Tetris isn’t quite as sublimely satisfying as watching the four-block pieces from its namesake neatly fall into place, but people making other video games movies should take some notes anyway.
This is a perfectly OK film that explicitly understands that video games are cultural artifacts that are made by real people under real (and often extraordinary) circumstances. Games don’t just emerge from the ether to make kids smile; they’re the product of difficult labor and, occasionally, geopolitical anxiety.
That’s the boldest move Tetris makes, bolder than even trying to T-spin your way out of a jam with a high score on the line. For most of its runtime, this is a movie about men in suits negotiating for IP rights. Contracts are drafted, signed, voided, faxed, shredded, and all the other fun things you can do with a contract. The core conflict here is 1980s capitalists versus Communists trying to get the best deal for their country (and maybe themselves, individually) in the USSR’s twilight years.
What Tetris lacks in factual realism (one of its subjects has admitted as much), it makes up for in convincingly examining the inner lives of the people responsible for bringing joy to countless players over the last 30 years. Behind his madcap, Reagan-era Wall Street persona, businessman Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) is a tremendously hard-working dude who sees a golden opportunity to set his kids up financially for life by licensing the game for global release. Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Yefremov), meanwhile, is torn between wanting to break the rules of Soviet society for his own (deserved) gain and wanting to keep his wife and kids safe.
The interplay between these two men ultimately leads to the best scene in Tetris. Rogers, on a business trip to Moscow, wants nothing more than to commune with the man who made this perfect video game. His distinctly capitalist persistence leads to a dinner date at Pajitnov’s apartment, something Pajitnov initially hesitates to do because of local laws about sheltering foreigners.
Credit: Apple
After a somewhat icy dinner (with Pajitnov’s wife astutely observing that Rogers is “dumb but honest”), the two men retreat to Pajitnov’s living room computer desk to play the titular game. Rogers notices something unsatisfying about the mechanics of Tetris: You can only clear one line of blocks at a time. He suggests allowing multiple lines to disappear at once. Pajitnov writes a few lines of code, and boom, Tetris as we know it is born.
Amusingly, Pajitnov’s explanation for why the game didn’t work like that in the first place is that he just hadn’t thought of it. All it took was another pair of eyes to create something beautiful. The two men then go on a lovely sojourn to a Moscow nightclub, where for the first time, we see Pajitnov crack a smile. Not only has he put the crucial finishing touches on his greatest creation, he’s made a friend in the process.
Is that moment cornball Hollywood nonsense? Kinda! But for decades, Hollywood has seen gaming as little more than an easy cash grab. Sure, I love the live-action Super Mario Bros. nightmare from 1993, but it’s far from respectful to the source material and the people for whom the source material is a source of lifelong inspiration.
This one sequence in Tetris, which can’t last longer than 15 minutes, has more reverence for gaming as both an artistic medium and a way to bring people together in it than the combined runtimes of almost every other game adaptation ever made. As a fan of video games, I don’t want to see something I’ve already played get recreated in live action. If given the choice, I’d always rather see the conditions that led to the creation of a classic, and the real-world impact that that classic had as it swept the globe.
Great art can be made in isolation, but greater art is made in collaboration. Here we see two men from opposite sides of the world, both literally and politically, coming together in a taboo fashion to make something special. They don’t even realize it, but a tiny conversation in a dimly lit Soviet living room changed the course of video game history.
Whether or not that moment played out exactly the same way in real life almost doesn’t matter. It’s genuinely heartening to watch barriers break down in a way that produces a stroke of creative genius. And, more broadly, it hammers home the point that video games, like all art, emerge from the trials of human existence.
In this movie’s version of history, Tetris became a cultural phenomenon because one guy wanted to feed his family and another guy wanted recognition for his work. Tetris is not an A+ film by any means, but in a world where Hollywood has so deeply misunderstood gaming for longer than I’ve been alive, that one living room scene makes me hopeful that future endeavors can build on what Tetris does right.
