That addictive puzzler Tetris – created 25 years ago by Russian Alexey Pajitnov – has a legitimate claim to being the videogame that conquered the world

Twenty-five years ago, inside the bowels of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, a young artificial intelligence researcher received his first desktop computer – the Soviet-built Elektronika 60, a copy of an American minicomputer called a PDP-11 – and began writing programs for it.

But not numerical ones. He ended up creating one that would infest the dreams of those who played it, spurring addictions and even the suspicion that it was a Russian plot to divert the youth of America in a pointless exercise.

"I started to put together all kinds of mathematical puzzles and diversions that I had loved all my life, since I was a boy," says Alexey Pajitnov, talking to the Guardian from the Russian capital.

Pajitnov, then 29, thought the puzzles were fun, but after a few experiments there was one roughly-hewn game that stood out from the others.

"The program wasn't complicated," he says. "There was no scoring, no levels. But I started playing and I couldn't stop. That was it."

Russia is used to revolutions, but this was something different: Tetris had been born.

The concept is simple: from the top of the screen a series of differently-shaped "blocks" fall slowly towards the bottom. The player can turn each block as it falls – making a line into a column, say – or move it sideways, but once it hits the lowest point, it stays. If the blocks fill a line without gaps, they disappear. Otherwise they pile up, giving the player less and less time before they hit the "bottom".

Simple; but hugely addictive. A quarter of a century later, it has a legitimate claim to being the videogame that has truly conquered the world. In all its forms, Tetris has sold more than 70m copies around the globe; it has spawned architecture, art and music; it has earned multiple Guinness World Records (including "Longest Prison Sentence for Playing a Video Game", for a man who kept playing it on his mobile phone during a flight against crew demands) and is regularly voted one of the top games of all time.

The game's early success didn't leave Pajitnov much better off – the rights were owned by the Soviet state – but the combination of falling blocks did start to gain some traction. A PC version released in 1985 began spreading around eastern Europe, before heading to the west a couple of years later.

But it was in 1988 that things started to accelerate.

"I first saw it at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January of 1988," says Henk Rogers, a Dutch games publisher who was based in Japan at the time.

He says it didn't take long to realise there was something interesting going on with this deceptive, unpretentious puzzle game.

"My first impression was that this game was too simple, that there was nothing to it. Then I came back and played it again. And again. Soon I realised there was something going on – no game had grabbed me at a show just like that."

Rogers beat fierce competition to agree on a deal – a move that eventually led to an agreement brokered with Nintendo that that saw Tetris bundled with every Game Boy. That, says Pajitnov, is when things changed.

"We visited Nintendo's headquarters … all the cartridges for Tetris on the Game Boy were stored in this Kyoto warehouse," he says. "I saw, in reality, all these hundreds of thousands of pieces of my game. It was at that time I realised it wasn't just a small game, it was a big, big material shift. That was a very strange feeling."

Without Nintendo it is likely that Tetris would have faded into obscurity, but Rogers – an affable and restless Dutchman – says he found an ally in Minoru Arakawa, then boss of Nintendo of America.

"He's the one I did the big deal with; he totally recognised that this game was the key to Game Boy's success in the rest of the world. He packed in 30m of them."

While Rogers made a career out of licensing Tetris to other companies around the world, Pajitnov had to wait until 1996 – when the rights reverted to him from the Russian state – to begin making money from his success. By that time, however, his mind was elsewhere: he had moved to the US and was working as a games designer at Microsoft.

These days, both men spend their time licensing Tetris to other companies. Between them, they maintain the "Tetris guidelines" – a surprisingly exacting basic standard that any official version of the game must meet.

This includes, among other things, the size of the playing area, the colours of the tetronimos, the configuration of keys and buttons used to move the blocks. Also in the rules is the demand that the game must include a version of the Tetris theme song – a folk number called Korobeiniki that has become almost as recognisable as the game itself, even reaching the dizzy heights of number six in the UK charts back in 1992, thanks to a Europop cover version masterminded by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

For anybody with functional hearing, that marks a low point in the history of Tetris – but it didn't stop the game enduring.

But what makes it that way? Of the game's contemporaries, only Nintendo's Italian plumber Mario has shown similar longevity – and even he has changed over the years.

Pajitnov, who says he is still a coder at heart, believes that Tetris is a "good program" with simplicity and portability as crucial assets. But he thinks the secret sauce for its 25-year success is something more pedestrian: perseverance.

"Frankly, I think that most of the classic games which were written in the 80s or early 90s are dead just because their authors or owners didn't care about them," he says. "They're still interesting to people, especially now with the new boom of casual games."

Whether that continuing interest is a symptom or a cause of the game's success remains unclear – but persistence and dedication has certainly proved important, even when it strays into the overbearing (they regularly litigate against unlicensed versions of the game).

Even after so many years – and despite recognising the addictive nature of the game early on – Rogers remains surprised that Tetris has displayed such durability.

"I always thought that every game has a certain shelf life," he says. "In the early PC business it would take somebody else a year to copy your game, so I thought we had a year or two before somebody came up with a better Tetris."

"You know what? They tried. But in 25 years, nobody has."