With the release of the first trailer for the new Tetris movie, there's been a renewed wave of attention paid to the successful block-based puzzle game, and the story of how the Dutch businessman Henk Rogers brought it to the Game Boy.
This has led some people (including the Twitter user @loderun) to dig out some lesser-known artifacts from Tetris's history, such as this remarkable series of illustrations from the pulp Japanese artist Gōjin Ishihara about the making of the game. Ishihara was a post-war painter and illustrator who was often known for producing risqué and erotic art, as well as fairly terrifying depictions of Japanese Yokai, but for whatever reason, they were at one point hired to recap the story of Tetris, leading to a bunch of incredibly striking (albeit baffling) artwork.
The illustration starts off simple enough, depicting the Tetris co-creator Alexey Pajitnov making Tetris at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre, while the KGB drags a person away. It then descends into a more fantastical retelling of events, portraying a bunch of women (and a flying horse) fawning over Pajitnov as he sips a delicious cocktail in his underwater mansion.
We haven't been able to find the original source of these sadly but it's likely that Gōjin Ishihara may have created them for an issue of Famicom-Tsushin from the late 80s or early 90s. We believe this because we also recently came across some Mario ones he created for the magazine, on author Patrick Macias's blog. You can view some of those images below: