Tetris creator on turning his life into a spy movie: ‘exaggeration is kind of natural’

polygon.com:

Apple’s movie Tetris tells a truly extraordinary story from the gaming history books: the time a scrappy video game promoter, Henk Rogers, battled Britain’s evil media moguls, Robert and Kevin Maxwell, to win the handheld rights to the greatest game of all time from a dying, paranoid Soviet Union. This is the unbelievable origin story of Game Boy Tetris, and it doesn’t seem like it should need embellishing.

But while the surprisingly tense contract negotiation scenes stick pretty close to the historical record, Tetris the movie is otherwise an unapologetically heightened version of the story. It’s a frothy Cold War thriller in which Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov takes the wheel for a climactic car chase, Rogers gets into a romantic scrape with a honeypot KGB agent, Robert Maxwell punches a Russian official in the face, and Nintendo executives Minoru Arakawa and Howard Lincoln run pell-mell through an airport, pursued by Soviet goons.

“We’re not doing this documentary version of [the Tetris story],” director Jon S. Baird tells Polygon. “There’s a really great documentary called From Russia With Love, which is available on YouTube. It’s a really great story, but, you know, to make a two-hour version of it, you need to sort of Hollywood-ize, if that’s a word, the tale.” Baird and screenwriter Noah Pink certainly did that with Tetris, in a brazen way that’s arguably cheesy and inauthentic, but could also be called disarmingly honest. You can’t really mistake Tetris’ spy-romp flourishes for the real thing.

Baird and Pink also had the support of the film’s subjects. “We got involved in the scriptwriting from the very beginning,” says Pajitnov. For our interview, the man himself was wearing a tie-dyed Tetris T-shirt and