Tetris: Game on!

Tetris (2023) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity

Available via: Apple TV+

By Derrick Bang

You wouldn’t think the debut and marketing of a video game could be spun into an absorbing thriller.

 

You’d be wrong.

 

Software entrepreneur Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton, left) initially believes that marketing
Tetris simply will involve securing publication rights from developer Alexey Pajitnov
(Nikita Efremov), but the latter quickly dismisses this naïve notion, pointing out that
things are handled quite differently in the Soviet Union. Translator Sasha
(Sofia Lebedeva) follows this conversation with open curiosity.

Director Jon S. Baird’s Tetris is an audacious account of the mid-1980s struggle for publishing rights for that enormously addictive game. Many of the key players here are actual people — the two most prominent individuals, still with us today, approved the project — although scripter Noah Pink employs serious dramatic license to transform what likely was a dull, grinding saga of dueling litigants into a delightfully cheeky spy flick.

Besides which, we’re dealing primarily with the Soviet Union, during the final few years before its collapse … so who’s to say that some of Pink’s imaginative embellishments don’t hew close to the truth?

 

A brief real-world introduction:

 

In 1984, early-gen hardware and software engineer Alexey Pajitnov — then working for the Soviet Academy of Sciences — developed a puzzle game on the institute’s Electronika 60 computer. Pajitnov titled his “falling blocks” creation Tetris, from a blend of “tetra” (four) and his favorite sport, tennis.

 

The Electronika 60 lacked a graphical interface, so Pajitnov’s first-gen version used simple spaces and brackets. The game caught on like wildfire once he shared it, and soon migrated to every scientific colleague with a computer. With the help of Vadim Gerasimov, a 16-year-old student with mad programming skills, Tetris was adapted for IBM personal computers.

 

But Pajitnov didn’t “own” his creation; the Soviet government did. He therefore couldn’t sell, license or market it. The game nonetheless um, ah, “traveled” to Hungary and Poland, where it came to the attention of international software salesman Robert Stein; he shopped it around the 1987 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show.

 

What happened next was somewhat fishy, because Stein ultimately licensed a game that he didn’t actually own. Soon thereafter, it was spotted by Henk Rogers, a Dutch-born, American-raised entrepreneur living in Japan with his family; he smelled opportunity.

 

Baird’s film begins as Rogers (Taron Egerton), seeking a hit that might save his failing company, Bullet-Proof Software, stumbles across Tetris at a computer expo. He’s transfixed, and immediately sets out to obtain the right to license the game in Japan. Stein (Toby Jones) already has — questionably — sold American rights to video game developer/publisher Spectrum HoloByte, and European rights to Mirrorsoft; Japan remains an open market.

 

But Rogers soon learns that — Stein’s existing deals notwithstanding — the game’s ownership is murky at best, utterly bizarre at worst. The complexity of additional licensing involves not only nation-state rights, but also the proliferation of platforms — at the time, Atari, Commodore 64 and Amiga, among others — and their parent companies.

 

Ergo Rogers, with no shortage of brashness, becomes “the guy who goes to Russia.”