Everyone has heard of Tetris the game but I think that most people - including me - were unaware there was such a heated battle around the release of it. When I went into this movie I was hopeful that it was a true story and it wasn't until the end where they provided some "where are they now" information that we realize that at least to a certain extent, it is a true story or at least "based on a true story."
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There is a reason why I say that it would be amazing if you were alive when it happened is because for those of us that are of the correct age we are aware of how Tetris went from being something almost no one had heard of to being something everyone loved basically overnight. This was because the iconic game came bundled with every Game Boy that was sold and man oh man, did that thing sell like crazy. Basically everyone I know got one for Christmas that year in 1989.
The song that plays endlessly in the Game Boy version is something that I think most people alive at that time can hum or whistle without even thinking about it for very long. It was a very "Russian" sounding song and I suppose that is appropriate given its source.
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The film follows the lives of the person who developed the game and also distributed it for free. He had no intention of ever making money off of it. It also follows the lives of the people who sought to make a ton of money off of it by licensing it around the world and how this was something that was very difficult to accomplish seeing as how the USSR basically cut itself off from the rest of the world. Contracts don't mean a great deal when your government doesn't recognize documents originating in other countries I suppose.
It was difficult for me to imagine this film being the thriller that it is but they did a very good job making it tense and I am sure they took some liberties in how they presented the actual events that took place in real life.
For those of you that were not alive or at gaming age in 1989, I think that this movie can still be entertaining but it will be considerably more meaningful for anyone that had a Game Boy under the tree at the end of the 80's like I did.
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It's difficult to imagine that a movie that is mostly told from a narration point of view and involves a ton of board room meetings and flying around the world to make business deals would be exciting, but it is. Perhaps this is the reason why it took so long to make a film about one of the best selling video games of all time. While I have no facts to back this up, I would imagine that Tetris has probably been available on the most devices of any game of all time, surpassing even titles like Pac-Man.
Should I watch it?
I think almost everyone will find this entertaining but like I said before, you are going to like it a lot better if you were alive during the 80's and when the USSR was still a place. It might be difficult for younger viewers to truly get on board with how big of a deal this game actually was since we don't see it a great deal anymore. I was glued to the screen for the near 2 hours of the film and actually watched all of the credits hoping that there would be some more information contained therein.
This film is only on AppleTV but if you use torrents be careful to check the comments since some of them do not contain subtitles and a lot of this movie is not in English. I was on my 4th try and was about to give up when I finally found one that worked all the way through.
