How do you make falling blocks interesting in a movie? I don't know, how the hell did they make it interesting in a game?
The first trailer for Tetris, an Apple TV exclusive film set to premiere on March 31, released this week. Though "Tetris movie" may conjure images of actors dressed in primary colored block suits, the actual film will tell the story of Henk Rogers, the Dutch entrepreneur who secured the rights to distribute the Russian tetromino-sorting game in America. Rocketman's Taron Egerton plays Rogers and the film is directed by Jon S. Baird, whose previous credits include the Laurel and Hardy biopic Stan & Ollie, and Filth, a black comedy adapted from a novel by Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting.
It looks like a more madcap, '80s-set version of The Social Network, which Egerton has cited as an influence. It could be good, it could be bad. But the trailer gets at least one thing right. It sees Egerton summarizes the appeal of Tetris in a monologue, as tetrominoes descend like neon snow around his mustachioed head: "I played for five minutes, I still see falling blocks in my dreams. It's poetry, art, and math all working in magical synchronicity. It's the perfect game."
The game of falling blocks recently reentered my life via two separate iterations. A few weeks back, my wife and I had planned to check out a museum in a nearby town only to find it closed when we arrived.We wandered down the street and found one of those arcades where you can pay $15 to play as much as you want. We went in and, after dabbling with separate single-play🔴er games,gravitated towards Tetris. We ended up competing in multiplayer until it was time to leave.
About a week after that, Nintendo added the Game Boy versionto Nintendo Switch Online. I often play my Switch when I'm killing time or need something to play while my wife is watching TV, and there is no better game for either pursuit than Tetris.
There are a lot of games you could reasonably ascribe "perfect game" status to. If you're a fan of narrative, you may have said it about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Kentucky Route Zero. If you love Byzantine systems, maybe your perfect game is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dwarf Fortress or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crusader Kings 3. If you love simply-facilitated chaos, you might argue for Spelunky. If you love text-heavy communist RPGs, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Disco Elysium might get your vote.
However, few have as strong a case as Tetris. The game of falling blocks feels less like a game that was developed, and more like an artifact that was discovered. Stephen King talks about stories being things that writers uncover, not things that they create. "🐓;Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world," King says in On Writing. "The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible."
Believe King's hypothesis or not, Tetris feels like that kind of relic. Like chess or soccer or any number of games that have survived throughout millennia, passed from one generation of players to the next, Tetris seems like it would eventually exist in every universe. Had Alexey Pajitnov not created it in 1984, it feels inevitable that someone else, eventually, would have made it. There's something primal about the way its pieces fit together, something evolutionarily satisfying about assembling the blocks into rows which then disappear.
That isn't to diminish Pajitnov's accomplishment. Using King's rubric, Pajitnov used his tools skillfully and got the immaculate thing out of the ground fully intact. It will be difficult for any movie to capture what makes Tetris so special. But, the game is so perfect that even the worst movie could not diminish it.