Tetris movie: Inside the great game business deal of all time | Maya Rogers interview
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Maya Rogers, CEO of the Tetris Company, told me that the Tetris film is really about the story of the greatest business development deal of all time.
Naturally, she’s a little biased. After all, her father was the pushy guy who saw the potential of Tetris, sneaked his way into Nintendo to get a meeting with its CEO, and tracked down the rights in the Soviet Union to an obscure agency and a programmer named Alexey Pajitnov.
The film debuted in a premiere at South By Southwest show in Austin, Texas, and it will get a special showing next week at the Game Developers Conference. Tetris, directed by Jon S. Baird, is a biopic work of fiction that captures the essence of the deal — oh, and that car chase in the Soviet Union didn’t really happen.
The movie is about how Henk Rogers, Maya’s father, tracked down the creator of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov, back in the 1980s and secured the rights to the block-stacking game for Nintendo. There are some Hollywood embellishments to the story, but it tells the story of what it was like to go inside the communist regime of the Soviet Union and emerge with a contract of all contracts for the game rights.
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Maya Rogers said her father and Pajitnov are still great friends and business partners to this day. I talked with her at the recent Dice Summit. I’ve watched the film and I’ll give my impressions later this week. But it was hoot to see characters on the silver screen that I’ve met in real life.
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