It’s one of the best-selling video games of all time, but people likely don’t know the quite frankly unbelievable true story of how Tetris arrived on shelves in the first place.
This includes Jon S. Baird, the director of AppleTV+’s new stranger-than-fiction thriller of the same name, which recounts the tense battle to release a popular Soviet Union video game beyond the Iron Curtain – a tale which pit the KGB, a disgraced billionaire and several video game giants against each other for the rights.
Whilst a boardroom drama about the battle to secure legal rights to release the game internationally sounds like dry viewing on paper, the real-life spy thriller that unfolded ensured any film adaptation would be anything but; the director cites Uncut Gems as one of the major inspirations on the breakneck film. The true story was certainly a surprise for Baird, a confessed non-gamer, who had never heard it before he first sat down to read the screenplay.
AppleTV+
“I just assumed it was probably invented in Japan through Nintendo, like a lot of computer games”, he told Zavvi. “But whilst the KGB spy thriller stuff is quite shocking, it’s not what I found surprising – there are so many instances in this screenplay that I assumed were writers’ flourishes to simplify the true story and move it along, that I discovered actually happened.
“Seeing the Maxwells, Henk Rogers and Robert Stein all turn up in Moscow at the same time, unaware that the others were there as they were being held for questioning – I found it genuinely unbelievable, I thought it was (screenwriter) Noah Pink streamlining events. But it really happened like that, they all turned up at the same time looking for this game, even though the path to finding it was deliberately laid out like a maze”.
Henk Rogers is here played by Taron Egerton, a video games entrepreneur we meet struggling to find any interest in buyers from a niche Japanese game he’s bought the rights to. At a games convention, he first encounters Tetris, snapping up the rights to release it in arcades and as a video game.
AppleTV+
The only problem? The person he bought the rights from seemingly did it without the knowledge of the copyright holders beyond the Iron Curtain – and several other companies believe they own the rights too. Seeing the game as his big payday, with a Nintendo deal all but finalised, he opts to travel illegally to Moscow as a tourist to meet the original creator and smooth things over, something that immediately sees him followed around the city by the government.
When Baird first read the screenplay, it had the punning working title Falling Blocs (get it?), with the Cold War backdrop being the first thing that brought him in – he confesses that if it was called Tetris when he read it, “he’d probably have a different preconception” and likely wouldn’t have given it a chance.
His next step was enrolling Henk and Alexey Pajitnov, the computer engineer who invented the game, into the production process to ensure the story was told as accurately as possible.
AppleTV+
“Noah had already done most of the research whilst writing the script, but for me, meeting the real people involved if possible is always essential if you’re telling a true story. We involved Hank and Alexey in the script, but I also met with Kevin Maxwell and other people in this story – spending a lot of time talking to them is a great place to build from.
“Henk and Alexey did give us freedom with the script, there were only a few details they ever wanted changing. Alexey was very conscious about the coding you see used in creating the game, he wrote a lot of it for us to make sure it was all accurate, whereas Henk was more involved in the realities of dealing with Russian border guards, or what the Moscow hotel room looked like – they were both executive producers on the film, so they didn’t have a huge amount of input, but we always made sure they were happy.”
Baird initially met the two men over Zoom, as pre-production was taking place amidst the pandemic. Knowing that he would eventually come face to face with the two men responsible for making Tetris a sensation, this declared non-gamer started fine tuning his Tetris skills, afraid that either of them would challenge him to a game.
AppleTV+
“But they never challenged me, as every time we would talk, I’d change the subject so they wouldn’t have to see how bad I was!”, he laughed. “I think they were just relieved to be talking about the film, they’ve been exhausted from having to talk about the game for so many years.
“At the premiere, I met a lot of their extended family, their children and grandchildren. It was just so pleasurable to see how they all appreciated the film – it doesn’t always happen like that, but I think that was largely because when working with Henk and Alexey, we talked about their lives more than anything else.
“There’s nothing that can surprise me about them now, I know pretty much everything about them. The only line in the film that really shocked me was when Henk asks Alexey where he has lived before, and he said he’d only ever lived in that apartment – I couldn’t believe he’d never got anywhere else.”
DDA
The pair gave the nod of approval to all of Baird’s casting choices, with Egerton chosen shortly after production on Kingsman 3 (which Baird was due to direct) stalled. Knowing that the actor could “rise up to the responsibility of playing a real person” following Eddie The Eagle and Rocketman, the actor knew he was right for the role – but casting was never the problem the filmmaker had.
Instead, his big challenge was finding somewhere that could easily stand in for Soviet-era Moscow. Luckily, he found that north of the border, with Glasgow and Aberdeen both standing in for the city.
“We were lucky as those cities gave us the raw elements; there are brutalist concrete structures in Glasgow that look very Stalinist, they look more like the buildings you’d find in Moscow than any other UK city. So whilst we used CGI, it was really through the work of a location scout and a production designer working in Scotland that helped us pull it off”.
AppleTV+
Since its world premiere at the SXSW film festival in Austin, Texas, Tetris has received rapturous acclaim, winning over gamers and non-gamers alike. But no review was more surprising than the one written by Pete Hammond for Deadline, in which the critic confesses that he’d never even heard of Tetris before watching the movie.
Hammond wrote: “Sue me but not only have I never played the iconic ’80s video game Tetris, I had never heard of it before encountering this new film Tetris. I realize that probably makes me a bit of an oddity to the gamer generation, but I can only say my lack of knowledge on this product did not hurt one bit in being wildly entertained by a movie that tells its origin story.”
Naturally, this review went viral because people couldn’t fathom that somebody had never heard of Tetris. But for Baird, it made him happier than any of the other positive notices his film had received.
DDA
“I’m not a massive gamer, so it gives me a lot of pleasure seeing someone not interested in Tetris who enjoyed the film. It was the first review I saw, someone showed me it at the after-show party right after the premiere, and I just thought it was very cool – I hope there are a lot more people like Pete Hammond, who can enjoy the film whilst having no idea about the original game!”
We think that’s highly likely, as Tetris transforms a tale of corporate intrigue into one of the tensest, crowd-pleasing thrillers you’re likely to see in 2023. Game on!
Tetris is streaming on AppleTV+ from Friday, 31st March.
