Virtual bricks and an iron curtain. Here is the setting for the movie Tetris, released this Friday on Apple+. It traces how the famous game, invented in the USSR, ended up becoming a world classic of video games. All this thanks to Henk Rogers whose “fight” for gaming rights looks like a real spy movie.
In 1984, at the facilities of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a young 29-year-old researcher, Alexey Pajitnov, out of boredom, developed a video game based on a simple principle: stacking geometric shapes to create lines, which gradually destroy each other. themselves. .
The Soviet Electronika 60 computer on which Pajitnov is developing the game has no graphic properties, so it uses letters to form the pieces. Despite its primitive appearance, the game is popular, it passes through the hands of Pajitnov’s colleagues who improve it, give it color. Sensing the potential of the game from him, Alexey Pajitnov manages to send a copy to an acquaintance living in Hungary, who allows Tetris to be displayed at a software exhibition at the Hungarian Institute of Technology.
This was where the British businessman Robert Stein discovered the game and wanted to export it to the other side of the Iron Curtain. In Soviet Russia, the rights to the game do not belong to Alexey Pajitnov but to Elorg, the office that handles all Soviet software licenses. An agreement is reached to distribute the game in the United States and the United Kingdom, but only on personal computers, not on video consoles or arcade terminals.
Success at Nintendo
In the 1980s, the job of Henk Rogers, a Dutch-American businessman, was to acquire and produce video games for the Japanese market. In January 1988, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Rogers stumbled across the game and was immediately hooked. He manages to convince Hiroshi Yamauchi, the head of Nintendo who is about to launch the first Game Boy, that the game must be there.
With no contact on the spot, not speaking a word of Russian, Henk Rogers flew quickly to Moscow, a tourist visa in his pocket.
Finally, he is received at the Elorg offices. After being interrogated for several hours by the KGB, lawyers, businessmen and Alexey Pajitnov, he managed to convince them to give him the exploitation rights.
Back in Tokyo a few days later, he is again visited by KGB agents, who have come to check his good faith. The agreement was definitively reached, and on April 21, 1989, the Game Boy by Nintendo was released in Japan and three months later in North America. Above, the game Tetris.
35 million copies of the game will be sold on the Japanese console.
Recover the exploitation rights
“I didn’t make a lot of money at first,” Alexey Pajitnov said in 2014, “but I was happy. My priority was to see people have fun with my game.”
When he released Tetris in 1984, he signed over his rights to Elorg. For years, therefore, he did not earn a ruble on his planetary project. When the USSR fell in 1991, Pajitnov, who had become close to Henk Rogers, immigrated to the United States where he devoted himself full time to video game design.
In 1996, when Elorg went out of business for good, the two men managed to regain the intellectual property of the game and created the company together. The Tetris Company and market the game on all platforms.
About the movie tetris, Premiering on Apple TV+ on March 31, Alexey Pajitnov, who like Henk Rogers was involved in writing the script, admits to BFM TV that the film is “very accurate in the psychological background. It was a very dark time, there was a lot of pressure. And obviously the film is sprinkled with Hollywood glitter.”
Source: BFM TV
