Trivia / Tetris (2023)

• Approval of God:
  • Both Henk Rogers and Alexey Pajitnov read the script and approved it beforehand. They even attended the red carpet premiere and commented that the movie was actually very accurate, despite the considerable creative liberties taken with scenes like the car chase at the end.
  • A surprising one came from Kevin Maxwell who is not exactly portrayed positively in the movie. In an interview in the Express he said that while he wished some things could be changed, he overall liked the movie's script. He also stated that the movie severely understates how much of a Corrupt Corporate Executive his father Robert Maxwell was and that his backdoor dealings with the KGB throughout the years were actually way worse than what is portrayed in the movie.
• Blooper:
  • The film does not bother to try and hide the fact that footage of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! was lifted directly from Game Grumps, as evidenced by the trademark orange-patterned borders on the footage.
  • Henk Rogers mentions several game duos while pleading his case to Hiroshi Yamauchi. One of these duos is Link and Zelda; however the screen shows a green and blue Link from The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords, with Zelda herself nowhere to be found.
• California Doubling: Scenes set in Russia were actually filmed in the Scottish cities of Glasgow and Aberdeen.
• Disowned Adaptation: Robert Stein's family was not consulted for the movie and feel like it grossly misrepresents his legacy (in his home country he is known as the "Father of Hungarian Video-Game Development").
• Fake American: Wimbledon native Ben Miles plays the Oaklander Howard Lincoln.
• Fake Nationality: An odd multi-layered case: Welsh actor Taron Egerton plays the Amsterdam-born Dutch-Indonesian Henk Rogers, but plays him with a neutral American accent (Rogers himself having moved to America at 11 and likely having adapted an Americanized accent).
• Fake Russian:
  • Londoner Matthew Marsh plays the Russian-born Mikhail Gorbachev.
  • Nina Pajitnov is played by the Lithuanian Ieva Andrejevaite.
• In Memoriam: A dedication to Dmitry Pajitnov, Alexey's son who suffered a fatal skiing accident on Mount Rainier in July 2017, appears at the end of the Creative Closing Credits.
• Insistent Terminology: Viewers might wonder why would Robert Stein ever agree to sign a "new contract" in order to negotiate the handheld rights. That's because in reality it was not a new contract but an amendment to the original contract, something quite common for commercial agreements. Perhaps fearing that viewers wouldn't understand what an amendment is, they refer to it as "new contract" in the film. Since ELORG was not receiving any of the royalties they were promised, the amendment added extreme penalties for late payment. This was really all just a smoke screen to distract Stein from noticing what he was signing. In reality the new terms he signed clarified what a "computer" was, removing any doubt that the original contract did not cover home consoles or arcades.
• Saved from Development Hell: A film adaptation based on Tetris had been attempted by numerous film studios for years, only for all of them to fall into Development Hell due to the property being a Hard-to-Adapt Work. Ultimately, this film would materialize. However, it forgoes adapting the game and instead focuses on its real life history.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting: Togo Igawa is a dead ringer for Nintendo's president Hiroshi Yamauchi.
• What Could Have Been: Lawrence Kasanoff, the producer of Mortal Kombat: The Movie and Food Fight, had the movie rights to the game at one point in The New '10s and planned to make an "epic science fiction trilogy" out of it. Exactly how he planned to do that has never been explained, and nothing ever came of it.

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