How Tetris Pieced Together a Real-Life Political Thriller

The story behind Tetris—the movie and the game—is, shall we say, convoluted. First, there was the actual real-life struggle to secure the rights to the game and distribute it outside of the USSR—the espionage, the legal battles, the personal intimidation. Then, there was the challenge that writer Noah Pink and director Jon S. Baird faced: cramming all of that into a two-hour film.

It’s something Pink had been wrestling with long before Tetris (the movie) was even greenlit. “I had pieces here and there from articles and a few podcasts, chapters from books,” Pink says. “Obviously, this is not a secret history, but that being said, it was a pretty unknown history.”

The circumstances of the origin of Tetris (the game) are as complicated to untangle as any historical event, with the added difficulty of its development happening in the then-collapsing Soviet Union. Much of the film’s tension is built around the challenge of contacting people inside the country, language barriers, and the confusion those factors can cause.

Fortunately, Pink found a way to navigate the messy history. “I really latched on to this idea that, at the core, this movie was about two guys from very different parts of the world who found a commonality and a connection through gaming.”

Pink spent a year and a half assembling the story from second-hand details, but after the film was set up with a producer, he was finally able to meet with the real Henk Rogers and Alexey Pajitnov (played by Taron Egerton and Nikita Efremov, respectively, in the movie). “Henk, being Henk, was more concerned with who was going to play him. And Alexey, being Alexey, was more concerned with making sure that we got the facts right.”

It’s hard to find a better source for a historical story than the people who lived through it. Not only for getting the details of the timeline correct, but for understanding the perspective of people living in the final days of the Soviet Union. “You could say in hindsight, that the writing was on the wall,” Pink says. “But, talking to Alexey, if you were living through it, it wasn't on the wall until it actually happened.”

The emotions surrounding an event and the details of the event itself can sometimes be at odds with each other. At one point in the film, for example, Henk is invited to Nintendo to learn about a new product they’re developing: the Game Boy, a handheld video game console that, in retrospect, would change the face of gaming forever. In the film, the device’s prototype is hidden under a sheet and unveiled with flourish. The reveal will feel momentous to fans of the original handheld, but it likely didn’t happen the way it’s portrayed. “It probably happened in an office,” Pink says. “It’s a slight tweak to give that kind of ‘Aha!’ moment of a thing we all recognize.”

In some cases, the details of history are also hard to parse. For example, in some tellings of the story, other people have occasionally shared credit for developing Tetris, including Vladimir Pokhilko and Vadim Gerasimov. However, their roles are nuanced and, as with any story that originated behind the Iron Curtain, the details of their involvement are unclear.

Pokhilko was a clinical psychologist and friend of Pajitnov. In his book The Tetris Effect, Dan Ackerman relays how Pajitnov showed the game to Pokhilko, who immediately identified its addictive nature. He also subsequently had to ban the game from his offices, as workers were getting too distracted—a detail the film alludes to through the character of Valentin Trifonov, who tells Pajitnov that his game was “being played by government workers across the Union for hours a day.”

The Tetris Effect also details how Pokhilko worked with Pajitnov to develop an early two-player version of the game, where players would control blocks falling from opposite sides of the screen to meet in the middle (notably, this is different from the multiplayer mode that shipped with the Game Boy).

It’s unclear whether Pokhilko made any other contributions, or whether those contributions made it into any published versions of the game. Nevertheless, his association has led to some accounts crediting him as a co-developer of Tetris. In 1998, Pokhilko and his wife and son were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide, and the recent docuseries, The Tetris Murders, builds many of its theories around the premise that Pokhilko was a co-developer of the game.

Meanwhile, Vadim Gerasimov has a somewhat more tangible connection. As the film explains, Pajitnov made the first version of Tetris on an obscure computer, the Electronika 60. This version used parentheses to form blocks and was rather rudimentary. With Gerasimov’s help (along with another of their friends, Dmitry Pavlovsky) they were able to rebuild the game for IBM machines.

