Tetris seems to have always been a part of our lives. After reading David Sheff’s Game Over (1993) in 2003, we’ve been aware of the game’s bizarre, notorious, fascinating history.
A BBC documentary (From Russia With Love) had a go at telling the story in 2004, with well received results.
But now it’s got the feature film treatment launching in March 2023, in the form of a biographical thriller on Apple TV.
Capitalistic Scheming Meets the Soviet Union in… Tetris!
Directed by Jon S. Baird, Tetris is an interesting biographical thriller. Based on a true story, this very much indeed based.
It plays fast and loose with real life events, Hollywoodising a lot of what really happened. Although the people involved in the events, Alexey Pajitnov and US entrepreneur Henk Rogers, did have involvement in the script. Just a lot of what they pointed out was ignored.
This means you should watch Tetris and take very little of its developments as fact.
It’s a bit annoying there are fabricated car chases and whatnot, but away from all that this is a genuinely interesting and well-made film.
Starring Taron Egerton as Henk Rogers, the Tetris starts in 1988 with the businessman trying (and failing) to sell his own game at a electronics convention. However, he spots a ported version of a puzzle game and immediately realises it has global potential.
What follows is true—a mad scramble from businesses such as Mirrorsoft (headed by the odious Robert Maxwell) to secure the rights to the game.
Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov is portrayed by Nikita Yefremov.
The cast also includes Roger Allam as Robert Maxwell, Toby Jones as Robert Stein, and Ben Miles as Nintendo of America’s legendary Howard Lincoln.
If you ever thought Tetris just turned up on Nintendo’s Game Boy and that was that, the film version will be a surprise for you. But we do recommend you read David Sheff’s Game Over for the genuine account of what happened.
To be fair, the real life events did play out like a film.
Henk Rogers and Maxwell’s son, Kevin, held various meetings across the world at the same buildings. And would often miss each other by minutes due to happenstance.
Later, Rogers teams up with Pajitnov and the pair become friends.
This is true to life, as the pair hit it off. Over Rogers’ repeated visits to Soviet Russia to secure the rights to Tetris, he and Pajitnov became close friends.
Due to the Soviet Union’s general confusion over everything, the rights to Tetris were distributed (or stolen) by various companies. This meant versions were popping up on all manner of home computers that weren’t legal.
For example, Atari published 300,000 copies of Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the late 1980s. All without really having the rights to do so.
As the film version of Tetris shows, and as you’ve probably guessed already, Henk Rogers helped to secure the handheld rights of Tetris for the Game Boy.
When Nintendo launched the system in 1989, it wasn’t with a Mario game. Rogers convinced the gaming giant to package the system with Tetris—a game for all ages.
It worked a treat. Tetris and the Game Boy were instant global best sellers. The game sparked a cultural phenomenon.
You’ve also got to remember it all played out as the Soviet Union was crumbling and the Chernobyl disaster was wrecking socioeconomic havoc across the nation. Difficult, crazy times for anyone in the country.
And the arrival of capitalism merely shook things up further.
Tetris is a good film. If you had no idea about this story, you’ll find it very intriguing. But take most of the plot developments with a pinch of salt.
At the end, the film shows Pajitnov and his family move to America to live near Rogers (which is what happened in real life). Pajitnov is clearly a very nice and humble type of guy—unassuming—making this a happy development in his life.
The Russian computer engineer worked at Microsoft for a spell. He and Rogers then founded The Tetris Company Ltd. in 1996, which finally allowed Pajitnov to collect royalties for his creation (12 years after its launch).
He’s now 68 and continues to readily promote his genius creation, living in Clyde Hill, Washington with his wife. He has two sons although, tragically, one (Dmitri Pajitnov) died in a skiing accident in 2017.
In 2022, he also openly criticised the war in Ukraine, saying Putin is a:
“Soulless, crazy dictator … his hateful regime will fall down and the normal peaceful way of living will be restored in Ukraine and, hopefully, in Russia.”
The Production of Tetris (and notes on its creators)
Although we enjoyed Tetris, the first half is certainly better than the second. It does start to drag and the invented car chases and other Soviet shenanigans are a bit tedious and jarring.
But we can understand why they were added.
To be honest, we do think the film would have worked well as a genuine telling with a serious tone. Perhaps as a documentary. But for whatever reason, it’s been played out as a thriller by stretching the truth. Liberally.
This does lead to a jarring (again) pro-capitalistic agenda at times, with a huge proportion of Soviet era Russian characters being a bit shifty.
For example, Roger’s innocent seeming female translator (played by Sofya Lebedeva) turns out to be a KGB spy and later pulls a gun on him. He then has to flee the USSR in a panic. Which is all complete bollocks.
Interviewed in February 2023, Rogers told Canary Media in video game icon turned climate champion:
“Alexey Pajitnov and I got to look at the script. It’s a Hollywood script; it’s a movie. It’s not about history, so a lot of [what’s in the movie] never happened. But the filmmakers asked us a bunch of questions about what it was really like. They wanted to capture the darkness and the brooding, how nervous I was — ’Am I seriously going to come away with the rights to Tetris? Or am I going to end up in a gulag?’ These were the kind of thoughts that were going through my head. We spent a lot of time going over iterations of the script. They tried their best to accept our changes when they had to do with authenticity. But when it started getting into [creative flourishes like] the car chase and all that, it was, ’OK, now it’s all them.’ We couldn’t change anything.”
Again, and happily, Rogers and Pajitnov are great friends.
In late March 2023, they had a joint interview with Polygon in the men who created Tetris reflect on their bromance. As the game heads for its 40th anniversary, Pajitnov continues to oversee some remarkable takes on his creation:
“Pajitnov notes recent successes with Tetris Effect (an ‘absolutely great game’) and Tetris 99 (‘My favorite… That’s a gift to my baby’). And he still thinks the ultimate two-player competitive version of Tetris is out there, waiting to be discovered. ‘I do expect to have something much deeper in [terms of a] two-player version,’ he says. ‘There are lots of them, lots of variations, but I kind of have the feeling that we are not there yet.'”
For the record, Tetris Effect (2018) and Tetris 99 (2019) are outstanding. If you think Tetris can’t possibly have advanced in any way since 1989, you’re very wrong!
And if you want to end on an even happier note, here they are in another March 2023 interview promoting the film (they’ve been doing the media rounds for Apple TV).
And for us, as huge fans of the puzzle game, its story, and creators, this post coincided with World Tetris Day on 06/06/2023.
Today is #WorldTetrisDay, and we have some big news to share! We’re excited to announce that we’ll release our first-ever podcast this fall. The Tetris Podcast will explore the real people behind the game, with surprising stories of how Tetris has touched people in so many ways… pic.twitter.com/mfLLS7G3pF
— Tetris (@Tetris_Official) June 6, 2023
Yes, there’s one of those! To mark the 39th birthday of the game, it was announced an official podcast will launch later in 2023.
Tetris is far from done. Good! It’s a magnificent, genius creation and we hope the film draws attention to its perfection as a title to a wider audience.
If you don’t play video games, fine.
But you should be playing Tetris. Its health benefits have been proven as stress relief, advanced problem-solving, decision-making, and impulse control (it’s been used to control addictive urges).
For all of this and more, Mr. Pajitnov we doff our caps to you.
