alt Hacker NewsBy far the most compelling telling I've seen of the "How BPS and Nintendo got the Tetris rights" story is in chapters 13 and 14 of David Sheff's book "Game Over". The whole book is a good read if you're into game history (apart from the Atari chapter, which leans too hard on Nolan Bushnell as a source), it's basically the only time people at Nintendo talked at length with a reporter.
Meanwhile the Tetris film was awful. The Tetris rights negotiations were all about the various sides wrestling for power and the Soviets trying to play them against each other. The film basically goes "nah that's too boring for our target audience" and tries to make it into a Cold War spy thriller, but the hamfisted modifications to the events that transpired make the plot nonsensical (especially for general audiences that would be unfamiliar with what actually happened).
Replies
+1 for David Sheff's book. It's by far the best written history about video game distribution in the late 80s and early 90s.
FWIW, The Gaming Historian youtube channel did a good cover of it [0]
> Meanwhile the Tetris film was awful. The Tetris rights negotiations were all about the various sides wrestling for power and the Soviets trying to play them against each other. The film basically goes "nah that's too boring for our target audience" and tries to make it into a Cold War spy thriller, but the hamfisted modifications to the events that transpired make the plot nonsensical (especially for general audiences that would be unfamiliar with what actually happened).
It was definitely a bit much in places, but it was a fun dramatization. Having been very familiar with the background, they at least did a good job of keeping it interesting enough where even a non-gamer would stay interested through the film as far as theming/story/etc.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fQtxKmgJC8