There is also Oleg Shtefanko aka Stefan as Belikov, who works for the ELORG Agency and becomes a key player for Rogers in all this.
Mixed up in all this are the Russians themselves including a devious KGB agent Valentin Trifonov (Igor Grabuzov) who senses the end of the Soviet Union and sees a key opportunity for himself here before the breakup. Working with an interpreter, Sasha (Sofia Lebedeva), Henk finds himself caught up in a cat-and-mouse game to land rights, one that also involves Nintendo which is about to launch its Game Boy, a key destination for a game like Tetris. His motivations are sketchy as we will soon find out. These include Robert Stein (Toby Jones, great as usual) who thinks he has a couple of deals, but turns out they are shaky including one with Mirrorsoft UK owned by none other than flamboyant newspaper magnate and billionaire Robert Maxwell (Roger Allam), who is also on the scent of Tetris along with his buttoned-up son Kevin (Anthony Boyle). However, in a wild confluence of events, rivals converge on Moscow at the exact same time. Henk meets the man himself, Alexey Pajitnov (a superb Nikita Efremov), an unassuming guy completely the opposite of the aggressive pitbull Henk, but eventually he wins him over. A little more research sends him to Russia, where he must negotiate with Cold War corporate entities because this is where the game is a big hit, a homebred success dreamed up by an average working guy who killed time by developing it and then watching it catch on with his co-workers and then the country, while it remained little known beyond the Iron Curtain. He manages to get Japanese rights to the game but it turns out they don’t exist. He is on the search to find a video game that could blow up the market, and at a consumer show in Las Vegas one day he lands on the obscure Tetris and - bingo! - this is it, he thinks.
ORIGIN GAMES SOFTWARE
It is 1988, Henk Rogers ( Taron Egerton) is an entrepreneur and owner of Bullet-Proof Software living with his wife Akemi (Ayane Nagabuchi - excellent) and daughter Maya in Japan. Yes, that latter sentence is what makes up the bones of this story, but I guarantee you will be on the edge of your seat, and remarkably it is all true.
ORIGIN GAMES MANUAL
Baird ( Stan & Ollie) and written by Noah Pink, is simply riveting, playing more like a Cold War-era international spy thriller rather than a manual for acquiring rights to a Russian video game.
ORIGIN GAMES MOVIE
It is the kind of thing that would drive me nuts, but watching the movie about how it all came about is another matter because this one, directed by Jon S. Tetris, for those like me who were clueless, turns out to be one of the most popular video games of all time, a puzzle-based one-player game where you have to engineer an endless choice of colored geometric shapes into a single board, fitting them all together. SXSW 2023: All Of Deadline’s Movie Reviews
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