The Davil in the Details
Some media becomes inextricably linked to horrible crimes. Taxi Driver and the Reagan assassination attempt, The Catcher in the Rye and the murder of John Lennon. Does “inspiring” a crime lower enjoyment of our favorite books or movies? What about games?
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From Crimes in Progress editorial: There’s no evidence that books or movies cause people to be more violent. But video games? Nope. No evidence they do either. Over a long enough timeline though, damn near anything can happen. And in one tangential way, a video game caused two brutal murders and one suicide. Maybe. Well, cause might be too strong a word. Helping popularize Tetris certainly didn’t turn out to be the boon Vladimir Pokhilko thought it would be.
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125,000,000
- Total number of copies of Tetris that have been sold across various platforms.
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As a psychologist in Soviet Russia, Vladimir Pokhilko had to look for innovative ways to treat his patients. In the late 1970s, he began studying puzzles as a means of quick intelligence testing.
He also happened to be friends with a software developer employed at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre, a part of the Academy of Soviet Sciences. They shared a love of puzzles and were both employed by the Soviet government. One day in 1984, the developer, Alexey Pajitnov, showed Pokhilko a little game he created based on Pentamino, an ancient Roman puzzle.
Pokhilko immediately saw the potential of Pajitnov’s game but so did the Soviet government. The creators were forced to sign over the rights to the state, losing out on some $40 million in royalties. Pokhilko probably would be one of the beneficiaries of this windfall. He is often credited as a “co-creator” of the game and was clearly working the business side but didn’t seem to be involved in programming.
As the Soviet Union disintegrated, Pajitnov and Pokhilko emigrated, finding themselves in San Francisco. They partnered with Henk Rogers, a video game distributor that had secured the Japanese rights to Tetris. The group quickly founded new ventures to take advantage of their new capitalist opportunities, founding a series of companies. By 1996, the original rights to one of the highest selling games of all-time reverted to its creator, Pajitnov.
Despite being vital to the history of Tetris, Pokhilko was left out of the creation of The Tetris Company, which was founded by Pajitnov and Rogers. He continued to work and create businesses with his more successful colleagues but his own projects were faltering.
As a president of AnimaTek, Pokhilko was in charge of some 80 employees, the majority of which were based in Russia. Still, the company was struggling to bring a product to market and needed to secure outside funding to continue operations.
After a tour of Asia in search of a deep-pocketed backer, Pokhilko returned home without a single commitment. What he did next would shock friends, colleagues, and the relatively crime free tech enclave of Palo Alto.
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2
- Number of murders that occurred in Palo Alto in 2013. The area has seen remarkably low homicide rates since becoming a hub for premier tech companies in the 1970s.
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On September 21st, 1998, the pressure became too much for Pokhilko. He bludgeoned his wife and 12-year old son with a hammer as they slept. In the aftermath, he slashed his own throat, succumbing to the wounds. A family friend, not Pajitnov or Rogers, discovered the body the next day.
A casual observer might dismiss Pokhilko’s as inspired by anger or jealousy, perceived as an honor killing by a man that believed little else was available in life. Maybe that’s right.
When asked about the state of their business, Rogers said, “We were in the middle of raising money. It was nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that we couldn’t see past the end of.”
At this point, what we’re left with is speculation and one last detail I failed to mention. Investigators at the original crime found a note, written by Pokhilko, that was ultimately ruled “not a suicide note”. While unusual (or disturbing considering the context), the hand-written scrap of paper failed to reveal a motive. In exactly 13 words, it simply read, “I’ve been eaten alive. Vladimir. Just remember that I am exist. The davil.”
Sgt. Scott Wong of the Palo Alto Police Department struggled to describe a consensus opinion of the note to press at the time. He said, “There are different interpretations of what the note means but any interpretation of the person writing the note is that they were under some stress.”
Various business partners, Rogers included, tried to assuage Pokhilko’s apprehensions about managing a modern business in America.
“Vladimir was stressed about the business,” Rogers added. “This may have been the first time he dealt with this sort of situation.”
Gilman Louis, a member of AnimaTek’s board of directors and the Chief Creative Officer at Hasbro at the time, pointed out that the company had a partnership with Squaresoft, a Japanese game development company, to create tools associated with game and special effects. He told the Palo Alto Times in 1998, “We told him that the company [Squaresoft] was willing to give an additional advance to help manage the difficulties the company was experiencing in cash flow. Vladimir was afraid that they’d have to lay off workers both in San Francisco and Moscow.”
“Vladimir takes things very, very seriously,” he continued. “He’s one of the most responsible people I know. That’s why it’s such a big shock for anybody who knows Vladimir or is involved in AnimaTek. He seemed stable and in control. He never raised his voice, never got physical, never even swore.”
And this is the moment where we need to remember that Pokhilko was a trained psychologist and a former citizen of the Soviet Union suddenly placed in charge of a prototype Silicon Valley startup.
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90
- Percentage of Silicon Valley startups that fail without recouping capital for initial investors.
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For a certain kind of person with a certain kind of dream, Silicon Valley has long been a proving ground. Vladimir Pokhilko was not one of those people.
Though intelligent and ambitious, he could not navigate the stress associated with creating a new business in a relatively new field.
One of the more tragic elements of this case came just four days after the killings. A Japanese investor that had met with Pokhilko a few weeks prior contacted AnimaTek for instructions on wiring their investment to the company. They didn’t know what had happened.
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