Upon the 35th anniversary of the video game Tetris in 2020, I heard some news stories about its Russian creator Alexey Pajitnov. Back then, I was hoping that they would also mention the company I was a part of, Nexa (AKA Spectrum HoloByte or Sphere), and its role in the development of the game. They never did.

Now, with the release of Tetris the Movie on Apple TV, I was once again hoping that our story would finally be told. Sadly, it was not.

Most likely for the purpose of telling an interesting story, the creators of the movie chose to concentrate on the licensing battles and the shenanigans that were happened at the same time as the game was beginning to take the world by storm. It’s understandable that the telling of the story of the development of a computer game would be tantamount to watching paint dry, but for those of us that were there at the time, it was an interesting experience.

For you, our readers, the interesting thing about the development of Tetris for the US market might be that Nexa was really one of the first Asian American software tech startups in America. When I joined Nexa in 1985, roughly two thirds of this little company (including its CEO and co-founder Gilman Louie) consisted of Asian Americans.

I’ve asked some of my friends and former bosses to tell me about their story on Nexa and its connection to Tetris.

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Nexa Corporation (Early 1980s)

Note: The following text from Gilman Louie are taken from his speech at the 3rd Personal Computer Faire in San Francisco in September 1985. (You can read the transcription of Gilman’s entire presentation in a MicroTimes magazine article which has been saved by the Internet Archive.)

Gilman Louie (GL): The trick for success is finding something that you love to do. What I mean by loving to do something, is when you're about nine years old, and you have a bunch of masking tape, and a bunch of cardboard index cards, and you paste together this make-believe computer, and everybody around you says, “That kid's a little strange.”

Kenneth Chan (KC): My initial involvement with Gilman was when he and to a certain extent Greg Omi started a training class to teach people 6502 assembly language (one of the programming languages for the Apple II, Atari, Commodore, and other computers and gaming devices at that time). I did not have a job because of the recession in the early 80's. My sister knew Gilman from high school so she asked for me to join.

The class was mainly for Gilman's fraternity brothers (Bryant Fong was one of them).

Bryant Fong (BF): Gilman was a close college buddy who I saw shopping at Christmas and he said that he was forming a group to do some game development. With no job at the time, I thought it would be an opportunity to do something, learn more about programming and hang out. Getting my parents off my back was also a factor. Bear in mind, I had no expectations of making money.

GL: So what we offered them was to come and work for free in the company and give up your unemployment checks, and work for a year, and see what would happen. That's exactly what we did…

So we set up this house, which was my parent's house, and we moved my parents into a little corner of the house and surrounded them with boxes. We take over the kitchen, the bedrooms, the dining room, and the basement, and we shoved forty computers in there with ten programmers. Now this is a little strange. The little kids outside in my neighborhood — we work out of a residential area — thought it was a little strange, because they saw the same people coming in and out of this house at three o'clock in the morning for about four months, working on a project. And you could kind of see they're getting kind of scrungy and looking rather disgusting.

KC: The idea was for Gilman to train new people so they could work on new games. Greg was already around as a mentor having so much success with Captain Cosmo (a computer game made by Nexa).

Over time, people stopped coming until Bryant and I were the only ones left because Bryant too did not have a "real" job. I think the rest of the people were still in school. Since Bryant and I needed to earn a living (not much of a living since we were both living at home), we started branching out to do consulting work and work on some projects for some banks and companies that wanted to start using “microcomputers” but lacked the expertise to do so.

BF: There was a non-gaming side to Nexa doing spreadsheets and other business applications to bring money into the business as Gilman's parents supported the business operations. Ken and I worked a bit on that side.

KC: At some point, ASCII Microsoft came along and wanted a version of Captain Cosmo for Japanese computers.

GL: Our major clients — the first ones we had were the Japanese in Japan. Microsoft-ASCII came to a West Coast Computer Faire. We had this little micro booth, a 6 x 6 lot on the corner, which we extended out to two feet on each end, so we kind of got an 8X8 booth. We built it all the way up to the ceiling. What happened was this Japanese man walks up to us, and it just so happens that everyone who wasn't Asian, which was like half the company, decided to go to lunch at one time. So here's this big booth in this 6X6 slot, filled with these Asian employees, and they said “Great! This must be another Japanese company, and we can do lots of business with them!” So they came up and he took lots of pictures with the camera, and he gave us his card, and we took it back, and the next thing we know, there was this doorbell ringing.

And there were these four Japanese vice-presidents from the largest Japanese software house in Japan, visiting our house, with the little kids running around out in the street. Now they come in and we're real scared, because my mom is there, and she's going “What's going on here? Do you want a cup of coffee?” and she introduces us as “her kids,” and they're looking real strange at us, like “Why did we fly in from Tokyo to meet these guys here?” Everybody's speaking Japanese, and nobody in our company knows Japanese…

Now they got this translator working for them, which happened to later on be one of the vice-presidents who disguises himself as a translator, and everybody else pretends that they can't speak English. So they're watching, and seeing what's going on. My mom is serving them cups of coffee. They're saying “We'd like to do more business with you.” My mom got real upset and she's saying, “Well, I'd better be quite honest with these people, otherwise my son is going to get in a lot of trouble for making promises he can't carry out.” She tells the Japanese that “Look, this is all there is to it, right?” and “These kids running around, they really don't know what they're doing. They're just out of college, and they think they know, and they have all the answers in the world, because they got their M.B.A.'s.”

Now at that time, the Japanese guy kind of chuckled, and he looks at us, and he says, “Look, we started out in a room about half the size of this kitchen, and we like companies like you, because you're cheap.”

