Tetris: the movie

The Tetris movie released on Apple+ this past weekend, so of course I had to see it day one. I'm happy to report that while I was a little nervous going into it, overall the movie was very enjoyable, the actors were great, and most things didn't feel embellish too much, just enough to heighten what was already a really crazy story to begin with.

Spoiler alert if you care about such things, I mean it's based on a true story and all!

The story of Tetris is a story of a tangled web of copyright and contracts, and at the center of it all are two very likable characters, Alexy Pajitnov and Henk Rogers. There's a billionaire tycoon, Robert Maxwell with ties to Gorbachev who's trying to get Tetris, there's Stein out there selling Tetris licenses to companies that he technically doesn't have, and there's Russia trying to keep control over this game and who has it, essentially playing everyone off of everyone else. Like I said, it's a crazy story as is, and doesn't need much embellishment.

While the movie flows well enough, even with the extra details that were added, I was surprised they didn't add more of an epilogue. They mention in the movie that Pajitnov won't get any money from his game, because it belongs to the State. That was true, and the government figured since Pajitnov built this game using their computers at their government building, it belonged to them. But the movie doesn't mention that after 15 years, the ownership reverted to Pajitnov, and from then on he was able to get royalties for his game.

It also goes to great lengths to build up a bond between Pajitnov and Rogers. In real life they became fast friends and hit it off pretty quickly, but in the movie there's a sense of distrust between them that over time leads to a friendship. Since the movie goes out of its way to focus on their relationship so much, I was surprised to see them not mention that they go into business together, starting The Tetris Company, which handles all licenses of Tetris. It seems like that would have been a great conclusion, instead of just having Pajitnov arrive in America.

Another (admittedly very small) detail that stuck out to me was then Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi. They absolutely nailed his look in this film, I'll give them that. But his film version is much more interested in video games than the real life one seems to have been. I've read plenty of descriptions of him in books that say he never played an NES game, except for one time when he tried an NES version of GO, but didn't care for it, feeling that the video game version wasn't able to convey the feeling of the game, they way the pieces should be felt in your hand, etc. To Yamauchi, video games were a toy, an entertainment product that they made. He was a great businessman with an eye for what would sell, but he didn't care for video games himself. His movie persona, however, is shown playing an NES game and enjoying it, but the part that stood out to me more is when Henk Rogers is making a speech to convince Yamauchi to help him, Rogers talks in Super Mario Bros analogies, which seems to heavily influence Yamauchi. While a speech like that may have worked on Miyamoto, or Iwata, I don't think that Yamauchi would have been particularly moved.

One scene in the movie has Howard Lincoln of Nintendo saying he'd love to swoop in under Atari and get the Tetris license from them. They go a little into why he'd like to personally attack Atari, which is because they started selling their own Nintendo cartridges that weren't licensed by Nintendo under the name Tengen. But after that they never mention how much they really did screw over Atari with the Tetris deal. Nintendo essentially ran them out of business. They had huge ads printed in magazines, had taken full page ads in newspapers, and had millions of copies of Tetris printed, which Nintendo then forced them to take back and destroy. None of that is mentioned in the movie, so I didn't know why they had Howard Lincoln mention wanting to get Atari so much if they wouldn't show the payoff.

Again, these are some minor nitpicks in what I thought was a fun movie with great actors, and I hope that the movie will peak viewers' interests and lead them to find other first hand true stories of how Tetris came to be.

There's a couple of really great sources out there that are easy enough to find for anyone that does a Google search. The BBC did an hour-long documentary titled Tetris: From Russia with Love a while back, and I think the whole thing is still easily found on YouTube. It's filled with interviews and first hand accounts from all the characters you'll see in the movie, so well worth a look. Also on YouTube is a video from Norman Caruso, the Gaming Historian. His hour-long video is well-researched (as all his videos are) and entertainingly presented. Then there's a graphic novel about the history of Tetris from Box Brown called Tetris: The Games People Play. There's some great resources out there for people to get the real account.

So that's my initial thoughts on the new Tetris movie. Overall I really enjoyed it and thought the movie was paced well and kept the most important details while adding a few more things in there to keep it fun.