A Hammer and Sickle for a Letter: Faces...tris III (1990) and the Soviet Union as Trademark
The Archive's study of Tetris documented how a Soviet mathematical theorem was dressed by its Western publishers in onion domes and folk songs. Faces...tris III (1990) records the next stage of that operation, and in some ways the stranger one. Here is a game developed in California by Sphere, Inc. and published by Spectrum HoloByte, an American product from first line of code to last, whose box copy nonetheless announced it as the newest "mind-teaser" from the Soviet Union, and whose logo drafted the hammer and sickle itself into service as a letter of the Latin alphabet. By 1990 the costume no longer required the body. The USSR had completed its conversion from state to trademark, and the trademark was being applied, with total confidence, to goods manufactured in Alameda.
The "-tris" Assembly Line
After the planetary success of Tetris, the Western industry needed a sequel to a game that logically admits none, and the solution it found was linguistic: the suffix. In two years the market received Welltris (1989), where pieces descend the walls of a three-dimensional well; Hatris (1990), where the tetrominoes became stackable hats; and Faces, subtitled "...tris III" because Spectrum HoloByte, counting only its own releases, numbered the line Tetris, Welltris, Faces and quietly skipped the Hatris that had gone out through other publishers. A Russian coinage, half Greek and half tennis, had become a franchise particle, an "-ов" for the American software shelf. Wordtris would extend the arithmetic in 1991.
Faces holds a specific place in this sequence: it was the last Tetris-style game Alexey Pajitnov directly created, designed together with his friend and collaborator Vladimir Pokhilko. Pajitnov's own verdict, delivered years later to Retro Gamer, was withering by his gentle standards: "Personally, I didn't like it very much." He recalled that he and Pokhilko had pushed the concept onto Spectrum HoloByte themselves, drawn by the novelty of pieces that assembled into a human face, only to discover the design's central flaw in play: in Tetris, a mistake is an abstraction; in Faces, a mistake stares back at you as a deformed human being. It is a rare thing, a designer's honest autopsy of his own work, and rarer still from a man whose previous idea had sold in the hundreds of millions.
The Psychologist of Tetris: Vladimir Pokhilko
The co-designer of Faces deserves more attention than the medium's histories usually grant him. Vladimir Pokhilko was a Moscow clinical psychologist specializing in human-computer interaction, and he holds a singular distinction in the scientific literature: he was the first person on Earth to use Tetris in clinical experiments, conducting them around 1985 at a Moscow medical facility. The famous anecdote is worth retelling for what it says about the game's power. When copies of Pajitnov's creation reached Pokhilko's institute, his colleagues' constant playing began to impair the actual medical research, and Pokhilko destroyed the disks. New copies arrived anyway. Recognizing the inevitable, he surrendered and put the game to work in psychological testing instead. In 1989 he and Pajitnov founded AnimaTek in Moscow, and after emigrating to the United States in 1991 he produced El-Fish, the remarkable Maxis-published aquarium simulator that let users breed algorithmically generated fish.
Seen in this light, Faces is a thoroughly Pokhilkian object. A clinical psychologist works in faces; recognition, expression, and the reading of features are his laboratory materials. A game about assembling human faces from sliced strata, and about the specific discomfort of assembling them wrongly, carries his professional fingerprints as plainly as the falling blocks carry Pajitnov's. His story ended in tragedy: in September 1998 Pokhilko, his wife Elena Fedotova, and their twelve-year-old son Peter were found dead in their Palo Alto home, a case officially ruled a murder-suicide amid the financial collapse of AnimaTek, though doubts about that ruling persist and the affair has since been the subject of a television documentary series. The Archive records the fact soberly and moves on, noting only that of the two Muscovites who signed Faces, emigration was kind to one.
Stacking Humanity in Five Slices
The design itself is easily described. Two horizontal slices fall side by side from the top of the screen, each carrying a stratum of a human face: forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, or chin. The player shifts them left and right, swaps and flips them, and builds faces upward from the chin, ideally assembling all five slices of the same person. The game shipped with sixty preset faces spread across ten themed levels, each with its own period backdrop and Ed Bogas music: composers, scientists, monsters, historical figures. Spectrum HoloByte's box copy leaned on the roster with a flourish worthy of its subject, posing the dilemma "To rotate Shakespeare's nose or not to rotate Shakespeare's nose." Perfect faces score highest; hybrids score less; a botched stack must be abandoned to a new chin.
One mechanical footnote earns the game a place in design history regardless of its reception. In head-to-head mode, completing a perfect face dumps a stack of pieces onto the opponent's screen. This is, recognizably, the attack-and-garbage grammar that would later define Puyo Puyo, Tetris Battle Gaiden, and eventually the ninety-eight simultaneous opponents of Tetris 99. The idea that one player's excellence should become another player's burden, now the spine of all competitive falling-block play, was already present in 1990, in a game remembered mostly as a curiosity. Contemporary critics were lukewarm; Dragon magazine awarded three stars of five in 1991. The industry itself was kinder, handing Faces the Best Action/Arcade Program prize at the 1991 Excellence in Software Awards, a reminder that the "-tris" suffix still commanded institutional respect even as its returns diminished.
