I knew I was doing something wrong because my interpreter said, “No you can’t go in there,” and I said, “Why not?” “Because you’re on a tourist visa.” I stayed in a freaking tourist hotel, obviously everybody there was on a tourist visa. And you could say I was “courageous,” but I mean, I was ignorant. I didn’t know how much trouble I could get into. So, there was a bunch of ignorance involved. What about the real danger? How real was that feeling of danger or a threat to you? So, everything is on the line, financially. And that’s a world of hurt, and that is not a world of hurt that I could have survived. Which is, in fact, exactly what happened to Sega and Atari afterward because Nintendo told them both, “Sorry, you can’t publish that game.” And both Sega and Atari had to bury 300,000 cartridges each. If somebody else picks up those rights, they can just tell me no? And I can’t publish? And you know, that all becomes garbage. And they’re telling me that, “You don’t have those rights.” And I’m like, “Holy shit. They’ve worked their entire lives making dumplings and bought all this property and it was all on the line. I basically had used all of their land as collateral to make Nintendo cartridges. And there was no such profession in the Soviet Union.Īnd this strange guy with the mustache had pretty much invested everything in getting the rights to Tetris? And what was most important for me was that he was my colleague he was a game designer. You’ve seen the movie, you remember it.īut that was a very unusual meeting because it was the first time we met a professional there, a person who really belongs to the game industry, and very competent and very good, and explain what was going on. So, I went and I met this strange guy with the black mustache. It wasn’t the first precedent because there were some other strange people kept coming and looking for some Tetris opportunities before. What was your first impression upon meeting?Īlexey: I was just invited on some routine meeting in Elorg, which was because some kind of strange adventurer kind of showed up in Moscow and wanted to talk about Tetris. In both the film and real life, there’s something of a yin and yang dynamic between the two of you. Together, they’d form a partnership that would bring Tetris to the global masses and continues to this very day.Īlexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov) and Henk Rogers ( Taron Egerton) as seen in Tetris. Unable to turn a profit from the game while working for a state-owned organization, his luck would change upon meeting the other man responsible for Tetris’ phenomenal success: Dutch video game designer and entrepreneur Henk Rogers ( Taron Egerton). It’s the story of a Soviet-era Russian engineer, Alexey Pajitnov (played in the film by Nikita Efremov), who singled-handedly designed one of the world’s most addictive and influential video games while working for Elorg, the ministry of software under the USSR. Originally depicted in the 2004 BBC documentary Tetris: From Russia with Love, and now dramatized in the Apple TV+ film Tetris (now streaming), it’s the kind of story that has it all: corporate espionage, personal betrayal, and an outcome that would change the world forever. But anyone familiar with the story of Tetris knows there can be exceptions to the rule.
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