Red Herring magazine’s Internet news briefs for the week of May 22, 2006.
Alexey Pazhitnov, the Russian programmer who invented Tetris when Mikhail Gorbachev was still in the Kremlin, has probably long since stopped being surprised at the enduring popularity of his simple and addictive video game. But news that Tetris is the most popular game on American mobile phones some two decades after it first emerged from a government lab in the crumbling Soviet Union is stark evidence that innovation in mobile gaming in the United States has been surprisingly disappointing (see Tetris Still Tops Phone Games).