ELORG

~ the obituary ~

Vsesoyuznoye Obyedineniye Elektronorgtekhnika was founded in 1971 and everybody shortened it to ELORG. It was an office of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Trade, and it held a monopoly on the import and export of computer hardware, software and technical support for the entire Soviet Union. If a computer or a program crossed the Soviet border in either direction between 1971 and 1989, it crossed through this organization or it did not cross.

The day job was moving machines. On the import side it was how Soviet institutes obtained Western equipment under the export controls of the period. On the export side the product was Soviet electronics sold abroad under ELORG's own badge, including Elektronika calculators that went out as ELORG units. None of it was a business in the sense of chasing a market. The office was the market, and whoever stood on either side of the border dealt with it because there was no alternative counterparty.

What made the name survive was one line item. Tetris was written in 1984 by a researcher at the Computer Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, on a state machine during state hours, which under Soviet law meant the state held the rights. ELORG was the part of the state that sold things to foreigners. So a puzzle game written for nothing by an employee who owned none of it became the property of an import-export desk, and by 1989 that desk was negotiating with Nintendo.

In 1991, with the union dissolving around it, the director Nikolai Belikov converted ELORG into a private company. That is the trick of the whole story: a ministry desk with a rubber stamp walked out of the Soviet Union owning a piece of the most licensed video game in the world. There is no way to have experienced ELORG. It had no customers and no product with its name on it, only a signature at the bottom of other people's contracts. The closest anybody outside the trade ever got to it was a copyright line on a title screen.

~ the case file ~

~ the only export that mattered ~

The hardware trade is genuinely gone. Soviet minicomputers were mostly clones of Western architectures and the export markets were mostly other countries inside the bloc. The whole apparatus stopped making sense within two years of the union ending. By 1993 there was no monopoly to hold, because there was no border control on computers worth enforcing and no ministry left to enforce it for. What ELORG still had on its books at that point was a contract file.

~ fifteen million dollars for a ministry office ~

Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris in 1984 and Robert Stein of Andromeda Software began selling licenses to it in the West before the underlying contract with ELORG was signed in May 1988. The result was that more than one company believed in good faith that it owned overlapping rights. Belikov settled it in Moscow in February 1989 by reading the contracts more carefully than the people who had signed them, and the handheld rights went to Nintendo, which shipped the game in the Game Boy box. The story of that room belongs to the companies that lost it, and one of them is already buried on this site.

Pajitnov's licensing arrangement with ELORG ran ten years. When it expired in 1996 the rights came back to him, and he and Henk Rogers set up The Tetris Company that year to hold and license them, with ELORG holding half of the new venture. A Russian private company descended from a Soviet trade ministry now owned fifty percent of an American joint venture whose only asset was a game one of its own founders had written for free.

In January 2005 Rogers and Pajitnov bought ELORG outright for $15 million, and the last piece of state ownership came off the game. Thirty-four years after the Ministry of Foreign Trade opened the office, the office itself was the merchandise. The minicomputers and the calculators had stopped mattering around 1992.

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