‘The Cold War Is Over’ proclaimed a flashy 1988 marketing brochure for a strange new computer game, an unlikely hit from behind the Iron Curtain. Then came the teaser: ‘Almost…’ Perhaps they got it right, but for the wrong reasons. The brochure, now at the National Museum of American History in Washington, was the brainchild of Spectrum HoloByte, a Silicon Valley software company then owned by Robert Maxwell (father of Ghislaine). Featuring a drawing of the Kremlin with some geometric figures in front, the brochure warned of the ‘Soviet challenge’, announcing that ‘just when East/West tensions are beginning to ease, the Soviets have scored a direct hit on the US.’

That hit was Tetris, the cult computer game, whose Cyrillic name Тетрис – in bold yellow letters – was proudly displayed on the brochure’s bright-red cover page (the Soviet hammer and sickle replacing the final ‘s’). Spectrum HoloByte, the game’s US distributor, leveraged all the right cold-war themes – from Russian folk music to the images of the Soviet cosmonauts – to make Tetris a hit in Reagan-era America. Even then, some in Silicon Valley knew how to cash in on the cold war.