Alexey Pajitnov, the Russian video game designer and computer engineer that birthed Tetris, will be the center of a new origins movie depicting the creation of the seminal game. According to The Tracking Board, Rush Hour director Brett Ratner and James Packer are developing the picture through their Ratpac Entertainment banner.
Similarly to the Monopoly-themed film brewing in development over at Big Beach, Ratner and Packer are gunning to shed light on the intriguing story behind Tetris‘ early foray on the market. Built within a Soviet-funded company in the USSR during the late 80s, Pajitnov sought the help of fellow designers Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov, who together transformed the plotless puzzle game into a bona fide juggernaut, with various sequels iterating on the core formula of managing and arranging a perpetual stream of falling blocks.
But with great success, comes a great legal battle over the game’s rights – and sure enough, Tetris was the subject of controversy at the beginning of the 1990s. After one court ruling in particular granted Nintendo the legal rights to the puzzler, the Big N bundled a copy of the title into each and every Game Boy hardware that sold in North America. It’s for this reason that Tetris stands to this day as the best-selling game of all time – some 100 million units – not to mention the various mobile versions once the rights battle had been settled.
During this trying time, Alexey Pajitnov didn’t receive any loyalties for sales despite being the brains behind the pixels in the first place. Pitched in a similar vein to David Fincher’s excellent The Social Network, Brett Ratner and James Packer are primed to produce the Tetris origins movie.
Bearing no affiliation with the “big, epic sci-fi movie” that Threshold Entertainment are cooking up, Ratpac’s Tetris film will hue closer to the real story than its live-action counterpart, and based on that fact alone, it already has our interest.
