10 Crazy Unlicensed Video Games You’ve Never Heard Of

9. TETЯIS: The Soviet Mind Game (Nintendo Entertainment System)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLTj9LTd-NA As strange as it may sound, there once was a time where Tetris was not a worldwide juggernaut available to play on every single electronic device in existence. After its initial release for various personal computers in the mid-'80s, the Soviet government started to license it to various video game companies around the world. While Nintendo famously won the bidding for console and portable rights, Atari Games got the arcade rights. At the time, Atari Games' console imprint, Tengen, was also publishing games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. After briefly working with Nintendo to publish the games with an official license, they reverse-engineered the NES's copy protection system (most unlicensed publishers effectively short circuited the copy protection chip) and started manufacturing NES-compatible games on their own. One of these games was TETЯIS, a port of the arcade version with a stylized faux-cyrillic version of the Tetris name on the box. Regardless of the legal status of the anti-copy protection method, Tengen thought they had the legal rights to publish a console version of Tetris...and they were wrong. The game was recalled after a month. It's considered a lost classic among NES fans, as it's considerably better than the initial Nintendo effort, in no small part due to the inclusion of a two player mode.