effect", the game that hypnotize the world. [applause] dan is a native new yorker and he moved to the neighborhood a few years ago and we are glad to have him. his section editor at cnet and he runs a gadget testing lab over there. his work has appeared in men's journal, splendor, spin, he has been a talking head on just about every news network imaginable. cnn, nbc, and and he appears regularly as an in-house technology expert. this is his first book before i invite him. i will will read a quote from ernest client wrote the book called grotty player one. the tetris effect is a page turning, turning, block stacking, globe trotting history book talking about the greatest games ever made a play. without further do, please welcome dan ackerman. [applause] >> hello everybody. thank you for coming. my name is stan ackerman and this is indeed not only my first book is my first book reading. it's exciting because as someone has been a reporter and writer for 20 years it took me this long to come up with a story i thought was really worth telling and this expanded format. we will read a little bit tonight and we'll talk and take questions, have some fun, i think the number one question i get is why this story, why this story about this video game, this retro grain. i think anyone who has an interest in the history of games or technology knows a little bit about this story. they're familiar with tetris it's a game you play, your mother play, everybody played and they may know that it has a russian background. they're familiar with the red bods who used to come in and the backwards are on the box in the russian folk music they hear most versions of the game. they may even know there were a lot of legal battles over who owned and things like that. it's interesting to be sure about what i started looking into this and more death what i realized as this is not a videogame story, this is a startup story. it had great parallels to the start of stories we talk about today and obsess with it today on silicon valley and elsewhere. it has a creator comes up with something great that literally goes viral. it. it has different people competing for ownership of it. it has business deal, shady business deals, backstabbing globetrotting, it has a lot of the things we expect from the principal version of this is the billing or that became the movie of the social network which is the founding of facebook. i found somebody parallels the more i looked into this story to that. and that made it feel very fresh and relevant for today. beyond that it's a story of the west and russia and a different russia back then in the eighties. it was the tail end of the soviet arrow in the time of great mistrust. tetris ended up building bridges between different cultures. you could still see a lot of the differences between russian culture and soviet culture and we go into that in the book. once again where in the time of great tension between the west and we that has been relevant to me. in the 80s were talking about western companies appropriating russian software and trying to get their money and and it was very hard to come by and this became an issue that was the highest thing in the state up to gorbachev. today we are dealing with russia purportedly hacking into american elections and that something we talked about a lot recently, so that's another set of parallels there. that would only became clear recently and there's lot about about this story and that it's about the 80s and most of the book cut takes place between 84 and 89. 89. but there's a lot that feels really relevant today. if you're interested in the start of culture and technology and how technology crosses cultures. that's cultures. that's what jimmy into this. the other thing that you mean was i realize that if you wanted to tell a good story that resonated people you had to make it a story. to make it a story you have to have really great characters. i was not expecting to find this when i started my research but i found a cast of amazing characters that you can imagine. from russia from japan and these people and to really make this story come alive. it's really a book about them and their globetrotting adventures. but still if you've ever played tetris or nintendo wii used a handheld gaming system or anything you have been influenced by these guys. i'm going to read a couple of excerpts from the book. there centered around these great characters. i will start off with the person i think is the hero of the story, not very well known if you not well-versed in the history of games and technology. hank rogers. he becomes her entry point to the book. he book. he was born in the netherlands, came to the u.s. as a very young child, and went to college in hawaii or talking mainframes and things like that. and later moved to japan and single-handedly revolutionized the videogame industry by creating the very first japanese computer role-playing game which is a very traditional japanese were created by dutch american guy. what i call a software anthropologist, he went around the world looking for software that would translate across boundaries and bring back to japan. we open the book with hank rogers as he is flying to moscow as part of these very complicated business deals where companies are already making money off tetris in there wondering if they can become the preferred tetris of the world. they have to find a secret government organization in that that organization is called eve lord, so hank rogers, our main protagonists here literally had to go to moscow for the first time, on invited with no meeting set up, doesn't know where their options are and find you lord. and that's where i'll start at the beginning of the book. the first chapter is called the great race. >> in an airplane where central final dissented toward moscow. hank rogers gripped his arm against him. years of the globe with new technologies and left him feeling with a well-traveled citizen of the world. this was something altogether different. you look around this shaking cabin and he spent the last hours with a notorious airline that allowed the russians a hand in the business of actually carrying passengers across the pacific and onto the russian continent. eyes fixed he asked himself what was worse, going in blind from a strange city city and strange country without speaking