Deals, drama and danger: the incredible true story behind Tetris | Film

When he looks back on it now – gambling his house, battling Robert Maxwell, turning up in the Soviet Union on a wing and a prayer – Henk Rogers still insists that he never considered giving up. “People ask me how much naivety was involved?” he recalls. “I would say 20% naivety/stupidity and 80% determination.”

That may be the key to success in many aspects of life. In Rogers’s case, he was a video game publisher who knew he had discovered the next big thing: Tetris, a strangely addictive puzzle in which players must arrange falling bricks of differing shapes to form a solid wall.

Rogers travelled to the Soviet Union in 1988 to meet Tetris’s designer, Alexey Pajitnov, hoping to secure worldwide distribution rights to the game. But he had plenty of rivals, including the businessman Robert Stein, British newspaper proprietor Maxwell and his son Kevin, and Russian officials and KGB officers on the make.

The somewhat convoluted story of how the irrepressibly charming Rogers outfoxed them all, and formed a lifelong friendship with Pajitnov in the process, is told in director Jon S Baird’s film Tetris starring Taron Egerton and Nikita Efremov, with memorable cameos by Roger Allam as Maxwell and Matthew Marsh as President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Rogers and Pajitnov worked closely on the script to ensure authenticity. But in a joint Zoom interview from New York, Pajitnov, wearing a black shirt dotted with colourful Tetris bricks, acknowledges that a fair bit of artistic licence was used to make “a thriller on steroids”.

The pair also advised on the look and atmosphere of the Soviet Union, which was largely recreated in Aberdeen and Glasgow. Pajitnov, 67, a US citizen who still speaks with a strong Russian accent, recalls of his Moscow childhood: “The life of the Soviet Union was very stable. We didn’t have any change for decades. The same street, the same stores, the same same everything, the same price, the same leaders in the government.”

Rogers interjects to ask if he used to queue up to buy meat and vegetables, as depicted in the film? Pajitnov replies: “Probably not for vegetables, not for bread, but for meat, yes. I spent a good half an hour in the line for meat or for some kind of exotic stuff like sweets or good fruits or whatever. There was a deficit from time to time and it became worse and worse with the years. To the end of the 80s, it became really nasty.”

In 1984 Pajitnov was working as a software engineer in a computer centre at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Testing a new computer, he wrote a simple game based on a puzzle from his childhood that involved fitting different-shaped blocks into a grid.

Pajitnov’s initial version of Tetris used seven different shapes, which he called “tetrominoes” and made up of four blocks each. The game became an instant hit among Pajitnov’s colleagues and it eventually spread to other computer users in the Soviet Union, becoming an obsession.

He says: “Basically, at one point I realised that this is a very good game. When I got myself hooked on it for a couple of weeks without doing any other job I needed to perform in my computer centre, I realised that it’s something. But I never expected that big.”

Enter Rogers, a Dutch-born, American-raised games publisher who at the time was living in Japan with his family. In 1988 he discovered Tetris at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Was it love at first sight?

The 69-year-old says via Zoom: “It was fairly fast. My job at the time was to find games to bring to Japan so I was supposed to go from game machine to game machine, spend a few minutes and make a decision: do I want this game or not? Well, I was back at the Tetris machine the fourth time, and I realised that I’m just wasting time playing this game at the show, and there are people behind me, and so on.”

The movie shows Rogers risking everything, including his family home, to raise the money to buy the rights to Tetris. “It was worse than that. It wasn’t my house. It was all of the property of my in-laws. They’d saved up all this money and got this property and I put all of that on the line.”

He flew to Moscow to meet officials from the Soviet government and the state-owned software agency, Elorg, which held the rights to Tetris. It was the time of the cold war and outsiders were regarded with suspicion.

Rogers recounts: “It was weird. Nobody fucking smiled at me. I’m trying to be charming and this works everywhere I go in the world. It didn’t work at all. It’s like, ‘Oh my God, these people don’t have a sense of humour or whatever.’ It felt like everybody was watching me. It was creepy.”

But Pajitnov quickly warmed to him. He says: “I was charmed by his English. His English was very clear, very honest and very understandable, and that produced a very big impression for me.

