The Tetris movie doesn’t do its story justice

polygon.com:

Box Brown’s 2016 graphic novel Tetris: The Games People Play explores the creation of Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris in the grander context of how humans play. The book reaches back 3,500 years to Ancient Egypt, starting with the ancient board game Senet, then leaps forward to 19th-century Japan, and the founding of Nintendo, which made Tetris a household name. This scene-setting is a thoughtful foundation for how Tetris went from a hobbyist diversion created during the Soviet era to a global phenomenon — and how math, science, and art collide to form video games.

Apple’s new movie Tetris takes a different approach, turning the story of Tetris and its escape from Russia into an uneven Cold War spy thriller with an ’80s pop-culture veneer. It’s a glossy, abridged version of the events that led to the game’s global success, focusing less on Pajitnov than on desperate businessman Henk Rogers (the Kingsman movies’ Taron Egerton) and how he attempts to untangle the Tetris rights so he and Nintendo can score millions from Pajitnov’s game.

Tetris the movie is at its humming best when it attempts to recount the cutthroat negotiations that determined who owned the rights to sell the video game Tetris. Director Jon S. Baird and screenwriter Noah Pink put the complicated battle to secure contracts to Tetris in the late 1980s at the heart of their movie about the making — and the exploitation — of Pajitnov’s hit puzzle game.

On screen, it all feels a bit ridiculous: Men in suits yell at subordinates and fellow executives that they Must get the handheld and arcade rights to Tetris! Now!! But the real-life puzzle game Soviet state employee Nikolai Belikov plays with Rogers and his rivals — the conniving Robert Stein and villainous