a word of the language or agreeing to enter one of the world's most notorious international class points under false pretenses. the paperwork to fill heavy and the jacket pocket. rogers had no doubt that if he was caught lying about his reasons for visiting the powerful business interests would cut him loose. they built just enough plausible deniability into the deal that he appeared to be another economic opportunist looking to slice off a piece of soviet prosperity for himself at the expense of the people. he wondered how it should've been a simple software license deal where he lived for years to the ussr, he was chasing down a shadowy arm of the soviet government while still one-step of head of a pair of powerful mercenaries who would stop at nothing to peel away the prize. to fly away into the heart of the soviet union in the late '80s was to take a step beyond the feared iron curtain, political and psychological barrier that kept 280,000,000 citizens walked away for citizens locked away for the rest of the world. secret police were everywhere in moscow visiting tours businessman, and journalists who expected their phones to be tap, their hotel rooms to be dug detailed around town the preferred vehicle and dark suited vehicle minders. a new reality started to replace their traditional east versus west rivalry. the openness of the communist party's marching orders of the day and in it came came and feared western money. it was into this charged environment that hank roger flew of februarf three competing westerners dissenting on moscow nearly simultaneously. each was chasing the same prize and they're having a profound impact on people around the world. that technology was perhaps the greatest cultural exports in the history of the ussr and was called tetris. this deceptive lee simple game circled the globe multiple times in multiple formats before they realized it was an on pack source of much needed cash. street after street of flat buildings they flew by the window into the heart of moscow, could this really be the epicenter of the fearsome soviet empire. high-rises broken up broken up by occasional flashes of brilliance from the cathedral and the arch and shadows of the heart of architecture and commerce. it was commerce that brought them here for the tourist visa, he hoped the checkbook in his pocket and the promise of a bankroll from his unofficial corporate sponsors would be enough to smooth ruffles of the government as legal status, what could go wrong question ricky was entering one of the closed off societies on earth looking to coats of barack or c into dropping its well-connected partners in favor of an on invited guests. he suspected he only had to offer might be the tool he needed to drill through what he expected to get with the russians. despite the state run media reports the empire was hanging by thread. a brief arrow government-sponsored prosperity in the 80s and 90s was over. it was a time where citizens with little money unless suspended on. one half of the bureaucracy was tasked with luring the currency behind the curtain. the other half was protecting the hierarchy of local privilege and power by any means necessary. it was a country to put up a sign on the front yard that said open for business. beneath. beneath someone had said now go away. it was going to be the eighth and final leader of the soviet union, even now the cold war practices of spy craft and espionage were being replaced or augmented by international business deal. it was a tangible product to be bought, sold and stolen. hank rogers lip there is pages of notes and spluttered toward the hotel. even securing a hotel room reservation had been a minor victory. customer service remained a novel idea in russia, situation they exchange little sense. there are bigger problems on his mind. the pages of his notebook contained shattering's of conversational of his notebook contains shattering's of conversational russian in the form simple questions. cancellations on sales and royalty numbers, and a single name. of these mysterious things one of the adversaries was maxwell. anyone who has ever taken on maxwell and his well-connected father found that the family put through the old adage of anybody who buys ink. . . each aimed to undercut the others. the paranoid russian. [inaudible] it was the most important technology to come out of the country. that is something i've actually been question about, i've done a bunch of media appearances for the story. everyone everyone says the same thing. they say really the most important technologies. >> i said think about it, whatever technological exports from russia from a cold war era can you even remember now. hank rogers plays a big role in our story. we will talk about that a little bit later. one of my favorite stories, i want to give you heads up, he grew up in new york, went to high school back in the 60s and they had access to a very early mainframe computers put it was one of the only high schools in the country that you could have computer access to in the 60s for high school students. in order to program -- he wrote a program on it and you had to basically create an old-school punch card, drop it in somewhere in the technician would come take the draw and they would pick up the results several days later it appear output wasn't what was expected you had to do it again. he got tired of waiting a week so he found out how to hack the punchcard queue system by making multiple punch cards, putting them in every class so than every time they came to run cards, his, his would get run and he don't make changes and put the new ones and that's how he hacked the mainframe. hearing this from hank, i said that's a really great, great story. i'm proud of you and away, but i can't really be that supportive of you, but good for him for figuring that out anyway. >> the other big character that we should talk about, we mentioned briefly the guy who actually created tetris. many people thought he was the original programmer, the version he created will still be familiar to you in some ways and not familiar and 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 your leg as a teenager in the us, they put a cast on it and you're good in a couple weeks. in a couple weeks. in the soviet union in the 70s, the treat you like you're gonna be here a long time, you