Original subtitles

(bright electronic music)

- [Narrator] The state run Academy of Sciences

is home to some of the Soviet Union’s

most powerful computers.

One of its brightest young programmers

is Alexey Pajitnov.

- [Adam] Alexey Pajitnov is a computer genius,

and if he were working in Silicon Valley,

he’d be working for Apple, he’d be working for IBM.

The problem for Alexey

is that he is in Communist Russia.

- He was working on an early form

of voice recognition technology.

And the KGB was actually interested in it

for their own spying reasons.

(keys clacking)

- Alexey Pajitnov.

(tense music)

We need the voice recognition program.

(dramatic music)

- The KGB wants to use the software for wire taps.

And this was something that didn’t really

sit well with Alexey.

- I need more time.

- You have three weeks.

(tense dramatic music)

- They don’t know it,

but Alexey’s working on a little something else.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Tetris.

(computer beeping)

Which will one day spread far beyond the Iron Curtain,

become a global sensation,

and rake in more than $1.5 billion.

But Alexey doesn’t create it to get rich.

He only wants to get out.

- [Laurie] When you look at toys like Tetris, Jenga,

Rubik’s Cube, this isn’t market research.

This isn’t trends in the industry.

- The word Jenga only means one thing.

The name can’t change.

- Something sparks something.

This is a once in a lifetime lightning bolt idea.

- Is it even solvable? - There’s always a solution.

- [Narrator] Three innovators, looking for a way out.

- What should we tell him?

- Tell him yeah.

- [Narrator] And in the process,

changing toys forever.

(dramatic music)

(toys chattering)

(dramatic music)

- There was nothing exciting or interesting or sexy

about puzzles in the 1970s.

It was the old-fashioned kind of toys.

- They’re the thing that your parents do,

that your grandparents do.

So puzzles are still something that Americans enjoy,

but not nearly as much as they enjoy

the newer kinds of toys that are coming out in the 70s.

(game effects bleeping)

- Every toy had some kind of a light switch.

Action figures suddenly lit up.

The X-wing fighter made the lasers shoot.

(toy lasers shooting)

- Toy companies look at trends, see what kids are doing,

and invent toys for them.

- Milton Bradley was predicting every game

would be electronic going forward.

The last toy that anyone would expect

to just seize the world’s attention

would be a non-electronic puzzle

conceived of behind the Iron Curtain, no less.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] A decade before Tetris,

another puzzle is conceived,

in the most unlikely of places.

The Hungarian College of Applied Arts

is a school for aspiring artists, engineers,

and architects.

- In 1974, at the Hungarian College of Applied Arts,

there is a young professor who’s basically

the same age as his students.

He’s a trained architect,

someone whose life truly is an intersection

of art and science.

The professor’s name is Erno Rubik.

(bright electronic music)

- His father was an engineer who worked on gliders.

His mother was a poet, and it’s really interesting.

You see those twin sides affecting him

throughout his life.

He was very interested in not just things

that you would make and mechanical items,

but how people interacted with those items.

- [Narrator] One of Rubik’s architecture classes

teaches the fundamentals of three-dimensional drawing,

beginning with a cube.

- If you are an architect,

it is incredibly important to have a precise way

of rendering a 3D object

on a two-dimensional drawing.

- A cube is an amazing object

because you can only see three sides of it

at one time.

You can never see the whole cube.

- [Narrator] But to properly draw a cube,

his students must account for the three unseen sides.

- How do you get students thinking about spatial relations

in 3D when you’re on a chalkboard,

you’re on paper with a pen or a pencil.

So how do you do that?

You try to build things out of 3D.

- Rubik wasn’t out to invent a toy.

He was actually just trying to do his job.

- He was thinking of something that he was gonna use

as a teaching device in his class.

- A little cube that could spin in different directions,

you could turn different pieces.

So that his students could examine,

see how things are turning,

and then they could draw that on paper.

- [Narrator] At the heart of Rubik’s

three by three by three cube

is a fixed core,

allowing each of the six spaces

to rotate in their own direction.

(exciting electronic music)

- The cube seems amazing when you turn it

it seems like all of the cubes are kind of moving,

but actually the core stays.

