Block ops: How everything fell into place for Tetris

[Administrator]

Tetris is a game with no story. The closest you get to a plot twist is rotating your current shape - officially, a tetromino - in the hope of a closer fit with the ad-hoc crenellation below. Achieve your nominal quest by creating a complete line and the result is not closure, it's erasure. The only real narrative comes with failure: a screen now cluttered with poorly stacked pieces standing as an autobiographical document of your own shortcomings as a player.
But look past the skydiving blocks, the gaping existential well and the endless Korobeiniki folksong rendered in chirpy chiptune and there is a staggering true story behind Tetris. A game invented by mild-mannered computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984 at the heart of communist Russia, the perennial puzzler would smash through - or at least sneak under - the Iron Curtain and proceed to conquer the entire world in an astonishing act of soft power.
How this transpired is a labyrinthine tale that combines high art, low cunning and an awful lot of international contractual wrangling conducted by fax. For Box Brown, a US-based writer and artist, the semi-secret history of Tetris became a slow-burning obsession. So when it came to following up his 2014 graphic biography of wrestling legend Andre The Giant in 2014, Brown decided to grapple with another icon that has loomed large in pop culture. The result is Tetris: The Games People Play, published last week.
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