![]() “I am about to walk in the door and my interpreter says, ‘You can’t go in there,'” Rogers told KCRW. Rogers traveled to the Soviet Union on a tourist visa rather than a business visa, a decision that complicated his efforts to meet with anyone involved with Tetris in an official capacity. With Nintendo’s groundbreaking Game Boy in the works, Rogers then set out for Moscow in hopes of acquiring the handheld rights for Tetris. Rogers went on to land a deal with Nintendo via his company Bullet-Proof Software, and Tetris for the Nintendo Famicon console was released in late 1988. Meanwhile, Rogers was busy obtaining distribution rights from Spectrum Holobyte for Tetris computer and console games in Japan. However, the contract expressly forbid Stein from licensing the rights to the arcade and handheld versions of the game, as well as any other mediums “which we did not dream about yet.” In the spring of 1988, Stein finally signed an agreement with Elektronorgtechnica (Elorg), the state-owned agency with a monopoly on Russia’s import and export of software, for the computer rights to Tetris (with “computer” interpreted by Stein to mean both PC and home video game-console). Miscommunication over the Soviet licensing process led Stein to prematurely sell the PC version of Tetris to Spectrum HoloByte, the American arm of British video game publisher Mirrorsoft, and the Tetris computer game was released to instant acclaim despite Stein not having a deal with the Russians. Like in the movie, after Tetris was ported to the IBM PC in 1985 and began to spread throughout the Soviet Union, Hungarian businessman Robert Stein (played by Toby Jones) made an attempt to secure the computer rights to the game for his company, Andromeda Software. ![]() ![]() Baird and written by Noah Pink, follows Henk Rogers ( Taron Egerton), a Dutch game designer who, after learning about Tetris at a 1988 Las Vegas tradeshow, traveled to Moscow to secure the game’s licensing rights from behind the Iron Curtain. The Cold War-era thriller, directed by Jon S. Tetris, a new Apple TV+ movie streaming March 31, explores the true story behind the late 1980s legal battle that led to the classic video game becoming an international phenomenon. The puzzle game-which requires players to fit together geometric shapes composed of four squares to form horizontal lines-skyrocketed to popularity so quickly that in 1994, writer Jeffrey Goldsmith coined the term the Tetris Effect to explain the psychological phenomenon that occurs when people devote so much time and attention to something that it begins to pattern their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. In the nearly 40 years since Tetris was invented, it has sold more than 520 million copies worldwide and been downloaded over 615 million times on mobile devices alone. ![]()
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