Comment by to11mtm
3 hours ago
FWIW, The Gaming Historian youtube channel did a good cover of it [0]
> Meanwhile the Tetris film was awful. The Tetris rights negotiations were all about the various sides wrestling for power and the Soviets trying to play them against each other. The film basically goes "nah that's too boring for our target audience" and tries to make it into a Cold War spy thriller, but the hamfisted modifications to the events that transpired make the plot nonsensical (especially for general audiences that would be unfamiliar with what actually happened).
It was definitely a bit much in places, but it was a fun dramatization. Having been very familiar with the background, they at least did a good job of keeping it interesting enough where even a non-gamer would stay interested through the film as far as theming/story/etc.
I mean it takes what's actually compelling about the story (the comedy of errors that caused the Tetris rights to slip through Robert Stein's fingers, culminating in the Soviets entirely redefining who has which rights in two days of simultaneous negotiations with all involved parties) and adds all sorts of nonsense about the KGB being involved in everything from the start, about Pajitnov's family being threatened over the licensing, about Tetris somehow having the potential to both keep the Mirror Group empire from imploding and liberalize the Soviet Union, etc. Then the film has to deal with the problem that it's ostensibly about real events, but the characters' motivation makes no sense because of all the embellishments. It all just comes off as cartoonish.