Tetris

dir: Jon S. Baird

2023

There are (unfortunately or fortunately) lots of movies based on games, but less movies about the games themselves, or about the creation of those games.

Or, even more boringly, practically no movies about someone desperately trying to get the regional licensing rights for a game. A goddamn game. Contracts and stuff.

Not just any game, though. Tetris, the best-selling and most played game of all time.

I know, I know that something like this should be dull as fucking dishwater. And let’s be honest, in reality, it would be. A documentary about this would probably be pretty fucking dull, even more so than most documentaries are about whatever their subjects might be.

But I think, as inconsequential as this flick probably is, they get the approach right, in that they give us an idea of just how fucking important it was to the people who were involved, who put their entire lives on the line, just to give the rest of us a few hours of amusement.

Plus, it was Tetris what brought down the Berlin Wall and destroyed the Soviet Union, doncha know?

Henk Rogers is not exactly a household name, and nor will it be after this. I’ve watched the film, and read the Wikipedia entry on him, and to me he’s just a guy with a moustache. There are other guys with moustaches. The actor playing him grows a moustache; a nice, solid triangular one. A weird moustache, but most / all moustaches are weird, and I say that as a man who has one, hidden within a goatee/mo combination.

Other than that, what defines him? He’s a guy, played by Taron Egerton, who foresees early that computer games are going to be the next big consumer purchase, back in the 1980s. Being the late 80s at that, he’s not exactly a prescient seer or anything – it’s already happening, and he’s just trying to jump on the bandwagon. All he needs is one great game.

And he sees it, on someone else’s computer, at a different stall at the Consumer Electronics Show that year.

He gets to play Tetris. It’s already been invented, it already exists. But its creator, Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov), seeing as he created the game in his spare time, and lives in the Communist paradise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in Moscow, he has no rights to his own “intellectual property”. Such things don’t exist, comrade, not in USSR. You create something, it is owned by Mother Russia, because all workers work for the glory of Mother Russia.

And yet someone has some piece of paper that implies they have the rights to something that they probably have no right to, and the rest of the world (outside of Russia), and Henk thinks “I want a piece of the Tetris pie, too!”

He is sold an idea that there are rights on paper that one could exercise through a contract, so he buys the “rights” to Tetris, but only in certain countries, and on certain platforms. To those of us (ie, my age AND also an obsessive gamer from a young age) this is fascinating stuff, far more so than the End of History stuff (the Cold War coming to a sad end but as a relief to hundreds of millions). I was part of the first generation of gamers, arcades but more importantly on clunky devices and computers at home. This stuff, no matter how fictionalised, is like scripture. The scene where the Nintendo Gameboy is revealed is like the revelation of the Holy Grail itself, a holy object, something with the power to transform the world.

Am I overstating things? Sure. Is the film overstating things, simplifying the history, turning a tussling over contracts into espionage and international intrigue? Yes, absolutely, that’s why we buy tickets, pay subscriptions for streaming services, or illegally download movies from torrent sites we otherwise don’t have access to – to be told stories about what happened in the past in amusing and entertaining ways.

And this is such a good story. Sure, gaming changed the world, that’s capitalism for you. But the way the story works here, that one guy, being this Henk Rogers, risked everything including his family’s prosperity, his home, other people’s money and ultimately his life in order to take on the combined might of: Billionaire tyrant Robert Maxwell (Roger Allum), his despicable son Kevin (Anthony Boyle), rival company Atari, who claim to have been sold the console rights, the Soviet Union itself and the furious cold sadism of the KGB, in order to come out on top?

And did he, in the end, triumph, or did he end his days shoveling snow in some Siberian gulag?
Well, no spoilers, but the fact that you or someone you know once played Tetris, perhaps for a few hours, perhaps for hundreds of hours, probably indicates that someone succeeded at something once.

Henk is represented as an absolute chancer, but not an immoral or amoral one. He desperately wants to secure the rights to Tetris, but he doesn’t want to screw the creator (the way that every single other participant in this Battle Royale seems happy to do). If anything, he wants the people responsible for the game, and whoever he eventually aligns with, to prosper, along with himself.

But…he doesn’t really bring anything to the table other than ambition. He doesn’t have the money to invest or not invest, he has to convince a bank manager to lend him the money with his house as collateral, and he doesn’t have the rights to anything. But he has the sheer force of will to make things happen, and the desire to will them into existence by throwing himself at the universe until it yields to him.

