It’s like, ‘Oh my God, these people don’t have a sense of humour or whatever.’ It felt like everybody was watching me. I’m trying to be charming and this works everywhere I go in the world. It was the time of the cold war and outsiders were regarded with suspicion. He flew to Moscow to meet officials from the Soviet government and the state-owned software agency, Elorg, which held the rights to Tetris. Nikita Efremov and Taron Egerton in Tetris. They’d saved up all this money and got this property and I put all of that on the line.” It was all of the property of my in-laws. The movie shows Rogers risking everything, including his family home, to raise the money to buy the rights to Tetris. 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 69-year-old says via Zoom: “It was fairly fast. In 1988 he discovered Tetris at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. But I never expected that big.”Įnter Rogers, a Dutch-born, American-raised games publisher who at the time was living in Japan with his family. 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. He says: “Basically, at one point I realised that this is a very good game. 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. Pajitnov’s initial version of Tetris used seven different shapes, which he called “tetrominoes” and made up of four blocks each. 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. In 1984 Pajitnov was working as a software engineer in a computer centre at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. To the end of the 80s, it became really nasty.” There was a deficit from time to time and it became worse and worse with the years. 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. 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. The same street, the same stores, the same same everything, the same price, the same leaders in the government. 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. The pair also advised on the look and atmosphere of the Soviet Union, which was largely recreated in Aberdeen and Glasgow. 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”. Rogers and Pajitnov worked closely on the script to ensure authenticity. 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. 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. Rogers travelled to the Soviet Union in 1988 to meet Tetris’s designer, Alexey Pajitnov, hoping to secure worldwide distribution rights to the game. 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. That may be the key to success in many aspects of life.
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