Watched "Tetris" (Spoilers included) #174

The struggle of a man who risked his company's fate and his own life to sell Tetris

Introduction

Henk of Bullet-Proof Software discovers a game called "Tetris" running on a PC at a Las Vegas game trade show.

Immediately after playing it, he is convinced it will be a massive hit and decides to travel alone to the Soviet Union, where the game's developer is located.

A movie that can be called a business adventure

A movie that reveals the incredible struggle behind how Tetris, a super-addictive game so famous that almost everyone has played it, ended up on the Game Boy!

Tetris was the game bundled with the Game Boy, Nintendo's explosive hit product.

With simple rules and extreme addictiveness, it became an explosive hit and a killer app. The Game Boy likely wouldn't have sold as well as it did without Tetris.

At the time, I knew the game was developed by someone in Russia, but I had never thought about the details beyond that.

To begin with, Henk had initially obtained the rights to sell it for consoles, and in that process, he heads to the Soviet Union to secure the rights for Nintendo's Game Boy. In the Soviet Union at the time, a communist state where even entering the country was difficult, he manages to reach the negotiation stage, but as he checks various details, it becomes clear that the rights to sell Tetris were only granted for PCs.

He then begins negotiations again to obtain the rights for consoles and handheld devices, but the film depicts the back-and-forth maneuvering with a sense of speed, as government officials try to interfere behind the scenes to line their own pockets, and other companies arrive in the Soviet Union to try and secure the rights for themselves.

Despite the content being centered on business, the scenes cut between Henk, the Soviet side, and the rival companies with such good tempo that I never felt a lull and reached the final scene in no time.

It depicted the changing times well

Tetris was originally developed on a PC (the Soviet Union didn't have console game machines), but since Nintendo's Famicom already existed, a console version was developed, and it perfectly matched the timing of the top-secret Game Boy development. The film skillfully weaves in the flow of the era—moving from PCs to consoles to handhelds—along with the major shift from the communist Soviet Union to the Soviet Union undergoing Perestroika, which was great because it didn't just stop at being a movie about business.

Conclusion

Given this content, I feel like it could have been made a little earlier, but I wonder if there was a reason for that.

It wasn't just finished as a documentary but was skillfully crafted into entertainment, making it highly recommended even for those who have never played Tetris or don't know the Nintendo Game Boy.