Nearly everybody has played or seen someone play blocky puzzle game Tetris. It’s one of the best-selling and most popular video games ever made. But while everyone might know of Tetris, I expect most people don’t know the wild story behind how it became a global sensation. Luckily, a new movie from Apple starring Taron Egerton, Nikita Efremov, and Toby Jones is coming out soon to share the genuinely exciting story behind Tetris.
Here’s the first trailer for the upcoming Tetris film, out on Apple TV+ on March 31:
Tetris (the game not the movie) was first released in the 80s and is remembered by most as that awesome block-falling game. Since those early days, Tetris has gone on to become a timeless pop culture icon and has been ported to basically every console and platform you can think of. But what you might not know is that Tetris was created in the Soviet Union by software engineer Alexey Pajitnov and that getting the game globally distributed took a lot of negotiations and legal battles.
And this new movie from Apple, simply titled Tetris, is a retelling of this wild story and how Egerton’s Henk Rodgers helped bring the game out of the USSR and to the rest of the world. The movie does seem to be adding in a few more car chases…
Fun fact: At one point around a dozen different companies thought they owned the rights to Tetris. So yeah, things regarding the dissemination of the game were messy, to say the least. And I’ll be curious to see how accurate the film is in its retelling of the story. At the very least it seems like a fun way to introduce people to the complicated history behind one of the best games ever made.
Tetris (the movie not the game) will be available to stream on Apple TV+ on March 31. And then the following week you can watch the Super Mario Bros. Movie.