“In the beginning, it was hostile… I think what they were trying to do is, they were trying to figure out what my angle was. “There were, like, eight guys sitting on the other side of the table, and they were giving me the third degree: Who the hell am I, and what was I doing? And Alexey was one of them,” Rogers remembers. (This part of the story is quite accurately told in the movie although it indulges in wild fabrications elsewhere, Pajitnov and Rogers say it’s true to the spirit of their adventure.) But the rights were in a mess, and the Russian communist state held all the cards. Nintendo had let him in on a little secret: It was preparing the Game Boy for release, and Rogers knew that Tetris would be the perfect game for it. He was in Moscow, uninvited and unannounced, to try to secure the handheld rights to Tetris, for which he was (or believed he was) the licensed publisher in Japan. “I came in on Thursday… I think it was Wednesday, maybe,” says Rogers, who has a habit of referring to long-distant events as if they happened last week. And it was thanks to this kinship that they formed an instantaneous bond in that meeting room in 1989. But they are both game designers, too, even if neither of them particularly planned to be. Pajitnov, who still speaks with a strong Russian accent, is a thoughtful, kindly science-teacher type, while Rogers is every inch the slick salesman, leaning into the camera conspiratorially to spin his yarns. Talking to me over Zoom to promote the new Tetris movie on Apple TV Plus - a film which concocts a watchable, frothy Cold War spy thriller out of the extraordinary true story of Rogers’ initial negotiations with the Soviet Union - the pair communicate with sideways glances and hands placed on shoulders, teasing and correcting each other like the old comrades they are. Later, they founded a company together to manage the rights to Pajitnov’s timeless creation. The man who created Tetris and the man who (more or less) sold it to the world met 34 years ago in a government office in Moscow. Ackerman’s work, for which Defendant Pink developed a screenplay, the contents of which was taken from the book and deceptively made into a film project without Plaintiff’s knowledge or consent, which included the lack of any optioning or licensing rights,” the lawsuit reads.Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers have known each other a long time. “After having reviewed the entire book that Mr. The author is additionally looking to receive statutory damages of up to $150,000 for copyright infringement and covering lawyer fees. IndieWire has reached out to Apple TV+ representatives for comment.Īckerman is seeking monetary damages of at least 6 percent of the film’s estimated $80 million production budget, which comes out to approximately $4.8 million. Ackerman said the film “liberally borrowed numerous specific sections and events of the book” and was “similar in almost all material respects” to it. CEO Maya Rogers and screenwriter Pink copied Ackerman’s book for the “Tetris” screenplay beginning in 2017. “The ‘Tetris’ film is substantially similar in almost all material respects including specific chapters and pages of said book that were simply adopted from the book to the film, without Plaintiff’s knowledge, authorization or consent,” Ackerman’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Warners Lost ‘Barbie’ Bragging Rights This Weekend, but ‘Meg 2: The Trench’ Is #1 on PVOD Per the lawsuit, as first reported by Reuters, Ackerman claimed he sent a pre-publication copy of “The Tetris Effect” to Tetris Co., but the company sent him a “strongly worded cease-and-desist letter” and refused to discuss adaptation rights, plus threatened to sue Ackerman if he pursued his own film or TV spin-offs. Ackerman, who is also the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo, is seeking at least $4.8 million in damages from Apple, “Tetris” screenwriter Noah Pink, and Tetris Co. Now, author Dan Ackerman is alleging that the film illegally copied from his book without fair compensation. The nonfiction 2016 book “The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World” charted the history of Tetris. The Apple Original film, which premiered at SXSW this year before arriving in theaters and the streaming platform in March, stars Taron Egerton as American video game salesman Henk Rogers, who discovered Tetris in 1988 and set out to acquire and popularize the Russian computer game. The “ Tetris” movie has inspired a new puzzle.
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