The heart of the new movie Tetris, a retelling of how the massively popular video game came to be, lies with its two “heroes”: Henk Rogers (played by Taron Egerton) and Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov). Rogers is the American businessman who unraveled the mystery that was Tetris’ licensing rights, ultimately scoring a killer deal with Nintendo to launch the Game Boy with Pajitnov’s puzzle game alongside it. Pajitnov, a humble engineer in the Soviet Union, was just happy that people found so much joy in his block-stacking, line-clearing time-hogger.
But the movie ends in 1989, just as the two men-turned-business partners’ real-life story is picking up. After Rogers secured the coveted Tetris handheld rights and propelled the game to a worldwide success, Pajitnov moved to the U.S. to co-found The Tetris Company, creating and licensing new Tetris games for decades to come.
The pair have remained friends ever since, and that close companionship is obvious when talking to them on Zoom, huddled together around a single screen.
“In real life, even today, if we’re in the same city every other day, we are having a bottle of wine,” said Rogers, of how the pair has maintained a friendship for nearly 40 years. “This is our tradition. And I lived in Seattle [where Pajitnov lives] for a year, so that was a lot of wine.”
Courtesy of HenkRogers.com
Rogers is the extroverted American to Pajitnov’s mild-mannered Russian, a dynamic that’s perhaps more of a treat to watch than even Tetris itself. (The film is now available to stream on Apple TV+.) Aside from co-running The Tetris Company, the men still have a lot to talk about during happy hour—like the time Rogers invited Pajitnov to Burning Man, where he had a horrible time in a van parked right next to the speaker. Yet their friendship persists; if that’s not love, what is?
It probably makes a difference that they first met in such a high-stakes environment. Rogers and Pajitnov’s friendship began in Moscow in 1988, back when it was still under the control of the Soviet Union. Pajitnov worked for Elorg, the government body that owned and was in charge of electronic projects; it was while working there that he programmed his wonderful game about fitting differently shaped blocks together in order to create perfect lines.
It was ultimately to Pajitnov and Rogers’ mutual benefit that they worked together on getting Elorg to sign over the licensing rights for Tetris to Rogers and Nintendo. But forming that partnership was a dicey endeavor.
“During the time that I was there, I was breaking all kinds of laws by talking to people, and Alexey was breaking laws by talking to me,” Rogers explained of that fateful trip, which makes up the core of the film. Foreigners, especially American ones, had only just recently been allowed to visit the USSR, after all. Pajitnov, as a government employee, had several reasons to be wary of talking to Rogers—but once he realized that Rogers was here to help bring his game to the broader world, he assumed the role of Rogers’ interpreter, guide, and, most importantly, friend.
“[We] clicked very fast because we were both game designers,” said Rogers, “and we could talk about the motivations of people that are playing our game, what the visuals should be like.”
While Tetris today is both Rogers’ and Pajitnov’s game, it is important to remember that Pajitnov was the one who originally designed it. But much of Tetris as a film centers around Rogers’ journey to clear through all the legal red tape that stood in the way of the game’s licensing rights, while also protecting himself from the KGB agents that didn’t want an American meddling in the country.
Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for SXSW
While the film sidelines Pajitnov to an extent in order to focus on this admittedly more action-packed stuff, the humble designer doesn’t see his role as minimized.
“[Rogers] was the main character in this period of the life of the game,” he said. “I did my business before that and I participated later on. … [Writer Noah Pink] took the most interesting moment of the life of the game, [and] Henk was the real hero at that point.”
Still, Pajitnov said, when the men attended the film’s South By Southwest premiere in mid-March, they were equally delighted to find that the audience was celebrating the game as much as the film itself. “The audience, during the premiere, [was really] cheering at every appearance of the game and especially the Game Boy,” he said, with Rogers adding that it felt like they “won an Oscar or something” upon receiving a standing ovation at the film’s end.
That the pair get to go through all of this together is the most meaningful part of it all—from convincing the Russian government to let them bring Pajitnov’s game out of the country to launching a company. It’s a testament to how a great video game can really bond people, to the point where they’ll even put up with going to Burning Man in the name of friendship.
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This post originally appeared on and written by:
Allegra Frank
The Daily Beast 2023-04-04 15:23:00
