, Crossy Road had been downloaded over 50 million times. Within a year, that number had grown to over 100 million. The game launched with just the chicken, but Hall and Sum quickly understood that character variety was the engine: adding celebrities, pop culture figures, and absurd animals (a zombie, a drop bear, a skeleton bird) gave players a reason to keep playing just to collect the next character.

Crossy Road's most lasting legacy may be its influence on the mobile game economy. It was one of the first major hits to demonstrate that a game could earn enormous revenue without paywalls, manipulation, or grinding mechanics. The developers were transparent about how ads worked and genuinely optional they were. In an industry often criticised for predatory design, Crossy Road stands as proof of another path.

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In 2001, PopCap Games released a browser game called Bejeweled. It was built by Jason Kapalka and Brian Fiete, inspired by a Flash game called "Diamond Mine" that Kapalka had encountered online. They licensed the concept, added satisfying audio feedback — the signature "tink" of matching gems — and a scoring system, and uploaded it to Yahoo! Games. They expected modest interest. What they got was a cultural earthquake.

The match-three mechanic — swap two adjacent gems to create a line of three or more — turns out to be the perfect intersection of accessibility and depth. Anyone can understand it in seconds. Mastering it, however, requires pattern recognition, forward planning, and a feel for chain reactions that takes thousands of games to develop. Bejeweled made the case that puzzle games didn't need narratives, characters, or conflict — the satisfaction of the mechanic was enough.

Bejeweled's most influential innovation wasn't the match-three mechanic itself — similar games existed — but its audio design. The gem-matching sounds were engineered to be intrinsically rewarding: a light "tink" for a single match, escalating to cascading musical notes for chains. Neuroscientists who later studied the game noted that the audio feedback triggered dopamine responses independent of visual reward. PopCap had accidentally designed a game that sounded like success.

Bejeweled has sold over 150 million copies across all platforms, and its match-three formula spawned an entire genre: Candy Crush, Puzzle Quest, and hundreds of successors all trace their lineage directly to Kapalka's gem grid. When EA acquired PopCap in 2011 for $750 million — one of gaming's largest acquisitions at the time — it was Bejeweled's enduring revenue that justified the price tag. A browser game about sparkling rocks had become a financial dynasty.

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Ask anyone where Sudoku comes from, and they'll say Japan. They're wrong — or at least only partly right. The puzzle's true origins lie in a retired architect from Indiana named Howard Garns. In 1979, Garns contributed a puzzle he called "Number Place" to Dell Pencil Puzzles & Word Games magazine. It was a 9×9 grid, nine 3×3 boxes, and a simple rule: each row, column, and box must contain every digit from 1 to 9 exactly once. Garns published it quietly, without fanfare. He died in 1989 without ever knowing what his puzzle would become.

The puzzle arrived in Japan in 1984 when publisher Nikoli introduced it under the name Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru — "the digits must remain single." The name was soon shortened to Sudoku. Japanese puzzle culture, with its love of logic games and its established network of puzzle magazines, embraced it completely. Nikoli refined the format: puzzles should be symmetrical, and the given numbers (clues) should be placed by a human, not a computer, ensuring a particular aesthetic quality.

The mathematics of Sudoku is staggeringly vast. There are 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 valid completed Sudoku grids — roughly 6.7 sextillion. A valid puzzle must have at least 17 clues to have a unique solution (proven by mathematicians in 2012 after a computer search that took years). The minimum number of clues that can yield a satisfying puzzle with a unique solution is a question that occupied professional mathematicians for three decades.

Today, Sudoku is solved by an estimated 100 million people worldwide every day, across newspapers, apps, and websites. Competitive Sudoku exists as a formal sport, with the World Sudoku Championship held annually since 2006. Howard Garns, who invented it in Indiana and never saw any of this, would likely have been baffled. He just thought it was a nice puzzle.

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Gomoku — "five stones" in Japanese — is one of the oldest strategy games ever recorded. Its origins are traced to ancient China, where a game called Wuziqi (五子棋, "five-piece chess") was played on Go boards at least two thousand years ago, possibly much longer. The game spread across East Asia, taking root in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam under different names and with subtle rule variations, but with the same core: be first to get five pieces in a row.

Unlike chess or Go, Gomoku has no defined inventor — it emerged organically, carried along trade routes and by travelling scholars. The game's elegance is mathematical: the 15×15 or 19×19 board offers enough space for strategy but the winning condition — five in a row — is simple enough to teach in thirty seconds. This combination placed it in a rare category of games that are trivially learnable but deeply strategic.

The game's relationship with Go is intimate. For centuries, Gomoku was played on Go boards using Go stones — the same equipment, a completely different game. In Japan, Gomoku was often used to teach younger players board-game thinking before they were ready for Go's complexity. Many Go masters described Gomoku as the game that first taught them to see patterns on a grid — to think in lines, diagonals, and clusters rather than individual stones.

Today, Gomoku is played competitively worldwide under the auspices of the Renju International Federation, founded in 1988. The annual World Renju Championship draws players from dozens of countries. Online platforms host millions of games per month. And yet Gomoku remains one of the least-marketed major abstract games — no branded boards, no celebrity endorsements, no movie deals. It thrives entirely on the power of its own design, as it has for four thousand years.

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Klotski is a puzzle that has been reinvented so many times, under so many names, in so many countries, that tracing its origin is like trying to untangle a knot. The name itself is Polish, from the word klocki — "wooden blocks." But similar sliding block puzzles appear in Chinese puzzle books from the early 1900s, American toy catalogues from the same era, and European mechanical puzzle collections with no clear trail between them.

The classic version — the one most people know — features a 4×5 board, a large 2×2 red block that must be moved to a specific exit, and an arrangement of smaller 1×1 and 1×2 pieces that block the path. The minimum number of moves required to solve the classic configuration is 81 moves. This was proven computationally, not through human play — and the proof took decades to establish, because the problem space is enormous.

The puzzle became widely known in the West through a 1927 British toy called "L'Âne Rouge" (The Red Donkey), in which a red donkey had to be manoeuvred out of a crowd of smaller animals. In the 1930s, American versions appeared under names like "The Donkey Puzzle" and "Traffic Jam." By the time personal computers arrived, the puzzle was a staple of shareware game collections. Its digital democratisation made it globally known, even if the name Klotski didn't arrive until the 1990s.

What makes Klotski endure when so many puzzle games fade is precisely its uncompromising nature. There is no luck, no randomness, no hidden mechanic. The board is transparent. The rules are simple. The solution is there — you simply haven't seen it yet. The puzzle knows you can solve it. You just have to believe that too. In an era of instant gratification, Klotski's patient demand for spatial reasoning and forward thinking feels almost countercultural — a century-old object quietly insisting that some things cannot be rushed.

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