Best-selling video game of all time

What to remember

Should every version of a game be added together? Opinions differ, and that question decides this record. Counting all its releases, Tetris totals 520,000,000 copies sold as of 2022, which puts it first. Others reject that sum and give the top spot to Minecraft, with over 425 million copies as of 2026. The closest rival to either, Grand Theft Auto V, has sold 230 million.

The game was born in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. Alexey Pajitnov, who worked at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences, made it in his spare time, first programming it in Pascal for the Elektronika 60 in about three weeks. He then spent over two months porting it to the IBM PC with Turbo Pascal, helped by Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov.

The idea fits in a sentence: falling pieces of four connected blocks, the tetrominoes, must be stacked so that full horizontal lines disappear and score points. That gameplay has appeared in approximately 220 versions across at least 70 platforms. After a fight over the rights in the late 1980s, they have belonged to The Tetris Company since 1996.