When told that there’s no way he can make any of this happen in Soviet Russia, he doesn’t listen, and just keeps moving forward. This is funny to me, but won’t be to Scottish people, I don’t think. This flick doesn’t have footage or scenes filmed in ye olde Soviet Bloc Russia, or even somewhere like Bulgaria or Romania, areas which still look today like they did 40 years ago. No, they filmed in present day Glasgow, and used signage and digital effects to make it look like one of the dreariest, darkest time in living human history.

Ouch. Take that, Scottish pride. The director himself is Scottish, so I have to think that maybe he wasn’t intentionally implying that there are parts of Glasgow so dire they easily sub for the architectural aesthetics of a brutal totalitarian regime of nearly half a century ago.

The stuff that transpires once Henk gets to Moscow – wow. It’s straight out of the standard Soviet textbook: Everything is grey or brown, people queue up for everything and go without all the time, everyone spies on everyone else, and if they’re not snitching on you right now, it’s because they’re undercover KGB agents, waiting to fuck you up later. Everything is recorded, every conversation transcribed and every meeting photographed.

It’s so funny, because in this context it’s meant to show the oppressive atmosphere of that regime, of that awful time in human history. These days of course we don’t need the goons of a totalitarian state to document everything we do – we just give it away constantly through our smartphone’s data, which do far more to surveil us than the KGB could ever have dreamed.

Ah, irony. Henk’s perpetual forward motion meets the immovable object of a state uninterested in human achievement or commercial success. No-one wants anything to do with selling Tetris to the world, all the Russians want is: to squelch everyone everywhere, to not make Soviet Russia look weak, and to delay for a little bit longer the inevitable seeming end of a system no longer able to sustain itself through deliberately causing human misery.

Freedom doesn’t mean the same thing to Russian people. Nor does making money (yet). But Russian pride, well, that’s something Henk can work with.

As he wheels and deals with the seemingly inflexible Director Belikov (Oleg Stefan), who takes pride in what he’s doing, and doesn’t want to see his nation embarrassed internationally, the bizarre billionaire Maxwell and his odious offspring are wheeling and dealing with the Russians as well, while being no strangers to threats and bribery. The funniest / most chilling thing is that the awful Kevin Maxwell, appalling to everyone in the flick, isn’t even the worst of Maxwell’s children.

You’d have to give the crown to his daughter Ghislaine Maxwell, who I believe is languishing in jail currently with a 20 year sentence for sex trafficking. Remember Ghislaine? Jeffrey Epstein’s partner in crime? I wonder why she doesn’t get a mention in the film, hmm?

And then the goons looking for a payday swoop in, whether they’re KGB or high ups in the Party is irrelevant – they don’t care about nuthin’, other than getting paid, and getting out before the mighty ship of State sinks completely. They beat Henk up, they threaten him, they make life hell for Tetris’s creator and his family, someone who already lost his parents to the State’s evil, impersonal bullshit.

They (the “bad” Russians) even threaten Henk’s wife and kids in Tokyo. What utter bastards, eh?

For a film that’s mostly about who has the rights to what, and whether someone’s going to get a fax in time (when was the last time you watched a flick where a fax was important, or when you even heard the word “fax”? Does anyone under 20 even know what the fuck they are – might as well be the telegraph with someone doing Morse code), the flick moves at a propulsive clip.

Henk is resolute at all times, unwilling to admit that he’s overextended himself and that it’s all built on bullshit, but he’s an endearing character, at least to me. His child-like joy at hearing “The Final Countdown” in an underground Moscow club made me laugh / smile. At least it wasn’t Winds of Change by the Scorpions.

The 8-bit graphics and titles and interstitials were right up my alley. They’re perfectly in line with the era and the flick, though I thought it was weird during the climactic car chase (something which obviously never happened, don’t even look it up) that they used superimposed graphics to almost imply that what we’re watching was just a driving game, an actual game someone could have played on the Gameboy back in the day, rather than a life or death dash to the airport to get out just in time

It’s a weirdly specific flick about a weirdly specific time and place, and such a strange topic, but I enjoyed it immensely. It will be of almost no interest to 99% of humanity, but it was right up my alley.

8 hundred hours that I probably lost to Tetris way back in the day out of 10(00)