According to The Tetris Effect, this process involved a time-consuming effort to rebuild the game from scratch, but also involved additional design elements. Gerasimov not only translated the game into Pascal, but also contributed the idea of color-coded blocks. Pavlovsky additionally contributed the idea of a high-score mechanic. Some versions of the title screen in the IBM version—the first version that went viral—reads “Game by A. Pajitnov & V. Gerasimov.” In other early iterations of the game, such as the Atari Arcade version, both men receive a credit for “original concept and design.”

This complexity strikes up a fascinating question of credit in a collaborative medium like game design. However, as Pink explained to WIRED, while the technical process and iteration may have been collaborative, the core idea and design for the game still originated with Pajitnov. “When it came down to it, after talking to Alexey and Henk,” Pink said, “This was definitely Alexey’s game.”

The film briefly alludes to Gerasimov and Pavlovsky’s contributions in an early scene where Rogers is explaining Tetris’ origins to a bank manager. “Alexey and a couple of buddies from work made the game IBM-compatible. Which meant color graphics, 8-bit music, and floppy disks that people copied and shared for free.” It’s a compressed version of the story, and might have been incomplete if Tetris had been a documentary, but it left room to focus on the emotional journey.

This compression was also necessary for dealing with some of the larger forces that were working against Rogers and Pajitnov. As Pink explained, the machine of Soviet bureaucracy was complex, and many of the people Pajitnov dealt with were fused into the character of Valentin Trifonov. “He was an amalgamation of Soviet corruption. At that level, obviously, it was more than one person. And I chose to put him in, to put a face to the pressure that Alexey was feeling on all ends.”

And as with any story this big, there are countless details that simply had to hit the cutting room floor. “I wrote an entire, like, 20-page Atari subplot,” Pink laments. The story in question involves corporate intrigue so dense it could be its own spinoff film. 

As Pink relays the tale, Tengen—a subsidiary of Atari Games—was attempting to make games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. However, Nintendo charged the company $10 per cartridge to manufacture them, and used a lock-out chip and program called the 10NES to enforce this policy. At the same time, Atari Games was attempting to reverse engineer the lock-out chip to circumvent it, but initially failed and agreed to Nintendo’s terms.

Despite this agreement, Atari continued its efforts to reverse-engineer the lock-out system. And this effort, according to Pink, included a lawsuit against itself. “So what [Atari] did—which is not in the movie, but it’s true—is they hired a law firm, I believe it was in Virginia, to sue them. Not Nintendo—to sue Atari, for patent infringement.”

By claiming that Atari was a defendant in a lawsuit over the lock-out chip, Atari was able to convince the United States Copyright Office to hand over a copy of the 10NES program. The only way for a company to defend itself against patent infringement claims, after all, is to see the patent in question and compare its product to it.

Instead, Atari Games used the information it gained from the Copyright Office to build the Rabbit, a replica chip that could fool Nintendo’s lock-out and allow Tengen to manufacture its own cartridges at a reduced cost.

Nintendo retaliated with a lawsuit alleging copyright and patent infringement (for real this time) in 1989. Separately, it sued Tengen over the rights to the console version of Tetris. This latter suit is prominently featured in the movie, as the state of Tetris’ global distribution rights was convoluted and high-stakes. The case over the lock-out chip, understandably, gets only a passing mention in the film.

“We didn’t have time to explain it,” Pink says. “When Henk came back with video game rights, not only [does Tengen] not have rights to Tetris, they also got fucked that way.” In a film that’s already overloaded with the intricacies of copyright law (a not-insignificant portion of the movie centers on the debate over whether a video game console in the ’80s counts as a “computer”), it’s simply not feasible to add 20 extra pages about patents.

It would be easy with a story like this to get lost in the weeds, but focusing on the relationship between Pajitnov and Rogers helped keep the focus tight. “That was kind of the North Star for me,” Pink said. “And to know that they are still friends today was really like, ‘OK, there’s a story here to tell.”