could have this cast all over your body and he was bedridden for months due to a simple fracture. he went from being a regular teenager interested in regular teenager things being obsessed with maths math and puzzles and became a math whiz and eventually he became a computer programmer because he wanted access to one of very small handfuls of computers that you could have access to in the early '80s in moscow. he went to the russian academy of sciences. there are many tell you a little bit about his early experience with trying to create a game on his very primitive computers that he have which were basically russian knockoff of american computers from ten or 15 years before. it was artificial intelligence, voice-recognition, things, things that people still struggle with today but his passion was re-creating puzzles. he had the idea of re-creating game experiences on the other machines he worked on and he found inspiration in the isle of children's world. the most famous toy store in moscow. it's been a landmark for decades. has breathtaking stone arches and just a short distance from kgb headquarters. when he searched the store shelves, something familiar caught his eye. it was a set of puzzle pieces. before he knew knew it the set had made his way into his hands and soon sat on his desk at the academy of sciences. he spent hours putting the pieces together trying to bridge the connection between the simple geometric design and the predictable complete heater platforms that he worked on. he knew he could translate these ideas to a computer screen even without access to the high-end graphic powerhouses used for pack man and other arcade style games that seemed advanced to us even in the west. first results were very primitive but the basic idea of what would become tetris started to take shape. the problem he knew was that his hardware was close to a decade out of date compared to amateur game programmers and the rest of the world that had access to. re-creating the effect of the tetris shape required additional sizzle and his computer which was can called an electronic 60 had no ability to draw graphics. his initial and imperfect solution was to create a stand-in for those shapes using the only paintbrush that he had, the alphanumeric alphanumeric keys on his keyboard, each shape could be approximated using punctuation keys. in different combinations, he carefully coated across multiple display lines, you could come up with things like the shape. it wasn't pretty, but it worked. in the early version, crafted in six days with genetic engineering, the shapes were cut down very quickly to a more manageable four segment. they could be formed with seven basic shapes. the first version was a re-creation of the the puzzle. remove the piece around fitted into a box and it fit and that was it. then there was a break flew. he could tell after a couple times a playing it was dull and it needed something else. it was born. computer puzzles were different. they could be played for an unlimited period of time but a computer screen needed a more manipulative relationship with the player. a puzzle on the computer had to be more of a game than a puzzle in a game required timing, danger and a push toward action. the mechanics of treating the game were easy. [inaudible] he continued to work on his programming assignments taking time here and there to pair its game down to the most basic elements. that led to a breakthrough idea. what if it didn't need the entire computer screen. just because the monitor was a square didn't mean everything had to fit into a square. this change the field of the game she changed the shape from five segments to for segments and he shrunk the plane screen down from nearly the m tire screen to a narrow section. there was still a problem with the game. once it was filled up, the area underneath it was out of reach. the game ended too quickly leave and little reason to play more than once or twice. the solution would be the one element of trespass that has remained constant in the more than 30 years since. there's no caps left and right and the row vanishes and that opens the downward path. the goal becomes finishing them together and also causing as many minds to disappear as possible. where he once spent countless hours working on an academic project, he now spent similar hours working on tweaking and playing his new game. even during the day he would pretend to be working on a software debugging project after playing round after round of tetris unable to his fingers off the keyboard. that's how the basic design came into being and then you work with his fellow programmers to translate it onto the ibm platform and then color and concrete shapes and all the things that are part of the game now. these guys were actually very entrepreneurial euro at the time, even back in the soviet union to somehow find a way to package them together and sell them. they didn't have any role models to look to. they do and how to start a business and do that especially in this era around 1984. the country would change radically in a few years but at this point there was no way to do that. the soviets to come in and say i can't believe you're trying to sell something. it's communism. we actually own everything. we don't know what intellectual property rights are but whatever they are, we own them too. some of the little bit of the addiction is told through the story who had a very unique experience with texas in the early '90s which formed an interesting part of the book. i'm in a bit about that. mr. goldsmith is a writer, he went to mexico for a while and he had a 1990 trip from new york to japan when something unusual caught his eye. he watched a man sitting in a car in tribeca. the man was unaware he was being watched but he was engrossed with something small in his hand. leaning closer he could see he was holding a nintendo game boy device. still a new invention that he was concentrating on a game which turned out to be tetris. after this initial encounter using the game everywhere with tetris zombies staring down at handheld devices as they do now with pokémon. he thought it was an interesting cultural moment but nothing more about the wade's head. he wanted to retreat to the countryside in japan but first arrange to stay in tokyo for a week. to pass the time he picked up a japanese