- When Rubik had a working cube,

as he said, it was born naked.

Every single square on every face

looked exactly the same, so if you twist it,

to all intents and purposes, nothing has changed.

- He realized he needed to track the movement of it,

because the whole idea was to look

at the spatial relationships.

- So he comes up with a great idea.

(bright inspiring music)

Rubik puts stickers on his little three-dimensional object

so that he can track the turns.

(casual funky music)

- [Narrator] The six faces of the cube

are now each a unique traceable color.

- He just figures he’ll start turning it.

And he turns it, and he sees, oh, okay this is interesting.

- He realizes well, now that I can track them, huh.

How do I get these colors to line up again?

- You can backtrack a couple of steps,

but once you get beyond that,

then you’re just kind of lost in the maze.

- In trying to solve it, he’s made it even worse.

- Humans need to make order out of chaos,

which is basically what Rubik was doing,

manipulating it so that it is order and harmony again.

- And he realizes, this isn’t a teaching tool.

This is a puzzle.

This is an incredibly cool puzzle.

He knows he has to solve it.

- [Narrator] At the same moment 3000 miles away.

(bright electronic music)

Another toy sensation is about to be born.

Leslie Scott has just finished boarding school.

- My mom was living in Ghana.

She didn’t know what to do,

and decided to go back and live with her parents

for a little while.

- Her brother, Malcolm, who was five at the time,

loved playing with bricks.

- Malcolm would just play with them,

as any five-year-old would play with them.

Build things and knock them down.

They were just sort of a jumble

of children’s blocks, really.

- Yes. (blocks crashing)

- [Leslie] (giggling) There you go.

- After a while, just stacking bricks

and pushing them down wasn’t quite enough.

Children get bored easily.

- So Leslie suddenly has this idea.

Instead of knocking it over,

what if we take away one block at a time

and see how long we can get it to stand

before it ultimately collapses?

- Mom, you go.

- Let’s see.

Ah!

- They weren’t just stacking,

they sort of put some rules around it.

(all giggling)

And the beginnings of the game started to evolve.

- Here, try another one.

- So then came the thing of testing the bricks.

Seeing which ones would slide out.

And therefore making the tower a bit more wobbly,

trying to see how unstable you could make the tower,

and the loser is the person who made the tower fall down.

- [Leslie] Go on, go on.

(blocks crashing)

(all laughing)

Oh!

- It definitely started off as just a way

of entertaining a five-year-old.

- That was fun.

- That was fun.

Night, buddy.

- She didn’t know that this was gonna turn

into something bigger, or go further than that.

She was just playing with some blocks.

- [Narrator] It will be another eight years

before Leslie realizes the potential of her idea.

But for Erno Rubik,

(bright electronic music)

his idea is consuming every waking minute.

- The cube didn’t offer an easy solution to itself.

He felt it would have been impossible

for there not to be a solution.

After all, it started out solved.

At that time, he had no idea

there are more possible permutations

than you have cells in your body.

In fact, there are 43 quintillion

different possibilities.

- Yellow, yellow, yellow.

- [Narrator] After a month of trying,

Rubik’s no closer to solving his cube puzzle.

- It was like a siren call.

The simpler a puzzle looks, the more alluring it could be.

And he created the thing.

He feels like he should be able to conquer it.

- Is it even solvable?

- There’s always a solution.

- [Narrator] Rubik’s problem?

He’s been thinking about the cube

one side at a time.

(bright electronic music)

- As anyone who’s ever tried to solve

a Rubik’s Cube knows, you make one move,

and you cause seven or eight other problems.

It’s almost like chess.

You have to think three or four moves ahead.

- [Narrator] Solving the cube requires

three-dimensional spatial awareness,

just like drawing one.

- You have to imagine all of the sides at once.

It’s not enough to say I’m looking at the front.

Can I make all the colors on that side

the right colors?

Because when you’re twisting it, each face

affects the other faces.

- And Rubik realized that the key

was not trying to get all the greens

back together, and all the blues back together,

but getting the cubes themselves

back to the original place.

- And bam!

There it is.

(exciting music)

- I just can’t imagine how thrilling

that was for him personally.

(gasping)

- He’s actually invented something

that’s pretty entertaining.

