Korobeiniki is a nineteenth-century Russian folk song about a peddler trying to sell goods to a girl, but you almost certainly know it as the inescapable Type-A background music from the Game Boy version of Tetris.

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Korobeiniki is a nineteenth-century Russian folk song about a peddler trying to sell goods to a girl, but you almost certainly know it as the inescapable Type-A background music from the Game Boy version of Tetris. Nintendo decided to slap this public domain banger onto their puzzle game in 1989 to emphasize the game's Soviet origins, forever rewriting global pop culture. Now, generations of functioning adults cannot stack moving boxes or pack the trunk of their car without this frantic Slavic melody looping endlessly in their heads. The original composer is lost to history, blissfully unaware that his romantic folk tune would become the official anthem for millennial anxiety and spatial organization