version of the game which he had seen people playing in new york. it came packaged with a single game cartridge, tetris. the moment he fired it up, things changed. his one week visit led to a month. he was chained to the game. he sat in a guestroom entering only out for food and batteries. he knew the effect the game had on him when he would visit a convenience store he bought snacks and other small items and then tossed a pack of batteries on the counter at the last minute even though that was the real reason he was there. he didn't know what he expected to get out of the experience nor did he think about it. the progress level bio level, battling the game day after day but on his occasional walks around tokyo he was seeing cars, people and buildings together. not only only did the game have addictive holdover them but it was altering the way he sought reality. its perception was being altered in a way that scientist began to understand. he was not alone in his op duration. in the following years several researchers discovered tetris as a tool for cognitive research. after six weeks of a tetris addiction, the experience something unexpected. after he surpassed a high score with puzzle pieces that descendent rapidly honing his skills of the game could possibly react in time, the game ended. it didn't end with the defeat, instead it just informed him he had one. he had beaten tetris. it celebrated with a short hand raised in an animated scene with russian dancers and then an american space shuttle lifting off from the launch pad and going up and the skype. that was it. it was over. he felt the great weight lifted. he couldn't believe there was nothing left for him to conquer. once that learning curve was conquered, the need to play was over. he he put the game boy down and that moment on the spell was broken. he went the country side seeking solitude. although his game boy made the trip with him it stayed still away wasn't turned on once. he has played it a few times over the years but only in the most casual way. the tokyo days was the end of his tetris days. that experience had such a profound impact that a couple years later he pitched a story about the game and he ended up talking to a bunch of scientist and wrote a profile that is still well-known today called this is your brain on tetris. he said that is the idea that when you close your eyes your brain can have the same effect of seeing it on the screen. he said to her, your packing groceries so expertly, do you ever see the shapes in your mind when you're not at work. she said no i don't get the tetris effect from this. he said i think i created that phrase. now he knows he departed history he also came up with the phrase what he described as a technology that has the same addictive effect of a drug and that's the term people also use now and you can see a million different ways you can identify something whether it's facebook or pokémon go, i think you get that endorphin rush of hearing that paying on your phone and it's a concept real familiar with today. i'm get a jump forward now and tell you about a few of my other favorite characters. this is one my favorite anecdotes because it's about my buddy hank rogers and it gives us a chance to bring in some other characters. the chief counsel for nintendo of america for many years, after that he retired after 15 years as the resident of the seattle mariners which is also owned by nintendo until they recently sold their controlling state of it. he was a tax dog lawyer that save nintendo when they were sued over donkey kong saying it to similar to king kong. not only was it successful but he got the other party to pay their court fees. [inaudible] he joined the business and came to america was responsible for getting the nes system into toy stores in the 80s which became an american phenomenon. he even brought over a japanese engineer to fix some old arcade cabinets that had games nobody wanted on anymore. put them on all these cabinets that we have in a warehouse and then they came up with donkey kong which came to every mario game and be much everything else nintendo you can think of. he was actually a guest at the apple press conference talking about the new mario game. nintendo executives are in russia, hard-nosed negotiation, tension is high, there's, there's not a lot to do in moscow in the 80s if you're visiting foreign business. there's a couple restaurants but that's about it. the overall air of tension continued because there is precious little to do in moscow for unofficial data visitors. one time he said it would be nice. [inaudible] it represented russian culture too much of the outside world. then he pulled him aside. let's go to the theater he said. he drove the partners to the theater in his rented mercedes, drop them off at the main interest. i'll pick you up after the show he said after pulling out into the night. despite being acquired at the last minute, these tickets were back row to receipts and they were escorted to a box overlooking the entire audience. it was more hank rogers magic. he looked down over the crowd as the performance was about to start ended nearly baldheaded figure strolled through, recognizable from behind and he leaned over and motioned for the man taking his seat. that's gorbachev. he strained to see for himself while another man who was sitting silently mustered himself into their conversation confirming him. as a member of the russian equivalent of the secret service. he sat by himself briefly into a long line of official looking men who join him in the same row leaving the entire row behind empty. they explained that the group he sat with were all members of the central committee. sitting in the premium seat, he realized he had no idea what the nights entertainment would be, he just wanted to attend entertainment but never asked with the show tickets were for. then his mood soured. he whispered, there's no way we will ever find hank rogers again he said oh yes, he'll be right outside. he said he would pick us up. that's the general. [inaudible] there is no way we are ever going to find us. not a problem. he insisted. as the last music faded, they made a break for the front entrance of the theater just as the applause began to swell. they raced down from their box to try to get ahead of the crowd and burst through the front