Tetris founder — and Seattle resident — reflects on iconic game's legacy

SEATTLE — Tetris is beloved in part for its simplicity. The game has no guns, no Marios, no apocalypses. Just colored blocks of varying shapes, all falling into flat-line harmony.

But the story of how the game was created by a Russian computer engineer, exported from the Soviet Union and then made its way through our Game Boys and into our hearts is far more complex.

The saga is detailed in "Tetris," the surprisingly action-packed film released earlier this year by Apple TV that follows Henk Rogers (played by Taron Egerton) as he works to license Tetris and give credit to creator Alexey Pajitnov, who developed the game's first version on an Electronika 60 computer in 1984. With both the game and creator behind the Iron Curtain, the movie shows Rogers facing obstacles — ones far bigger than Tetris players getting T-shaped blocks when they just need a square — of Cold War politics, licensing battles and money problems.

Spoiler alert: Rogers succeeds, Tetris becomes one of the most popular games in history and Pajitnov moves to the U.S. He now lives in Clyde Hill, where fans still send him cartridges to sign.

"Tetris" is faithful to the spirit of the game and the story of how it got to the masses, Pajitnov said. The Russian actor who plays Pajitnov, Nikita Efremov, looks similar to the real young Pajitnov with brown hair and a beard. He's seen in the movie playing tennis, a game the real-life Pajitnov still loves and plays weekly, which partially inspired the iconic game's name. (Tetris is a combination of "tetra," the Greek prefix for four, and "tennis.") The film accurately re-created the 1980s era Soviet atmosphere of computer scientists crammed into a room, trying to program on ugly, slow computers over long working hours.

But the film does take some liberties. Viewers see Pajitnov in a Soviet store line, giving...