The Story of an Enduring Game from a Dark Time

A new film tells how Tetris came from behind the lron Curtain to conquer the planet

- JAMIE BURTON

TETRIS, NOW STREAMING ON Apple TV+, is a biographical drama about the origins of the mesmerizing video game. On its way to the screen, though, the film nearly became, among other things, a fantasy epic about magicians.

"It was a project about some kind of interesting magic team," remembers Alexey Pajitnov, the Russian software engineer who created the game in 1984. Pajitnov and his Tetris Company co-founder Henk Rogers are the executive producers of the Apple TV film. Jon S. Baird directed. The film focuses on Rogers (played by Rocketman's Taron Egerton), a Dutch game designer and entrepreneur, and his adventures and misadventures bringing Pajitnov's game from the Soviet Union to the world. Russian stage actor Nikita Efremov plays Pajitnov.

Back in 2014, movie company Threshold Entertainment announced it would be making an "epic sci-fi story" inspired by Tetris. In 2016 it was even suggested Tetris could be the basis for an entire trilogy of films. Fortunately, according to Pajitnov and Henks, none of that happened and Tetris escaped the fate of other popular games.

Pajitnov says, "What came out now is much more significant and interesting, in my opinion."

"I've seen a lot of computer game [movies] go very strange," Rogers says. "The strange ones basically only appeal to the people who actually played the game, so that's a subset of the population. And then people watch the movie and they'll say, 'Wow this has nothing to do with the game that I fell in love with,' and then so they even p***** those people off."

In the 1980s Rogers went to what was then the Soviet Union to secure the rights for Tetris for Nintendo. The Japanese company wanted the game for the launch of its Game Boy.