day door to find a line waiting. one of the head of the line was extravagant and look like it's out low to the ground as if weighed down by internal armor. that must be gorbachev. [inaudible] they dove into the backseat and rogers pettaway tearing through red square late at night as if the countries was his to buy and sell. that's one of my favorite stories about hank rogers. now an attempt to give you some flavor of the characters in this book because there's really great characters but i think we have a few minutes if anyone wants to ask questions. then i'm happy to chitchat some more or sign any books for anybody. i believe there's a microphone floating around. thank you very much. that was very interesting. i'm curious if there is any kind of interesting back story that's involved with the music. you mentioned it was russian folk music and that was the first time i've heard that. was linked to the gameplay in the sense of urgency. >> that russian is so recognizable, in the early '90s it was like a dance remix it was a uk chart hit by dr. spin and it turns out he was actually a stage name for andrew lloyd webber. they decided to make it hip again. all of the russian, the red box, the imagery of the cathedrals and the music were all added by western software publishers to a game that was just a very basic looking game. the game was from russia. russians played it and they knew it was from russia. they didn't need any of that stuff to tell him that. the uk and american company said let's put all the stuff on and that's going to make it feel like for bitten fruit, something secretive or from behind the iron curtain and that's how they sold it as something maybe you weren't supposed to play and that's why that imagery and the music is still linked to the game today. >> are russians proud of the game today, is it as popular there as it end up being here? >> definitely. it was very popular in russia, even in the 80s when hardly anyone had a computer. back then you literally had to put it on and make a copy on a floppy disk and walk it over to someone because there was no internet. we still call that sneakernet and it eventually propagated out and got into the web because the economy made its way to hungary. their little more open to business and that started the whole evil back and forth about who owns the game can we publish it and that's a huge part of the story there. he's still very proud of his russian heritage and he goes back there all the time. he's really the number one star, russian programmer. >> that's great. it's really interesting. how did it come to be, i remember playing it on game boy and mostly because it came free with your gameboy. how did it come to be calm free on the game boy and did anyone ever get paid for that? >> that's a great example of what we call the killer wrath, the the marriage of the perfect hardware and software. the game boy was like a secret r&d projects at nintendo for years and hank rogers actually went and talked to them and said i know you're working on this project, instead of putting on mario, that's great but only kids who like mario will buy it. we have this game that i'm working on for the japanese market called tetris. it's kind of a risk, but trust me on this. everyone eventually bought into the idea and that's part of that whole race to moscow. there's a lot of talk about that in the book. eventually the russians did get the money but lexi 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 is, if you read through it, after the soviet union collapses, they form this lifelong friendship and they're still friends 30 years later and were able to claw back his portion of the rights which he's still controlled at the modern-day tetris company and they have both done very well for themselves. >> it's so awesome to hear you read this. my question is, this story could been told very dryly and it's not. it's really juicy. all these little he said that and even the thing you just said about the show, i just wonder how much of it is your imagination running away with it and little tiny details that you're adding. how much of that did you know and how much do you have license to just add in from your imagination. >> a lot of nonfiction is narrative nonfiction, almost like billionaires tell a lot of stories, i tried to actively stay away from that and every little fun interaction i tried to based on an actual conversation that i had with one of the people involved and i would draw more details out of them to try to get some of those little bits about gorbachev and armored car to try to then tell it 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. the great example is one time i was talking to lexi and he just said, as a as a teenager he broke his leg and was laid up and he learned to love puzzles in game. i said okay that's a good story. then my wife said how did you hear that, how did he break his leg and i said i don't know. she said you have to call him back print i said listen, you told me the story about breaking your leg. i gotta hear what happened. i don't think he had ever told anybody the story but he was cutting school and went to get a haircut and he was crossing a street and he saw the shuttle bus that he had to take back to his neighborhood and he ran to catch it and he slipped into a slushy puddle and broke his leg and that's the whole back story about how we ended up laid up and became a math whiz because he had nothing else to do with his leg broken. i look through all these opportunities to drag out these stories and make it as narrative as possible, which is, it strikes me is the way people like to read history nonfiction so i tried to come up with a version that was very readable but rooted in fact. >> okay, i feel like we've run through most of our time anywhere. great questions. it's so great to be here. [applause] [applause] book tv tapes hundreds of programs all year long. at the cato institute in washington d.c., the goldwater institute will weigh in on the differences between rights and privileges. then on wednesday, joad dolce will examine the history, science and economics of marijuana at the tattered covered bookstore in denver. friday we will be back in the nations capital at the center for american progress where john judas will provide a history of

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