Dan Ackerman, editor-in-chief of tech-news website Gizmodo, sued Apple, the Tetris Company, and others in Manhattan federal court on Monday, alleging that they adapted his book about the landmark video game “Tetris” into a feature film without his permission.
Ackerman said he sent his book “The Tetris Effect” in 2016 to the Tetris Company, which allegedly copied it for the movie and threatened to sue him if he pursued his own film or television spinoffs.
The “Tetris” film premiered on the Apple TV platform in March. Ackerman asked the court for money damages equaling at least 6% of the film’s $80 million production budget.
Ackerman’s “The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World” was published in 2016. The book describes the Soviet history of the popular puzzle game and the fight for its global licensing rights as a “Cold War thriller with a political intrigue angle,” according to Ackerman’s lawsuit.
The lawsuit said that Ackerman sent a pre-publication copy of the book to the Tetris Company earlier that year. He said the company refused to license its intellectual property for projects related to his book, dissuading producers who were interested in adapting it, and sent him a “strongly worded cease and desist letter.”
MacDailyNews Take: When films are based on a true story, as Tetris is, the resulting movies — even with the attendant Hollywood embellishments, constrictions, etc. — would very likely seem similar to every fact-based book, article, etc. written about the subject. Noah Pink is credited as the screenwriter of Tetris.
In a February 2023 interview prior to the film’s release, Dutch video game designer Henk Rogers, who secured the rights to distribute the Russian video game Tetris on video game consoles said that both he and Soviet programmer Alexey Pajitnov reviewed the script and made suggestions. However, Rogers noted, “It’s a Hollywood script, a movie. It’s not about history, so a lot of [what’s in the movie] never happened.” There were events in the movie that did transpire in real life. For instance, Rogers notes that he did convince Nintendo to bundle Tetris in with the Game Boy at launch in place of Super Mario Land. Rogers emphasized that the producers strove to “capture the darkness and the brooding” that he felt during his time trying to get the rights to Tetris in then-Soviet Russia. He continued, “They tried their best to accept our changes when they had to do with authenticity. But when it started getting into [creative flourishes like] the car chase and all that, it was like ‘OK, now it’s all them.’ We couldn’t change anything.”
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Tetris,,,
One of the best games of all time. A scenic tour of the mind. True genius!