play for longer than their opponent. Each player plays with a separate Game Boy and Tetris Game Pak, with the two consoles connected via the Game Link Cable. When a player scores a Double, Triple, or Tetris, incomplete rows of blocks are added to the bottom of the opponent's stack, causing it to rise. Development Tetris was first created in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov. In 1988, Pajitnov teamed with fellow Soviet Academy of Sciences researchers Dmitry Pavlovsky, and Vadim Gerasimov to create a new two-player version of Tetris that ran on PCs. The game was soon licensed by Andromeda Software executive Robert Stein, who sublicensed the game to multiple publishers in different territories. In 1988, Henk Rogers of Bullet-Proof Software noticed the US home computer version at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in a Spectrum HoloByte booth. Finding himself hooked to the game, he pursued the rights to publish Tetris in Japan, and secured licenses from both Spectrum HoloByte, who held the North American computer license, and Atari Games, which had produced the American arcade version under a sublicense from Mirrorsoft, which had the rights for the European computer market. Knowing Nintendo was planning to release the Game Boy, Rogers approached Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa to suggest Tetris as the perfect bundled launch game. Arakawa questioned the idea, having planned to bundle Super Mario Land, but Rogers countered by stating that though a Mario game would promote the Game Boy to young boys, Tetris would promote it to everyone. Rogers was told to pursue the rights; he approached Stein to seek rights for it to be distributed with the Game Boy. However, after several months passed, Stein had not signed to contract for the rights for the Game Boy, and Rogers learned that another person had approached Nintendo with the idea of a Game Boy Tetris. Requesting more time from Arakawa, he traveled to Moscow to speak with the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations's bureau for computer hardware and software export, called Elektronorgtechnica or ELORG, and Pajitnov. During this time, Nintendo approached Spectrum HoloByte on the prospect of a Game Boy Tetris, causing Mirrorsoft to send a representative, Kevin Maxwell, to Moscow to secure rights for the Game Boy version. Meanwhile, Rogers negotiated for the rights for Tetris on the Game Boy, noting in a later interview that the government officials did not understand the concept of