“He was my first colleague I ever met, because the profession of game designer didn’t exist in my country. Nobody designed games besides me. That’s the first time when I could discuss my next title, my ideas and whatever, so we became friends pretty quickly.”

The film flirts with the genre of a cold war caper with both men under surveillance by the Soviet regime, Rogers targeted by a “honey trap” and roughed up by goons, and climactic car chase and heart-stopping airport scene reminiscent of Argo. In reality, it wasn’t quite so dramatic.

Rogers says: “It’s an exaggeration but we did feel the pressure from the politburo. When Alexi wanted to talk to me about something confidential, he would always signal and we would go out and take a walk in the park. The assumption there was that every room and every car was bugged.”

Pajitnov adds: “I was feeling myself on edge all the time. Hollywood makes this very visible but that was in the air.”

Rogers realised that the key to securing Tetris from Elorg was to join forces with Nintendo and its promising new hand-held product, the Gameboy. But he faced stiff competition from factions who had also spotted Tetris’s potential and were eager to win the rights by fair means or foul.

Among them was Stein of Andromeda Software, who had signed a deal to distribute Tetris on personal computers outside Russia. Stein then struck another deal with Maxwell’s Mirrorsoft to produce the game in Britain. It soon transpired, however, that Elorg had not granted official permission, which sent Stein and the owners of Mirrorsoft heading off to Russia at the same time as Rogers.

Rogers explains: “After so many days of negotiating, [Elorg vice-chairman Nikolai] Belikov says to me, ‘Why should we choose you instead of Kevin Maxwell?’ I’m like, ‘Holy shit, Kevin Maxwell is here? I didn’t know. I’m not a rich man like Kevin Maxwell. I can’t give you as much upfront but I can give you an honest share of the profit. So for every Gameboy cartridge sold, you’ll get 25 cents.’”

Kevin’s father, Robert, a Czech-born immigrant to Britain, was a man of Trumpian appetites and excesses. He published the Daily Mirror newspaper, owned Oxford United football club and stole money from the Mirror Group’s various pension funds. He died in 1991 when he fell from the deck of his yacht into the sea having suffered a heart attack. Last year his daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell, was sentenced to 20 years in jail for grooming and trafficking underage girls.

In Tetris, Robert Maxwell may have perceived an easy way out of his financial troubles. Rogers notes: “He was scheduled to meet Gorbachev on Gorbachev’s visit to England. But then the earthquake in Armenia happened and Gorbachev had to leave. During that meeting, he was going to tell Gorbachev to cancel my deal and give it to his son, Kevin, but that meeting never happened.”

Rogers brought Pajitnov to the US where both men continue to work in the industry. Rogers, who lives between New York and Hawaii, says: “He asked me for help. We shook hands in 1993 and that deal still lives today. The strongest contract that’s ever been written is our handshake.”

They still own the rights to Tetris, one of the most popular video games of all time. Rogers adds: “It’s still a very popular game. I’m not surprised that’s the case because I always like to think if it’s a song, it would be Happy Birthday. Other songs come and go but everybody still continues to sing Happy Birthday. I don’t see it going away anytime soon. Nobody’s come close and there’s been plenty of time for somebody to come up with a game that competes with Tetris.”

The film, out this Friday on the Apple TV+ streaming service, comes at a moment when Russia is all over the news for the bleakest reasons following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Pajitnov, who now lives in Seattle, says the hopefulness he knew under Gorbachev’s democratic reforms has now been dashed.

“I don’t think Putin is human. It’s a pure evil in every way you could imagine. Basically that’s the worst that could happen to Russia.”

Rogers, who has visited Moscow 10 times, before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, adds: “It’s crazy. I just feel so bad for those people. We are testament that people from both sides of that Iron Curtain can be friends and that kinship is stronger than ideology.

“The ideology is crap. Just look at all the astronauts and the cosmonauts – they’re all friends. During the coldest time of the cold war, they were cooperating and happy to see each other; there was never any personal animosity there. That’s all bullshit created by propaganda on both sides.”