Starring Taron Egerton, Roger Allam, Toby Jones

Directed by Jon S. Bairs

Apple+’s story of Henck Rogers’s battle to obtain the licensing rights for the classic computer game, Tetris.

I was about twenty years late to the Tetris party, only discovering the game in the mid-naughties. Once I’d started playing it, however, I was a man (now in my forties) possessed. I must have wasted about a month of my life on the game and used to go to sleep dreaming of strategies to get the pieces to fall into place. Eventually I resorted to one of those app blockers to stop me accessing any Tetris sites, in the hope of rescuing my devastated work schedule.

The hypnotic, obsessional nature of one of the simplest video games there is lies at the heart of why there was such a battle for rights. I knew that with its Soviet origins, it had become a surreal last gasp of the Cold War (well, until the current one blew up again) and so I was looking forward this dramatization.

It’s certainly very watchable. Taron Edgerton is excellent as the entrepreneur Henck Rogers, and there are decent turns all round playing the various soviet middle-men, along with an uncannily authentic Robert Maxwell rendered by Roger Allam in an enormous fat suit. But you can see where the problem lies, if you flick your eyes back to the top of this review. ‘A battle to obtain licensing rights’ is just that. I dread having to work through contracts at the best of times, and after about an hour I’d completely lost track of which clauses meant what to whom, and frankly I’m not sure I really cared, especially when you can play the game for free online these days.

But it romps along, and everyone looks vaguely as if they mean it (although I did wonder at times if the actors actually understood what they saying) and when the story comes up for air amid all the chat about contractual definitions and arcade rights, the emotional throughline is interesting… ish… more or less.

Verdict: I hung on to the end, and thought it was okay, but a bit like the game itself Tetris used up more of my life than I really wanted to give to it. 6/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com