Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov genuinely thought he'd be arrested over the game
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Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov has confessed that he genuinely thought he'd be arrested over the game.
The Apple TV+ movie, chronicling how the race to distribute the block-stacking game came about, has been scoring rave reviews among critics this month.
Creator Pajitnov teamed up with video game designer Henk Rogers (played by Kingsman star Taron Egerton in the film) at the time in a bid to get the game to market in the 1980s.
However, it was a harrowing process for the pair and left Pajitnov fearing that he could face imprisonment in Russia as they worked to get the game on the market.
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Pajitnov told Digital Spy: "I never expected anything like that when I start working on my small baby, my game.
"Basically when that stuff happened, we didn't think about the [possible] movie, all this episode when we just met each other. We really were concerned [about] how to avoid jail time."
Rogers went on to share that while the movie dramatises many aspects of their experience, it accurately showcases the concerns they both had at the time.
"There are a lot of things that are really accurate and there's a lot of poetic licence," added Rogers.
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"What came through is my feelings and the anxiety of having to end up in the Soviet Union, walking through a door where I knew I was breaking laws in the Soviet Union. I really didn't know whether I was going to end up in a gulag," he added. "It was a little scary."
Speaking about working with the actors who played them, Rogers said of Egerton: "I think he was more concerned with being able to capture my personality.
"We Zoomed and we had a conversation. It wasn't so much about the specific memories, because the script takes care of that, so he wanted to see what kind of person he was portraying."
"We did Zoom as well," added Pajitnov of Nikita Yefremov, who plays him in the film. "He was very meticulous with all the details, the small details in my habits and life at the time.
"He did a great job. He [did a] tremendous job, very well done."
Meanwhile, the story behind the game even came as a shock to Egerton.
"I thought that if I don't know it, most people hopefully don't know, which makes it worthy of being made into a movie," he explained.
"It's just such a crazy story. It's always a good sign if the script's a real page-turner and it's not a struggle to get through.
Tetris is released in select cinemas and on Apple TV+ from March 31.
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