Tetris
June 1984, at the Computing Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The machine Pajitnov was working on was an Electronika 60, the Soviet version of the PDP-11, with no graphics capability. So the first Tetris was drawn in text characters. The idea came from pentominoes, shapes made of five squares, which he cut down to four and set falling. The name combines tetra, for four, with tennis, the sport he loved. A teenage colleague, Vadim Gerasimov, ported it to the IBM PC, and from there it crossed the Iron Curtain and went out into the world. Stacking falling shapes with no gaps needed no border and no language, and that is how it became one of the most widely played games on earth. The story of who owned it is exactly as told in the myth note above.
The myth, corrected
Tetris sold worldwide early on and made its creator rich
Alexey Pajitnov was an employee of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Whatever an employee made belonged to the state, so he never received a single royalty. The worldwide distribution rights were resold and sublicensed, and the state agency ELORG argued that he had never had the authority to license it in the first place; in 1989 Nintendo contracted directly with ELORG and won the resulting case. The rights only returned to Pajitnov, letting him start a company, in 1995 to 1996, after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. For roughly a decade, the creator of one of the most famous games in the world went unpaid. I am leaving out the figure of one hundred million dollars in lost earnings that sometimes circulates, since its source is weak.