- Not only does he have something fascinating,

something new, something groundbreaking,

he has a puzzle unlike any the world’s ever seen.

- [Narrator] Erno Rubik believes he has stumbled

on a million dollar idea.

There’s only one problem.

- Remember, this is all happening in Communist Hungary.

(tense electronic music)

- The socialist and communist philosophy

is that one person never invents anything.

It doesn’t matter whether you are the inventor or not,

the regime owns the invention.

- So how can he actually get the million dollars

from his million dollar idea

when he’s living under communism?

(Erno sighs)

(exciting music)

- [Narrator] Erno Rubik has invented a puzzle

unlike any other in history.

Now the only thing harder than solving his cube

is monetizing it.

- I think Rubik’s decision to pursue a patent

is almost as significant as the invention.

- Luckily, he happens to be the son

of an aviation engineer.

His father holds a few patents.

(phone ringing)

- Hello?

(tense music)

- [Narrator] It takes him two years,

but by drawing on his father’s experience,

Rubik obtains a patent,

allowing him to fully own his invention.

He names it the Magic Cube.

He releases his puzzle in Hungary

where the Magic Cube slowly begins to find a fan base.

(exciting music)

- You have the imagine that Rubik was thrilled

to see the reception his puzzle got,

where people couldn’t stop playing with it.

- Now that Erno Rubik has created

this deeply fascinating, deeply infuriating,

really captivating cube puzzle,

he realizes that this could be a global phenomenon.

(exciting music)

- [Narrator] But he’d have to get it

beyond the Iron Curtain.

- It was very fortunate that Rubik lived in Hungary,

because it was basically the crossover point

between the East and the West.

It was where the membrane was just a little bit thinner,

and if you were outside, it was easier to get

into the country, and if you were inside,

it was easier to get either yourself

or your ideas out of the country.

- So Erno Rubik sends the cube to the Nuremberg

West Germany Toy Fair in 1979,

and the response ...

(music winds down)

Is tepid, at best.

- [Narrator] Every major toy company passes

on the Magic Cube, except one.

(casual upbeat music)

- The Ideal Toy Company had early success with things

like the teddy bear, and Mouse Trap,

but right now, they need a hit, big time.

And they’re intrigued by Rubik’s cube,

so they send executive Stewart Sims to Hungary

to meet with Erno Rubik himself.

(Stewart chuckling)

- Uh.

- Now, Stewart looks at this cube,

and he sees all the different colors,

and it’s all mixed up,

and he does not believe that this thing

is actually solvable.

- Can it even be solved?

- Of course it can.

I’ve done it.

- Show me.

(soft tense music)

- And you should remember, it took him a month

the first time to figure it out.

This is not like today, where somebody can solve the cube

in five seconds.

(cube clicking)

- He needed to solve that cube right then, right there,

or he’s gonna lose his opportunity to sell this thing

to the world.

(tense exciting music)

- One other thing.

The name.

Magic Cube.

How would you feel like

letting us use your name?

(Erno chuckles)

- [Narrator] In exchange for just one dollar,

Erno Rubik signs a letter of consent,

officially changing the name of his invention

from Magic Cube to-

- Rubik’s Cube.

(exciting music)

- Suddenly you saw Rubik’s Cubes everywhere.

It was one of those things,

it was like furniture in anybody’s house.

It was just there.

- To say that it took America and the world by storm

is an incredible understatement.

It causes a sensation like none anyone has ever seen.

- [Narrator] In just three years,

more than 100 million cubes are sold,

making Erno Rubik Hungary’s first self-made millionaire.

- Even after all the Barbies and Star Wars toys,

GI Joe action figures, video games,

this cube still is the best-selling toy of all time.

- [Narrator] As Erno Rubik secures his place

in toy history,

(soft music)

another industry outsider

is desperate to make the leap.

- So it’s 1982, and a 27-year-old Leslie Scott

moves back to the UK and sort of sets herself off

on the corporate track,

and she still has not lost her love of games.

In fact, she brings her bricks with her.

- When Leslie came back to Oxford,

she got a job at a little company called Intel,

and they put her in charge of marketing.

- It was her job to explain to people

what microprocessors were, and she loved it.

