“Tetris, Tetris, Tetris, Tetris...it’s the perfect game,” begins the first trailer for Tetris, the upcoming biographical movie from Apple TV+ starring Kingsman: The Secret Service actor Taron Egerton. Coming courtesy of the official Apple TV+ YouTube channel, the first footage from Tetris teases the story you couldn’t make up, about the game you couldn’t put down. Check out the first trailer for Tetris below.
Rather than somehow adapt the video game Tetris itself, which would presumably follow a builder who cannot work out why all his bricks keep disappearing, Tetris will instead tell the tall, true tale of Henk Rogers and how one man risked his life to outsmart the KGB and turn Tetris into a worldwide sensation.
The project is led by Eddie the Eagle and Rocketman star Taron Egerton as Henk Rogers, a Dutch video game designer, and entrepreneur who fought to secure the rights to Tetris and thus share it with the world. The rest of the cast includes Toby Jones (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) as Robert Stein; Nikita Yefremov (Londongrad) as the video game designer Alexey Pajitnov; Roger Allam (V for Vendetta, The Sandman) as Robert Maxwell; and Anthony Boyle (Tolkien) as Kevin Maxwell.
The rest of the cast features Ben Miles (The Crown, Andor) as Howard Lincoln; Rick Yune (Olympus Has Fallen); Togo Igawa (The Last Samurai) as the former president of Nintendo Hiroshi Yamauchi; Ken Yamamura (The Wolverine) as the founder and former president of Nintendo of America and co-founder of Tetris Online, Inc. Minoru Arakawa; and Matthew Marsh (Dunkirk) as the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Tetris Has Been Described as a Thriller by Director Jon S. Baird
Tetris is directed by Jon S. Baird (Stan & Ollie, Filth) and written by Noah Pink (Genius), and has been described as a “thriller” by the filmmaker as it deals with the attempts to get control of Tetris during the Cold War. "I'm a politics graduate, and I was particularly interested in the Cold War period," Baird explained. "I knew a lot about that, and that thriller aspect drew me into this story. A lot of the work that I've done has been based on true stories."
It is this Cold War backdrop that gives Tetris its thriller pedigree, according to the director, which is perhaps not what you would expect when hearing that a Tetris movie is being made. "[The Cold War] Automatically gives you that thriller aspect because it's communism vs. capitalism, East vs. West, this clash of cultures and clash of ideas while this huge bloc of countries was disintegrating. People were stealing natural resources, and the whole thing was falling apart,” Baird continued. “It lends itself to this high-stakes, high-paced, high-impact sort of thriller, which just so happens to be about the world's most famous computer game."
The Executive Producer on Tetris is Iain MacKenzie, with producers Matthew Vaughn, Gillian Berrie, Claudia Vaughn, Len Blavatnik, and Gregor Cameron also on board.
Tetris is now scheduled to begin streaming on Mar. 31 on Apple TV+.