With Sonic, Mario and others making the leap to the big screen, you might have wondered how a Tetris movie could possibly make the same jump. Orange Ricky, Teewee and the gang might be terrific tetrominos, but they’re not exactly three-dimensional characters are they?
OK, so that years-old meme isn’t really the subject of this Apple TV+ movie, but rather the making of Tetris within the dying embers of the USSR and its proliferation around the world. It’s “based on a true story”, so it absolutely embellishes reality with a lot of extraneous details, but wraps these moments around a factual tale that is almost as improbable as it makes out.
At the heart of the story is game publisher Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton), who happens upon Tetris at CES in early 1988 and immediately spots its potential, quickly signing a deal to publish the game on consoles and in arcades in Japan. At this point, Tetris was already a growing success story through Europe and America having originally been discovered and licensed by Robert Stein, but as Rogers bets his future on his sub-license multiple times removed from Stein, and looks to partner with Nintendo to bundle it on the upcoming handheld Game Boy, it quickly becomes clear that Tetris’ entire licensing deal is a house of cards that’s just waiting to topple.
With the vast opportunity that the game represents for everyone involved, what follows is a race against time for Rogers to get into the USSR, to find the government agency Elorg and try to negotiate new rights. On the way, Rogers meets and manages to strike up a friendship with Tetris’ creator Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov) that eventually becomes a lifelong partnership.
Rogers and Pajitnov bond over game development. Image credit: Apple TV+.
The main issue with this movie, as is so often the case with “true stories”, is with how many liberties it takes with the narrative along the way. From Robert and Kevin Maxwell through to corrupt Russian politicos and KGB agents, it’s cartoonish in how it depicts some of the key figures that took part in events, and some of the fictional creations and amalgamations. That’s not to say that the Maxwells weren’t dealing with looming bankruptcy and desperately pulling on political connections, that Robert Stein wasn’t blinded by opportunity, nor that the KGB and central government wasn’t monitoring everything and trying to interfere in Elorg’s negotiations, but it’s all ratcheted up to pantomime proportions.
The way the movie massages the events into a new form does help avoid it becoming too much of a boardroom drama, and it successfully condenses events that took place over the course of several years into something that feels like around a fortnight, but the excesses along the way serves to undermine the very real dangers of what Rogers was doing and some of the unlikely events that actually did occur. Rogers, Stein and Maxwell really did all visit Elorg on the same day, completely by chance, but there definitely wasn’t a big car chase through Moscow with Pajitnov at the wheel. That just feels like an excuse to throw some pixelation effects around on screen as cars crash into one another.
There weren’t any car chases in reality. Image credit: Apple TV+.
Speaking of the visual effects, there’s some nice pixel art renditions of locations that resolve themselves into the different buildings, locations and scenes. It’s not really Tetris-y enough to be more than a generic video game aesthetic, though.
Despite these complaints, Tetris is still a fun watch if you can look past the added melodrama. The friendship between Rogers and Pajitnov feels natural as they bond over making video games, it’s fun watching Elorg director Nikolai Belikov (Oleg Shtefanko) playing the capitalists at their own game, and it’s a great introduction point into a real story that’s worth exploring more elsewhere. After watching the movie, I turned to the BBC documentary Tetris: From Russia with Love (which can currently be watched in the form of YouTube bootlegs), which is filled with interviews with Rogers (who recorded his trips to Moscow with a camcorder), Pajitnov, Belikov, Stein and more, and helps to fill in some of the blanks – Nintendo really wanted to get one over on Atari, for example, which is barely covered in the film.