She loved wining and dining,

bankers and businesses,

and setting up big conferences.

- [Narrator] And Leslie finds that the perfect icebreaker

is her brick stacking game.

- [Leslie] We take turns.

(both laughing) - Oh, we do?

- People loved it.

She was being invited to places just to play it.

They really enjoyed the rush of building this tower,

and going ooh when it fell over,

and people were addicted to it.

(bright uplifting music)

- All right, after you.

Careful.

- It’s a puzzle because you have to figure it out,

but it’s a game because you’re competing with friends,

and you do not want to be the person

to topple that tower.

- [Leslie] Go.

- There was something in this little pile of blocks

that was new, and was captivating,

and worth trying to take to market.

But she can’t just call it Leslie’s Pile of Bricks.

So she goes okay, I need to think of a name.

- Well, your brother just named his dog Chessa.

Swahili for play.

- I like that.

- Swahili is a language that they speak

in East African countries where mom grew up.

- Tumble?

- Gaga.

- Mm-mm.

Tower.

- Manara.

- They were throwing around words like tower,

no, it doesn’t sound quite right.

Crash, no it doesn’t sound quite right.

Naming something is really hard.

- What about Build?

Ka-jenga.

Ka-jenga.

- To build.

There’s something in that.

There’s a good sound in there, Ka-jenga.

So mom goes, why not just the imperative?

Build?

- Jenga.

(both laughing)

- It’s got good mouth feel.

Jenga.

The name was just chef’s kiss,

cherry on top, perfect.

- Jenga.

This is going to be big.

(both laughing)

(exciting music)

- Leslie is leading the life that many of us aspire to.

She’s going up the corporate ladder.

- But she really believes that Jenga

has incredible potential.

So she thought why not take all the marketing skills

that I’d developed at Intel,

and project it onto this little pile of bricks?

- She has a solid corporate job.

She is a manager at Intel.

She’s a rising star in the company,

and decides to throw it all away,

and bet everything on the appeal of stacking blocks.

(dramatic exciting music)

- It’s an enormous bet on herself, a leap of faith.

A leap into the dark.

But Leslie goes for it.

(dramatic music)

(gentle music)

(birds chirping)

- [Narrator] Leslie Scott has walked away

from her corporate career

to go all in on Jenga.

- The new bricks are here.

(gasping)

Let’s play. (laughing)

(bricks clattering)

- Leslie’s not a game maker,

but she does have a communications background

and she understands both the power of image

and the power of branding.

She realizes this can’t just look like

a bunch of chopped-up wood.

It has to have a distinctive shape.

It has to have a distinctive design element.

- [Narrator] Leslie changes the dimensions of the bricks

to form a three-by-three column and hires a professional

to make a mass production prototype

to her exact measurements.

- He made them as perfectly as you can ever make something.

And she got the bricks back and she stacked the tower

and she’s like, "Yes, finally!

"It looks good, it looks sexy."

"The tower is nice and easy to build."

"It fits perfectly together."

- Okay, you go first.

(pensive music)

(woman gasping) Oh, god.

(both laughing)

(woman exhaling)

- Everybody who’s played Jenga knows that the real trick

is hunting for that one wiggly block,

the one that you can push out and pull out

without knocking the whole thing down.

That’s the key.

- She tries taking out a brick and it doesn’t work,

so she tries a different brick.

And it doesn’t work. (gloomy music)

Nothing is moving.

It’s almost rock solid.

- That’s not right.

(gloomy music continuing)

- Oh. (bricks clattering)

- [Woman] Honey, what’s wrong?

- They’re sticking.

It’s not right.

- [Freddie] She’s like, "What have I done to this game?"

- And that’s when she realizes the magic of Jenga.

Her game was originally handmade.

- [Narrator] The blocks from Africa

were all slightly different sizes.

- And those bricks slide out nicely

because of the imperfections in the individual bricks.

It’s the imperfection that makes the game work.

- So, she had to sort of redesign the thing

to actually have microscopic imperfections

all throughout the game.

- [Narrator] Leslie works with a carpenter

to develop a revolutionary new way

of mass producing a wooden game.

