Apple’s Tetris movie has all the pieces of a Cold War spy story

What just happened? Apple has published the first official trailer for Tetris, a biographical movie inspired by the true-life story of one man’s quest to globally distribute arguably the greatest puzzle video game ever.

Tetris, named after the word “tetra” which means “four” and “tennis,” was designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov, and released in mid-1984. It would take a handful of years before the game made its way stateside but once it did, there was no slowing it down.

Tetris was included as a bundle title with Nintendo’s Game Boy in 1989 which sold like hot cakes. Nintendo went on to sell 43 million copies of the game between the Game Boy and the NES, and that doesn’t include the more than 100 million copies that EA has sold since acquiring the rights for mobile versions. The game has since become a pop culture phenomenon whose influence can be felt around the world.

According to Guinness, Tetris is the most-ported video game ever with more than 200 official variants developed for no less than 70 unique platforms including computers, game consoles and even in-flight entertainment systems. Unofficially, perhaps only Doom has more ports as id Software’s iconic first-person shooter can and does run on virtually anything.

Tetris is directed by Jon S. Baird, written by Noah Pink, and stars Nikita Yefremov as Alexey Pajitnov, Taron Egerton as Henk Rogers and Toby Jones as Robert Stein. The film focuses on American video game salesman Henk Rogers and his discovery of the game in the late 80s and subsequent struggles to share it with the rest of the world.

A three-part, live-action sci-fi movie based on Tetris was also reportedly in the works from Threshold Global Studios but it’s been several years since we’ve heard anything about that project.

Look for it to drop exclusively on Apple TV+ on March 31.

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Image credit: Luca Nicoletti, Nik