If you’re reading this, I’m sure you’ve read or heard some variation of the Tetris story. Some bigshot American goes to Russia, makes friends with the Tetris guy, and brings the rights back in Japan to make millions of dollars. Or wait. Wasn’t there some Cold War glasnost stuff going on, with spies and different companies trying to take the rights or something?
The problem is, if you’ve watched multiple documentaries (and YouTube videos) about Tetris, or even read several Tetris books, you have probably picked up some conflicting or debunked information along the way. It certainly doesn’t help that the Apple TV 2023 Tetris movie advertised itself as biographical, when it was clearly fictionalized to the point of parody.
Henk Rogers, the businessman and video game developer who was that actual bigshot American who went to Russia to bring the Tetris rights to Japan, has had enough. As he revealed in an interview with VentureBeat, the movie was the proverbial last straw that convinced him to write a book about his Tetris story himself.
Henk said this:
“There’s a bunch of things about the movie. When I read the script I thought, “My God, this is going to be such a bad movie.” That’s what I thought. It’s because I don’t know how to read a script and imagine what the movie is like from there. I didn’t imagine it. Alexey and I worked hard to try to fix it. “No, that’s not what happened! This is what happened!” All those things. That’s when I started writing the book, to set the record straight.
By the time I was done writing, the movie was already shot, so it was too late. And when I finally saw the movie I was expecting the worst. My God. I cried several times in that movie about things that never happened! They captured something, the feeling of something that never happened, but it would have happened. The whole thing about Maya and me missing her performance. That probably happened in a different way.”
Thankfully, we have an opportunity to get the full story now, not only from the man himself, but also while he still has his faculties to do so. And to add to that, Henk got some quotes from Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris’ creator, in the book as well. If anything, what we look forward to the most in this story is for Henk to clear up all the things that other researchers (or people who didn’t do their research) were mistaken about or didn’t know the full story about through the years. Ironically, the movie that definitely spread a completely wrong story about Tetris, may have led to us getting the final word on Tetris in the end.
The Perfect Game: Tetris: From Russia With Love is available now in hardcover at Amazon and in the publisher’s website.