- By taking the cut bricks, sanding them,

and then putting them in a tumble polisher,

they’d bounce off each other

and create indents in the bricks

and make the bricks imperfect.

- [Narrator] With the process perfected,

Leslie Scott takes out a £20,000 loan

to manufacture 200 sets of Jenga.

- Leslie took her game to Toy Fair in London

and she expected to really blow the doors off the place.

(dramatic music)

- [Reporter] It’s the biggest international toy fair

in the world, with 540 exhibitors from 37 countries.

- But people don’t know what it is.

When it’s stacked up, people don’t realize it’s a game.

People don’t know if it’s building blocks.

- You win Jenga by being the one who doesn’t lose,

(laughing) which is weird.

- Leslie Scott’s left her corporate job

and chooses to spend a massive amount of money

to get a booth at the London Toy Fair,

and she gets a whopping zero orders.

(dramatic music)

(uneasy music)

- [Narrator] While Leslie Scott

is trying to get industry eyes on Jenga,

28-year-old computer programmer

Alexey Pajitnov has been keeping his head down.

- So, Alexey is really an optimistic dreamer

of the computer industry.

(computer keys clacking)

He thinks that they should be there

to make people’s lives better, good,

everybody should have access to them.

- Pajitnov was working on an early form

of voice recognition technology.

- But he’s working in Moscow

and the KGB is all up in him and his team’s face

trying to twist it into things for war,

things for espionage.

(bricks clattering)

- I hear the KGB wanna use our program.

(apprehensive music)

- Wouldn’t it be great

if we could just write games for computers?

(man chuckling)

- Alexey has loved games and puzzles since he was a boy,

including one called pentominoes.

- It’s five segmented pieces in different shapes

and you slot them into, basically,

a box where they all fit in perfectly.

But they’re kind of impossible

and you really have to sit there and study it for a while

trying to solve the puzzle.

- And he begins to wonder:

"Instead of using these computers

for espionage, for spying,

"for something destructive and negative,

"what if we could create something fun, enlightening,

"and stimulating like pentominoes?"

(relaxed music)

- [Alexey] And a T on the side.

- So, he starts taking his pentominoes puzzle

and applying it to coding,

making a game of his puzzle that’s electronic.

- But putting pentominoes on a computer isn’t exciting.

There needs to be another element

to up the excitement factor.

- What are you thinking?

- I don’t think you do select the shape.

I think the computer selects it for you.

I think that makes more sense.

- At some point, he started picturing the pentominoes

falling from the sky.

- So, we will have a downward motion.

So, everything is gonna come down as it goes.

- It’s more of a fun way to play

to have these pieces falling

and a player has to manipulate them on the way down

to make them fit correctly.

- What if the pieces could come down faster and faster?

It’s a great idea,

but we don’t have the processing power to do that.

- He’s working on Soviet computers.

They’re behind what’s happening in the West.

- [Narrator] To add acceleration to the game,

Alexey needs to decrease its demands on the computer.

- What if we narrow the parameters, literally?

I mean, you know?

We just lose that.

Same on that side.

- So, the first variation he makes

is to only use the middle of the screen.

So, now you have this narrow column in which to build.

- It’s still too much.

- It’s too many shapes. - No, they’re too big.

So, make every five a four.

Just simplify.

- In pentominoes, each piece is made up of five blocks.

He decided to remove one of the blocks

and make all the blocks out of four pieces

because it’s easier for the computer

to process the simpler pieces.

- It’s better.

It’s not perfect.

- It’s still incredibly boring,

stacking the pieces one on top of the other,

and eventually you fill the board and it’s done.

And maybe you solve it or if you don’t, it’s over.

- [Man] How do you win the game?

- I don’t know.

I don’t know.

- There’s not really a satisfying conclusion.

There needs to be a sense of triumph, of satisfaction.

- [Man] Maybe we just need to start again.

- Yeah, I guess.

Yeah, reset.

Reset.

- [Narrator] Perfecting an idea is hard,

but selling it can be even harder,

(pensive music)

as Leslie Scott knows all too well.

A year after the London Toy Fair,

Jenga still has no interest from toy companies.

- Large retailers weren’t willing to take the risk.

It was too unknown.

She was too unknown.