KC: Eventually, we got involved with Epyx (one of the big game software companies at that time) because they wanted a football game to complement their lineup of sports games. With the success of the football game (the game did pretty well for Epyx but not so much for the company or Bryant and me), they wanted us to convert some of their games to different platforms. That's when we started to “hire” some of you to do the work.

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My Story

When I got out of college I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I had taken numerous computer programming courses and one of them was a course on making educational software using Apple II computers. My thought was to either join a tech start-up or perhaps even start my own.

As part of my job search or job creation strategy, I attend most of the local computer shows. One of those shows was the 3rd Personal Computer Faire. Gilman was a panelist on a session called “Software Entrepreneurs: From Start-Ups To Upstarts” (this is the same session that Gilman's quotes were pulled from above).

I was enthralled. Here was an Asian American that was successful enough to be on a panel with Adam Osborne (of Osborne computer notoriety), John Walker (founder of Autodesk, makers of AutoCAD), and Philippe Kahn (the head of Borland, makers of Turbo Pascal, one of the first high level programming language development tools for personal computers). Here was an Asian American entrepreneur among what seemed to me to be a mostly Caucasian tech industry.

This may be a surprise for people today since there are so many AAPIs in the tech industry, but I don’t think there were that many back then. Most of the well known founders and heads of American tech companies were mostly white men.

Not long after attending this computer show, my friend Clifford and I were looking at job listings on a bulletin board in Berkeley (these were real physical job boards, with note cards and push pins, and not the virtual kinds used today :). Clifford saw the listing for an Apple II programmer and pointed it out to me. The listing was placed by Nexa.

By this point Nexa had moved out of Gilman’s parent’s house and had a small office in an old Victorian buidling in the South of Market area of San Francisco. The South of Market neighborhood was not yet a tech hub. It was still mostly an old industrial area with numerous garment factories nearby. I would often see the Asian garment workers waiting at the same bus stops that I waited at. With Nexa’s low pay and long hours, I often felt a bit of kinship with these “sweatshop” workers.

When I joined Nexa there were only about a dozen of us. Soon after, I was joined by a core group of programmers, the majority of which came from Indonesia. They were foreign students that had graduated from the University of San Francisco and were all friends of each other. Besides from Indonesia, we had coworkers from Burma, Singapore, Malaysia (my friend Cliff eventually joined me), Turkey, Hawaii, Algeria, and right here from the Bay Area like me.

For the first year I was with Nexa, we were heavily Asian American, especially among the programming staff. After that first year we began to grow rapidly and started to look more like the rest of the Bay Area.

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Nexa and Tetris

In 1987 we merged with Spectrum HoloByte and the joint companies were called Sphere. I wasn’t privy to the details of the merger, but one of the investors was infamous British media tycoon Robert Maxwell. If you’ve seen Tetris the Movie, Maxwell plays one of the antagonists in it.

Spectrum HoloByte was originally based in Colorado and when we merged they only added two people to Nexa. One of them was Spectrum HoloByte’s president, Phil Adam. According to Wikipedia, Phil was credited with bringing Tetris to our company after he had seen an early version of the game at Maxwell’s software company Mirrorsoft.

My role in the acquisition, development, and marketing of Tetris was negligible. I was working on other projects at the time. Nexa was still developing software for other companies like Activision and Epyx as well as making our own products that we would sell through the label of Spectrum HoloByte.

In addition, our rapid expansion led to most of the staff moving to a new office in Alameda. I was one of the last employees to leave our South of Market office. I can’t remember now, but I think most of the development of Tetris was completed in our Alameda office.

Here are some of the few comments I could get from friends that worked on Tetris.

Gary Poon (Nexa’s lead Mac programmer): I didn’t do the Mac version. I just hacked it so it would run a demo loop when they showed it to Gorbachev (the Soviet Union Leader). At least that was what I was told.

I did finish the Atari ST version after their (Mirrorsoft) programmer/developer bailed on them. I don’t remember what the whole story on that was. Despite no hard drive and flaky hardware, (the floppy drives would just stop working several times a day) I put in a music driver, support for Atari’s TOS (the operating system for the ST) and a few other stuff I’ve since forgotten. I got it all done in about a month.

Billy Sutyono: I only did the conversion job for the Tandy PC if I remember correctly… Life at Nexa was wonderful for me (positive thinking). I got my first job, and met nice new friends like you all.

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Ken had left Nexa around the time of the merger and Bryant was not involved with the acquisition, development, or marketing of Tetris.

My one minor connection with Tetris’ development was that the artist, Dan Guerra, designed the iconic box cover art in my office. He needed some quiet space and my desk was available since I was working at my computer desk.

What made this memorable for me was that some time after he created the box cover, I remember seeing the same art on someone’s Tetris t-shirt. Perhaps that was when I realized that Tetris had become an iconic game.

Prior to that point, Tetris was not really that big of a deal for us. Sure it was an addictive game that we all got to try before most Americans. But it was a simple game that my co-workers could crank out in a short amount of time. At that same time, we were developing much more complex games like space shuttle and jet simulators. Even the simple role playing games that I worked on took months longer to develop.

In the grand scheme of things, there were lots and lots of tech companies that came and went. I remember walking through some computer shows thinking how most of the exhibiting companies there would not survive to the next computer show. It was like that back then.

Nexa had its day. It survived longer than many of the other ones did. Through a succession of mergers, what was formerly Nexa eventually got taken over by a division of toy maker Hasbro and then Atari.

For me, I left Nexa/Sphere in 1988 during some rounds of layoffs. They didn’t have a need for Apple II programmers anymore. The industry was changing fast. Soon after, I finally did get to write educational software when I joined The Learning Company (makers of programs such as Reader Rabbit). Eventually I left there too and found my way to AACP.

But that’s another story.

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To find the names of some of my Nexa/Spectrum HoloByte co-workers and friends that worked on Tetris, go to Mobygames.com.