This is the story behind the fiendishly addictive game, a tale of high stakes, intimidation and legal feuds set against the backdrop of Cold War tensions between East and West. Blocks of different sizes fall from the top of the screen. At the bottom of the screen they settle and, if you can make a whole line then they vanish – of course if you don’t then they keep building up until you run out of room and the game ends. It is incredibly simple but fiendishly addictive and once you played it, you were pretty much owned by Tetris. This documentary takes us back to the origins of the game in Russia as systems at the Moscow Computing School were being developed and pushed as to what they could do and one programme starts experimenting with falling shapes based on a famous jigsaw puzzle. Computer games are made every week in the world and although Tetris was a phenomenon, a documentary that looks at the business dealings and negotiations that took it from a Moscow computer into homes and...
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