Tetris was created by Soviet software programmer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984. For a variety of platforms, it has been made available by a number of companies, most notably in the late 1980s during a court struggle over the ownership of the rights. Before Pajitnov and Henk Rogers co-founded the Tetris Company in 1996 to handle licensing, Nintendo released Tetris for a substantial period of time.