(knocking on door)

Mum was not in a financially stable situation at that point.

She had taken out a loan

with her mum putting down the collateral.

She had sold her house.

It was getting pretty dicey.

(door opening)

(truck rumbling)

(birds calling)

(sorrowful music)

- Leslie Scott leveraged every penny she had,

so much so that her car was repossessed

and was taken away from her on a flatbed

with a lot of her dreams

and the hope of the future of Jenga with it.

(brooding music)

- What are you thinking?

I mean, it’s better.

- It’s better.

It’s not perfect.

- [Narrator] Alexey Pajitnov’s video game

still has little action and no reward.

- [Man] How do you win the game?

- I don’t know.

I don’t know.

- Stacking the pieces, the board would fill up

and that would be the end of it.

Maybe you solve it and maybe you don’t,

but it’s not really a satisfying conclusion.

- [Man] Maybe we just need to start again.

- Yeah, I guess.

Yeah, reset.

Wait, wait.

Hold on.

That’s it.

(hopeful music) What?

(chalk scratching)

- That’s how you win the game.

(flapping lips) By...

- As they drop, they delete.

This becomes your new base

only if the shapes are together.

- Suddenly, there is a goal

to making the pieces fit just right.

This isn’t just about filling the board,

this is about clearing the board.

- The only way to lose the game

is if you fill the entire screen, right?

So, no more shapes can drop.

- (laughing) It works.

- It works, it works!

(man laughing) - Yes.

- You have pieces falling, you have lines dissolving,

and now the game can go on longer.

(dramatic music)

- The line disappearing

and then immediately you’re given another piece

and a new task is what really makes it addictive.

Your brain’s excited and trying to figure it out,

this concept of task, reward, task, reward.

The concept was fully formed

and Alexey realized right away that he had something.

- [Narrator] But in Soviet Russia,

Alexey can’t own his own game.

(computer keys clacking)

(pensive music)

- So, here he is in Moscow,

working on his own project on a state-owned computer.

- He is effectively moonlighting to do coding for his game.

That is very risky because, again,

as we know, in those economies,

the state owns all the resources,

and he was basically going against the state at that point.

- Alexey Pajitnov.

We need the voice recognition program.

- Remember, what Alexey is meant to be working on

is a voice recognition software

that the KGB wants to use for espionage and wiretaps.

- It’s devastating to him.

He thinks computers and the advancement of technology,

this should all be done for the betterment of humanity.

And here, he now has the KGB breathing down his throat.

- So, Alexey knows he’s stuck.

He can’t get out of the USSR.

There’s not really a lot of options for him.

- You have three weeks.

- [Narrator] Alexey realizes that his puzzle program

might be his one and only opportunity.

(computer keys clacking)

- He knows programmers all over Moscow and all over Russia,

and he knows that they will love this game.

The thing is, he’s in Soviet Russia.

(tense music)

So, whereas Erno Rubik is in Hungary,

Alex Pajitnov is in Moscow.

He’s right in the belly of the beast.

He has no path to patent whatsoever.

So, his belief is cast it to the wind,

hope it sort of finds a foothold somewhere.

- It had to be hidden ’cause it was against the law.

These are state resources he’s using

for something the state has not authorized,

so he’s actually risking arrest.

- [Narrator] Before he sends it into the world,

Alexey gives his creation a name.

- By combining the Greek word for four

and the name of his favorite sport, tennis,

it becomes Tetris.

(tense music continuing)

- Tetris is almost like a message in a bottle for Alexey.

He’s made this amazing video game,

he’s put it on a floppy, and he hands that off.

- He’s hoping that it catches the right tide

and winds up on the right person’s desk

to help Tetris get out,

but also possibly to help him get out.

(phone ringing)

- Hello?

This is Leslie.

- [Narrator] By 1985, Leslie Scott has tried everything

to promote Jenga, including a grassroots tour across the US,

where she leaves copies of her game from New York to LA.

- The sales in America are certainly not enough

to actually keep herself afloat,

not enough to keep Jenga afloat either.

She had no money left.

She’d now been working on trying to get Jenga to market

for like three years and she gets a phone call.

