" " Tetris fanatics still compete in intense head-to-head competitions with double-elimination tournament formats. Karl Gehring/Denver Post via Getty Images For almost four decades, through Cold War and detente, through the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the rise of globalism, through diplomatic freezes and thaws and years of touch-and-go Russian-American relations, people all over the world have remained mesmerized by a Soviet invention — a computer game, of all things — that somehow has both persevered and prospered. By now, the game's ever-quickening trickle-down of four-block shapes is immediately identifiable to just about anyone who has ever signed on to a computer. When it was conceived in 1984 by a puzzle-happy programmer, though, Tetris was little more than an in-house diversion, designed to break up serious-minded,12-hour days at the Russian Academy of Sciences.