10 Great Video Games Made By Just One Person

Unquestionably one of the most famous games of all time, Tetris started off as an idea in the head of Russian computer scientist Alexey Pajitnov. Little did he know at the time that Tetris would go on to become an iconic part of the gaming industry and pop culture at large, selling millions of copies, inspiring a myriad of clones, and being released time and time again for every platform imaginable.

Pajitnov enjoyed puzzles from an early age and was working at the Soviet Acadmey of Science in the 1980s when he started developing Tetris. Part of his job involved testing out new computer systems, so he enjoyed making little games to see what the hardware could handle, and Tetris came about as a result.

Pajitnov showed the game to a couple of colleagues, who liked the idea and helped him port it over to PC. From there, history was made. Remarkably, despite Tetris being released in 1984, Pajitnov didn't actually make any money from it until over a decade later, when he co-founded The Tetris Company in 1996 and finally started getting the royalties he richly deserved.