How many copies has Tetris sold across all versions?

How to get close to this number

Count the platforms, not the releases. This game has been published on essentially every computing device made since the 1980s, frequently as a paid title, and the same person may have bought it several times across decades. A title with forty years of availability on every platform accumulates a total that no single modern blockbuster can match.

The download figure in the explanation nearly doubles the picture and raises the definitional question: are paid mobile downloads "copies sold"? Counting them is defensible and so is not counting them, which is why figures for this game vary so much between sources. Any all-time sales record for something this old is a statement about what was counted.

The history is the part worth knowing. It was created by a Soviet computer scientist, and the rights sat with the Soviet state, so the person who made the most widely sold game in history saw almost none of the money for the first decade. It is one of the clearest illustrations that commercial success and authorship can be entirely decoupled.