GAMERS GEAR UP

IN REVIEW

VIDEO GAME EMERGES FROM UNLIKELY PLACE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The scenes connect and fall and then disappear like the oddly assembled blocks in the video game.

Taron Egerton plays biopic character Henk Rogers of Bullet-Proof Software shuttling about the technology hubs of Tokyo and Seattle as that someone needed to bring the video game Tetris from limited release in Russia to the multi-market gaming world.

Director Jon S. Baird layers the arcade game over the film narrative as the corporate capitalist free market world of the West begins to merge with the collapsing state controlled communist economies near the end of the Cold War. 

Tetris has been invented by Alexey Pajitnov in Moscow, but the state owned company he works for controls the worldwide licensing for the video game.

Nikita Efremov shows how the inventor and his Russian boss don’t really get the adrenaline rush of a really good idea because all the profits go to the state anyway. But the players in the media world of the west come knocking like the falling Tetris blocks.

Negotiating the West’s lust for money is not the only challenge.

Nintendo in Seattle has developed a hand-held game device that would work quite well with the Mario Brothers, but when Tetris is patched in, Howard Lincoln and Minoru Arakawa just got to have it for Game Boy.

Tetris became sought after because of the game’s wide appeal to everyone as opposed to games that appealed to just kids or to just adults.

Baird contrasts the two worlds by bringing the corporate establishment together with the communist politicos inside the backroom corporate dealings thereby underscoring how those machinations overlapped with politics.

Everyone agreed that Tetris would make money, but the players could not agree on who would receive how much of the profits.

Pajitnov would repeat the phrase in one form or another, “This is not America” to accent the clash of civilizations and economies as a game in itself.

Egerton and Efremov show how family and escapism are common threads among people in the West and people in the Soviet Block.

Families are threatened, but in the end Tetris unites the two worlds and the people in them regardless of geopolitics.

Baird does create some minor side plots like how Rogers neglects his family responsibilities while the licensing deal collapses and then rebuilds itself.

But the narrative has mainly a singular purpose like that of a video game seeking the player who can obtain the highest score.

Tetris (2023) is streaming on AppleTV+.