'Tetris' Movie Creators Glad They Didn't Go the 'Lego Movie' Route

The Tetris brand makes its movie debut with a biographical drama about the origins of the puzzle video game, but the film nearly became a fantastical adventure with magical elements.

That's according to both the creator of the game and the man who helped spread it globally: Tetris Co. co-founders Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers. They are the executive producers of Tetris, now available to watch on Apple TV+. Jon S. Baird directed the film.

Following in the footsteps of Sonic the Hedgehog, Uncharted, Warcraft and many more series, Tetris is the latest video game franchise to get the cinematic treatment. Over the decades since the game's release, there have been a number of near-misses for a Tetris movie, with wildly different tones.

"Yeah, it was a project about some kind of interesting magic team," Pajitnov told Newsweek, discussing previous attempts to bring the Tetris brand to the big screen.

In 2014, movie company Threshold Entertainment announced it would be making an "epic sci-fi story" inspired by Tetris, then reports in 2016 suggested it could become a trilogy of movies.

"[It was going to be] a magical kind of story based on the Tetris items, but what came out now is much more significant and interesting, in my opinion," Pajitnov said.

The Apple TV+ movie tells the story of how Tetris was created in the Soviet Union and eventually distributed across the world, despite political roadblocks. Rocketman's Taron Egerton stars as Rogers, while Russian theater actor Nikita Efremov plays Pajitnov.

Pajitnov, who grew up in the Soviet Union, said it's significant that the movie is coming out now when things look "hopeless" in his country of birth.

"I've seen a lot of computer game [movies] go very strange," Rogers told Newsweek. "So the strange ones basically only appeal to the people who actually played the game, so that's a subset of the population. And then people watch the movie and they'll say, 'Wow this has nothing to do with the game that I fell in love with,' and then so they even p***** those people off."

Rogers was a games developer in the 1980s who set about bringing Tetris to Western audiences and went to Russia in an attempt to secure the rights for Nintendo to launch its Game Boy with Tetris available on the platform. There, the film shows, he met Pajitnov, his future business partner, for the first time.

"I really liked that this is a movie about people. Yeah, it's a game, but it's a movie about people. It's a movie about friendship. So I am much more happy with this than a Lego Movie,' Rogers said.

Rogers and Pajitnov, as executive producers, were on hand to help shape the script as it was being written by Noah Pink.

Tetris started shooting in late 2020, when strict COVID-19 rules were in place, meaning Pajitnov and Rogers couldn't be present during the shoot. Baird, the director, told Newsweek how they managed to contribute to the film anyway.

"We couldn't get them across to the U.K. where we shot, but we Zoomed them at the very beginning, then in 2022 during pickups they came across to London and we had them on set for a day," Baird said.

"We had a lot of fun. We showed them a lot of the scenes that we'd cut, and they were very excited about it. They were more involved in the scripts and giving notes to Noah about specific moments and details, especially about coding and things like that," the director said.

Both Rogers and Pajitnov are depicted as proficient coders with 1980s computer technology.

"I've been very humbled by their reaction to the movie," Baird said. "I'm sure there's a lot of things in there that they think, Oh, it's not quite right. But hey, it's a movie."

He added, "But they've been really great partners."

When it came to representing Russia in the 1980s, Pajitnov said, the creatives behind the scenes nailed it.

"What they really did in this movie is [capture] the spirit and the sense of the Soviet Union of the time of perestroika. The perestroika spirit and dark time of this communist era. Everything is in the movie, and that was a very accurate kind of spiritual reconstruction," Pajitnov said.

Tetris has been a worldwide phenomenon for over 30 years now, and while many mobile games have come and gone in that time, Tetris' popularity goes on.

Rogers, who was instrumental in bringing Tetris to Western audiences, said it's a different landscape now compared to when he entered gaming in the 1980s.

"The creators of games like Wordle or Candy Crush, they're not very famous, and they don't protect their IP very well, so there are lots of 'me too' games that come out that are confusingly similar. So my advice to new game designers is: Make sure you copyright your game right away before you release it," Rogers said.

He continued, "We don't get to talk to those kids. There's too many of them now. There's like millions of wannabe Alexey young people out there that want to make a game, but we don't get to meet them often enough."

Pajitnov said he's tried to speak with other world-famous games designers, like Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Mario Bros., Donkey Kong and Legend of Zelda franchises, but one thing gets in the way.

"I always try to have an inspirational conversation with Miyamoto, but unfortunately we have different languages, so most of the time we met we just smiled," Pajitnov said.

On Friday, Tetris premiered globally on Apple TV+.