Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov (born 14 March 1956) is a Russian video game designer and computer engineer. He is best known for developing Tetris in 1984 while working for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a Soviet government-founded R&D center. He only started to get royalties from his creation in 1996 when he and Henk Rogers formed The Tetris Company.