Tetris: An Action Thriller Starring Taron Egerton Coming To Apple TV+

How did one of the most addictive games in the world escape from behind Iron Curtain? According to a new trailer for Apple TV+, the story is full of espionage and action. So was the quest to liberate Tetris from Russia really a life-or-death struggle?

Nah, it’s just Hollywood being Hollywood. However, the recently released trailer for the upcoming Tetris movie looks excellent. If you can look past the whole “inspired by” angle, Tetris: The Movie seems fun. Taron Egerton looks like he is having a great time playing Henk Rogers, the man who helped snatch Alexey Pajitnov’s creation out of the grip of a communist country. Jon S. Baird, the director of the excellent biopic Stan & Ollie, directs Tetris. The film will premiere exclusively on Apple TV+ on March 31st.

In reality, the tale of Tetris’s journey from the Soviet Union isn’t super thrilling, but it is interesting nonetheless. The software licensing to Nintendo or any other non-Russian-owned corporation was full of red tape. However, the epilogues of the people involved with the entire Tetris fiasco are worth noting because some are pretty tragic. Check out the Gaming Historian’s hour-long documentary on the subject here.

The only thing I’m not liking is how all the colors are muted like there’s a gray filter over everything. Just because something occurred in the past or in Russia does not mean the color palette needs to be toned down.

I’ve often wondered if the Game Boy would have succeeded as well as it did if it’d not been for Tetris had not been the pack-in game. When I was a kid, we could only afford the system itself. So I got a lot of use out of that Tetris cartridge. Oddly, I’ve rarely encountered the title’s arcade version. I can count less than five occasions where I’ve seen Tetris in an arcade, including recently in Orlando while hanging out with DJ Slope.

What was your first experience with Tetris? Let us know in the comments section below.