A Hammer and Sickle for a "C"
And then there is the cover, the true reason this minor game belongs in the ROMANOV Archive. In the logotype of FACES, the letter "C" is not a letter at all: it is the hammer and sickle, its curved blade standing in for the Latin character. This is the trope this Archive has documented under Faux Cyrillic and The Hammer & Sickle, executed here in its most distilled form. Tengen had already given the world "Tetяis" with its reversed Я; Far Cry 2 would later stencil "ЯЕSТЯIСТЕD" onto its crates; an entire industry would spend three decades treating the Cyrillic alphabet as a texture rather than a writing system. But Faces goes a step beyond the alphabet. It conscripts the state emblem itself, the seal under which a superpower industrialized, defeated fascism, and reached orbit, and employs it as a font glyph on a $40 puzzle game about stacking celebrity noses.
The timing gives the gesture its full meaning. This box shipped in 1990, the year the Congress of People's Deputies repealed Article 6, the year the RSFSR declared its sovereignty, the year the symbol's own jurisdiction began voting itself out of existence. At the precise moment the hammer and sickle was being lowered as a political fact, it was being raised as a commercial one, embossed on American software as a seal of exotic quality. The box copy completed the fiction, presenting this California-built product as the third mind-teaser "from the Soviet Union." The claim was true only of the designers' passports, and yet it was the load-bearing sentence of the entire campaign. Nothing in the Archive's holdings states the thesis more nakedly: to the Western industry, the Soviet Union was never primarily a country. It was a flavor, and flavors survive the death of the fruit.
The "-tris" Ledger
| Images (Click to Expand) | Title | Year | Concept | Geopolitical & Thematic Analysis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Tetris | 1985 / 1988 | Falling tetrominoes | The theorem itself. Born at the Academy of Sciences, sold to the world in a red box crowned with St. Basil's. See the Archive's dedicated study. |
|
Welltris | 1989 | Pieces descending a 3D well | The first suffix. Pajitnov's own extension of the idea into three dimensions, and the moment "-tris" became a brand particle. |
|
Hatris | 1990 | Stacking falling hats | The suffix without the geometry. Released through other publishers, and pointedly omitted from Spectrum HoloByte's own numbering of the line. |
|
Faces...tris III | 1990 | Assembling sliced faces | The last Pajitnov-designed "-tris," co-authored with the psychologist Pokhilko, sold as Soviet despite its Californian manufacture, with the hammer and sickle serving as a letter. |
|
Wordtris | 1991 | Falling letters forming words | The suffix outlives the state. Released in the Union's final year, by which point "-tris" required no Soviet involvement at all, only the memory of one. |
Conclusion
Faces...tris III is a footnote as a game and a landmark as an artifact. Within one modest box from 1990 the Archive finds the complete late stage of the process begun with Tetris: a Russian design lineage reduced to a suffix, a Soviet provenance claimed for American goods, and the state emblem itself demoted to a typographic flourish, one glyph among twenty-six. Pajitnov disliked the game and said so; Pokhilko's fingerprints give it an unexpected human depth; and its two-player penalty system quietly seeded the competitive grammar the franchise runs on today. But its lasting testimony is the logo. When a civilization's seal can stand in for a "C" on a puzzle box, the merchandising of that civilization is complete, and everything this Archive documents in the decades that follow is aftermath.
Faces...tris III: The Emblem as Alphabet
Title: Faces...tris III
Designers: Alexey Pajitnov, Vladimir Pokhilko
Developer: Sphere, Inc.
Publisher: Spectrum HoloByte
Release Year: 1990
Platforms: MS-DOS, Macintosh, Amiga
Composer: Ed Bogas
Genre: Puzzle
The last falling-block game Pajitnov directly designed, created with the clinical psychologist Vladimir Pokhilko and disowned by its own author. An American-developed product marketed as Soviet, its logo pressed the hammer and sickle into service as a Latin letter in the very year the emblem's own state began dissolving, making Faces the purest specimen in the Archive of the Soviet Union's conversion into a brand.
References
- Sphere, Inc. (1990). Faces...tris III [Video game]. Spectrum HoloByte.
- Wikipedia. (n.d.). Faces...tris III. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faces...tris_III
- MobyGames. (n.d.). Faces ...tris III. https://www.mobygames.com/game/2627/faces-tris-iii/
- Internet Archive. (n.d.). Faces ...tris III Demo [Box copy]. https://archive.org/details/Faces_1020
- Wikipedia. (n.d.). Vladimir Pokhilko. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Pokhilko
- Crookes, D. (2018). "The History of Tetris". Retro Gamer, No. 183. Future Publishing.
- Lesser, H., Lesser, P., & Lesser, K. (1991). "The Role of Computers". Dragon, No. 168, 47–54.