Tetris

Tetris (2023) is about a man trying to acquire the rights to a game. Henk Rogers sees it at a trade show in Tokyo, starts working out who owns it, and the trail leads to Moscow. Alexey Pajitnov, who wrote it, works at a state institute and earns nothing from his own creation; the rights sit with a state body called ELORG. Robert Maxwell and his son Kevin are in it too, holding sublicences through Mirrorsoft and trying to cut Rogers off. Rogers himself answered the question of how much is true: he said it is a Hollywood script, not history, and that a great deal of what is in the film never happened. Director Jon S. Baird made the same point about not making a documentary. The KGB interpreter and the car chase at the end are invented. The core that is true is this: Rogers did convince Nintendo to bundle Tetris with the Game Boy instead of Super Mario Land, and that decision put the game in front of the world. Taron Egerton plays Rogers, Nikita Yefremov plays Pajitnov and Anthony Boyle plays Kevin Maxwell. It premiered at SXSW on 15 March 2023 and went out on Apple TV+ on 31 March 2023. It runs 118 minutes. Good for: the history of games, Cold War business stories, and licensing fights. Less good for: it simplifies the real events heavily and the action is entirely invented; anyone after historical accuracy will be misled. Most of the Soviet characters are stock types and the pixel graphic transitions break the tone.