The other day I sat down to watch a movie with zero expectations and ended up staying awake late, picturing blocks falling. The film is Tetris (2023, Apple TV+), with Taron Egerton as Henk Rogers — the Dutch-American businessman who bet everything to land the game's rights. I went to bed seeing blocks drop in my head, and by the next day I had already opened my editor to write my own version. That's exactly what's sitting right below this article, playable. But first, let me tell you the story — because it's far wilder than the game lets on.
The game was born behind the Iron Curtain
Tetris was created in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, a researcher at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He worked on artificial intelligence and speech recognition, and tested hardware using the puzzles he loved. One of them — the pentomino (pieces of five squares) — inspired the idea, but five squares were too heavy for the hardware of the time, so he dropped it to four. Hence the name: tetra (Greek for four) + tennis (the sport he played). Tetris.
It became a craze inside the institute and spread floppy by floppy across Moscow, then all over Eastern Europe, without anyone earning a cent from it. And this is where it gets really interesting.
The licensing war the film dramatizes
Because Tetris was made by an employee of a Soviet state institute, the rights didn't belong to Pajitnov — in practice they belonged to the State, represented by an agency called ELORG (Elektronorgtechnica). The problem was that none of this was clear to the rest of the world, and that's where the mess started.
- Robert Stein, of Andromeda, was the first to try to license the game and sublicensed it to other companies before he even had a closed, valid contract with the Soviets.
- Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte — both under media tycoon Robert Maxwell's umbrella — got involved in the computer rights.
- Atari (via Tengen) believed it held the arcade and console rights.
- Nintendo wanted the rights for its new handheld console, the Game Boy.
Into this tangled knot steps Henk Rogers. He travels to Moscow — at the height of the Cold War, uninvited and barely speaking Russian — to negotiate directly with ELORG. The film turns this into a thriller, complete with a car chase and the KGB on his tail. Rogers spotted the detail nobody had properly noticed: the existing contracts didn't clearly cover handheld console rights. He secured exactly those rights for Nintendo, while Kevin Maxwell (Robert's son) tried to close from the other side on behalf of his father's empire.
The result: Tetris shipped bundled with every Game Boy. It was the perfect marriage — a handheld console needed an addictive, universal game, and Tetris was exactly that. The two became inseparable in a whole generation's memory.
Curiosities worth the price of admission
- The music. The classic Game Boy Tetris theme is "Korobeiniki," a 19th-century Russian folk song based on a poem by Nikolai Nekrasov. Being public domain made it the perfect choice — and today it's impossible to hear that melody without seeing blocks fall.
- The "Tetris effect." There's actually a scientific name for the phenomenon of playing so much that you start seeing pieces fall with your eyes closed, or mentally fitting boxes at the supermarket. It's your brain rehearsing patterns while you sleep.
- The creator was rewarded only years later. Because of the Soviet arrangement, Pajitnov spent more than a decade earning no royalties from his own game. That only changed in 1996, when he and Henk Rogers co-founded The Tetris Company and finally gained control of — and profit from — the brand.
- The sales. Counting every official version across the decades, Tetris has sold more than 520 million copies, placing it among the best-selling games in history.
And the film — is it any good?
As a faithful biopic, it takes plenty of liberties — the car chase and spy-thriller tension are clearly dialed up to fit the format. But honestly: as entertainment, it works really well. The pacing is fun, the score blends chiptune with that 80s feel, and turning a contract dispute into a tense thriller is a bold move that, most of the time, pays off. I went in expecting nothing and walked out wanting to code. For me, that's already a great sign.
The dev angle: simple rules, deep systems
What fascinates me most about Tetris, as a developer, is how much it does with so little. Think about the constraints: a grid, seven pieces (the tetrominoes), gravity, rotation, and a single win rule — a full line disappears, and everything above it drops. That's it. And from those very few rules emerges nearly infinite depth: strategy, speed, pattern reading, decisions under pressure.
That's a masterclass in software design. The best architectures I've ever built follow the same principle: a few well-defined pieces that combine in rich ways. When you get the constraints right — the "shape of the pieces" and the rules for how they fit — the system comes alive on its own, and things you never planned start working. When you get them wrong, no amount of extra code saves you.
In the end, writing a Tetris is a great exercise precisely because of this: the main loop fits in your head, but making the feel good — the drop, the collision, the satisfying lock — is where the craft lives.
Enough talk — go play 👇
Here's the version I wrote. It's vanilla, runs straight in the browser, no libraries at all. You can play with the keyboard (and with buttons, on mobile). The controls are right below the board.