- [Narrator] A sales manager for Irwin Toys

has seen one of the Jenga games she left behind.

- Irwin, at the time,

was the biggest toy and games producers in Canada.

- Irwin Toys actually comes to her and says,

"We wanna produce this toy.

"We’re gonna buy it from you and produce it."

- So, Mum is obviously over the moon

that Irwin want to take the game.

It’s exactly what Jenga needs.

But there’s this one major sticking point:

They don’t like the name.

- The word Jenga only means one thing, and that’s this game.

- There was nothing else called Jenga.

And Leslie knew that if you heard that name,

she wanted you to think of one thing only,

and that was her toy.

- I’m sorry, the name can’t change.

- You can’t call it Tumble Down or the Tower Game.

She knew that Jenga could become synonymous with the game.

- All right.

- She was willing to walk away without the name Jenga.

It meant that much to her.

- [Woman] Leslie, call them back.

It’s okay if you need to change the name.

- They’re keeping the name. (giggling)

They’re buying Jenga!

(energetic music) (both laughing)

- It was an incredibly shrewd marketing ploy by Leslie,

and it worked.

She stuck to her guns and the toy company relented,

and that’s how we got Jenga today.

- We did it. (both laughing)

- So, Irwin took Jenga

to the Toronto Toy and Game Fair in ’86.

After three days, Jenga sold 80,000 copies.

This was an unheard-of number of games at the time.

If you sell over 10,000 copies,

it’s considered a bestseller.

(pensive music)

(computer keys clacking)

- [Narrator] Alexey Pajitnov’s video game

has now spread throughout the Soviet Union.

(footsteps approaching)

- He disseminates the game

by simply putting it on floppy discs

and people start to share it.

So, after a few years, Tetris has made its way to Hungary.

- [Narrator] As Erno Rubik found a decade before,

Hungary is where an idea has the best chance

of penetrating the Iron Curtain.

- Hungary is where Robert Stein comes across Tetris.

- [Narrator] Robert Stein owns a British software company

and is on the hunt for new titles.

- He loves the game, and now he sends a telex to Alexey.

- What should we tell him?

- Tell him, "Yeah." (laughing)

When did this come in?

- Just now. (both laughing)

- [Narrator] But in order to make the deal,

Alexey must assign ownership of Tetris

to the Soviet government for 10 years.

- And that’s how it’s able to get past the Iron Curtain

into the West.

And once Tetris is in the West,

it’s game over.

(spirited music)

- [Narrator] In 1989, Nintendo licenses Tetris

to be the pack-in-title

for its new handheld video game system, the Game Boy.

- Tetris is the perfect launch game for the Game Boy

because it is simple to understand,

it can be played on a small screen,

and you don’t need many controls.

But it’s got this limitless strategy to it

that you can always get better, you can always be faster,

and you can always find new ways

that the pieces fit together.

(spirited music continuing)

- [Narrator] Within six months,

Nintendo sells two million units.

- The game is amazing.

And in fact, it was the biggest exported game ever

from the Soviet Union to the United States.

- [Narrator] But Alexey doesn’t see a dime.

(gentle music)

- Alexey, he’s in the Soviet Union.

He’s under their thumb.

And what happens in 1991?

The Soviet Union collapses.

That is his door to freedom,

and he goes to the United States.

The next piece of his puzzle

is that the intellectual rights to Tetris expire.

He owns his own game again

and it has made him a billionaire.

- So, when you look at these three puzzles,

Jenga, which is the number-three selling game,

only behind Monopoly and Scrabble, the Rubik’s cube,

which is the number-one individual selling toy

of all time in the entire world, and Tetris,

which has sold 520 million copies,

each and every one of them was created

by someone that had nothing to do with the toy industry.

- All three inventors were outsiders.

As an outsider, you don’t have the network.

You don’t have the connections.

You don’t really know anyone in the industry,

so it’s just so much harder to break in.

At the same time, they’re not bogged down

by the status quo of the industry,

so they may bring a fresh idea

or a fresh perspective to the toy.

- They’re not looking at what the trends are.

They’re not trying to copy something else,

like toy companies do all the time.

They’re finding something by accident, something exciting,

and these toys turn out to be

some of the bestselling toys of all time.