As “Tetris” celebrates 40 years of falling blocks at the Lucca Comic and Games convention in Italy, Variety sat down with its creator Alexey Pajitnov and the Tetris company’s co-founder Henk Rogers to discuss the beginnings of the most successful computer game in the world.
Despite the difference in their appearance, Pajitnov, pale with a white beard, and Rogers, tan with a colorful trilby, make a formidable team who overcame great odds to bring their puzzle game – in which players pair and eliminate a series of multicolored falling blocks – to the world in 1984.
Such were the adventures, there’s even an Apple+ film “Tetris,” starring Taron Egerton and directed by Jon Baird. Pajitnov smiles at the memory: “Noah Pink [the screenwriter] was very attentive to our notes, but it was still a long and difficult fight with them, because they desperately need all this Hollywoodish bullshit.”
Rogers understands the compromises necessary: “Their job was to take a year and a half of our life and squeeze it into two hours. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any control on the shooting, because of COVID.”
“When we watched the movie, we were surprisingly pleased,” Pajitnov says. “We had low expectations. I’m pleased with the bad guys. They’re fictional though.”
The very real-life British tycoon Robert Maxwell as Rogers’ main competitor also features along with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, as the licensing battles took place against the backdrop of the changing situation in the USSR. “I like the actor who plays me [Nikita Efremov],” Pajitnov adds. “He reminds me of myself young. It was a strange, out of body experience.”
“I was there during the transition,” Rogers says. “We had a group of 100 graphic developers in Moscow working. I remember giving a speech. I said, this is not the end of the Soviet Union. This is the beginning of Russia. Everybody had hoped that it was going to be freedom. Then it slowly eroded back into what it is now.”
The reason for “Tetris’” success is simple according to Rogers: “We broke through the female barrier. Before ‘Tetris,’ games were for guys, 95% guys, right? And ‘Tetris’ changed all that.”
Rogers continues: “It’s an order out of chaos game and that is more the female side of us. Men are male and female. We are x and y. Women are x and x. We can do both construction and destruction. Women are construction and construction. That’s why the world is becoming a better place because of women.”
Looking at the current gaming market, both men have their criticisms. For Rogers, an ex-publisher of games, it’s economics. “People don’t want to spend the amount of money to buy a cup of coffee for a game. It’s $3 and a cup of coffee gives you 20 minutes of satisfaction, a game will give you hours.”
Talking about in-app purchases, Rogers continues the coffee comparison: “They give you this much coffee, and they ask for more money to put a little flavor into your coffee, or sugar. It’s such an annoying way of consuming something.”
“I’m still in love with my puzzle part,” Pajitnov says, but he finds current programs too full of bugs. “They’ll release a game, online or mobile games, and get the public to debug it. Then the game fails because people get annoyed.” He concludes with a resigned laugh: “It’s the dialectic.”
Rogers on the other hand is spending his energy now on combating climate change. “It’s called Blue Planet Alliance. We are basically putting Hawaii on a path to go 100% renewable energy. Fifteen other states copied us. It’s moving across the states. We’re bringing island countries to Hawaii to show them what we did and put them on track. Eventually, we’ll get all the countries in the world to have a mandate for 100% renewable energy by 2045, the 100th anniversary of the United Nations.”
Rogers talks about his next endeavor with the confidence of a man who has solved puzzles before.
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