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    Why Tetris Consumed Your Brain

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    Rotating a colorful shape before slotting it into the perfect position is such a satisfying experience that Tetris has joined chess in the pantheon of universally recognizable games.Less familiar is the true story of how a prototype created in 1984 by a software engineer for the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences ended up reaching millions of players across the world. The movie “Tetris,” which stars Taron Egerton and was released on Apple TV+ on Friday, explores those humble beginnings.The addictively simple puzzle game features seven uniquely shaped pieces, each composed of four square blocks. Players move, rotate and position the pieces to form solid lines, which are then cleared away, allowing for potentially endless play. The game’s name — derived from the words “tetra” (Greek for “four”) and “tennis” (the sport enjoyed by the game’s creator, Alexey Pajitnov) — has even pervaded culture as a verb, like when you “Tetris” your luggage into the overhead bin on a plane.In an interview with The New York Times, Pajitnov described Tetris as “the game which appeals to everyone” and said he hoped that its future included e-sports and the integration of artificial intelligence. He is also working on making “a very good” two-player version of the game but said “we are not there yet.”Before Tetris was able to cement itself as a household name with releases on consoles like the Nintendo Game Boy, Henk Rogers, the character played by Egerton, had to journey to the Soviet Union and fend off competitors to secure the game’s rights. As the film shows, that was an arduous task that paid off immensely.Here are more details about the game’s creation and why it has resonated with so many for so long:The Nintendo Game BoyIn the nearly four decades since Pajitnov created Tetris using the Pascal programming language on the Electronika 60, a Soviet-made computer, more than 215 officially recognized versions of Tetris have been released.Perhaps the most notable variant is the one that was packaged with each copy of the Nintendo Game Boy when the hand-held gaming console was released in 1989. But that incredibly successful pairing — the Game Boy and the Game Boy Color have combined for about 120 million unit sales — almost didn’t happen.The president of Nintendo of America, Minoru Arakawa, initially wanted to bundle Super Mario Land with the Game Boy, following the company’s success packaging Super Mario Bros. with the Nintendo Entertainment System. Rogers, however, was able to convince Arakawa that Tetris should be included instead, in part because it would appeal to a broader group of demographics.Pajitnov described the partnership as “two creatures created for each other: Game Boy for Tetris and Tetris for the Game Boy.”“Tetris” shows an early example of the video game featuring seven unique shapes.AppleThe Tetris EffectAs anybody who has spent hours playing Tetris knows, it is an incredibly addictive game. Many people who play for extended periods of time have reported seeing Tetris pieces outside of the game, such as in their mind when they close their eyes, or in their dreams. It’s a phenomenon known as the Tetris Effect.You may have experienced the Tetris Effect yourself if you’ve ever seen tetrominoes, officially known as Tetriminos, when you’re trying to bag your groceries.In professional studies, the psychologist Richard Haier found that regularly playing Tetris resulted in an increased thickness of the cerebral cortex. Haier’s studies also demonstrated how Tetris can affect the plasticity of cortical gray matter, potentially enhancing a person’s memory capacity and promoting motor and cognitive development.A study in 2017 by researchers at Oxford University and the Karolinska Institutet showed that Tetris had the potential to provide relief for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, if they played the game after an incident while recalling a stressful memory.The Quest for PerfectionDecades after it was invented, Tetris continues to have staying power. Newer versions of the game include Tetris Effect, which builds a Zen experience via music, and Tetris 99, in which players try to outlast opponents who are meddling with their boards.In competitive play, new methods of moving the pieces are still being discovered. The standard way to play the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Tetris — yes, the game first released in 1989 is still used at the Classic Tetris World Championships — is by holding the gray rectangular controller so that the left hand controls the movement of the pieces, and the right hand manages the rotation. But that method, known as “delayed auto shift” in the competitive community, has been usurped in recent years by “hypertapping” and “rolling.”Hypertapping involves rapidly pressing the buttons, countering the traditional sensation that pieces are slowly being dragged into position. Rolling lets pieces be moved even more quickly, by flicking the fingers of one hand along the back of the controller.The power of hypertapping became clear in 2018, when a 16-year-old named Joseph Saelee used the method to defeat Jonas Neubauer, a seven-time world champion. But in the years since, the rolling method has dominated the competitive scene. Not only is it incredibly effective, but it seems to be less strenuous on fingers and hands. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Tetris’ Review: Falling Blocks and Rising Freedom

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      Like it’s namesake, this film is clever, crafty and shockingly entertaining.When the Communist Party bans your video game from state computers because it’s lowering workers’ productivity, you know you have a hit on your hands. But in 1988, few people outside the Iron Curtain were even aware of the existence of Tetris, never mind its potential to enchant millions. While its Russian creator, Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov), was giving away copies for free, a savvy programmer named Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) was witnessing a demonstration of the game at a Las Vegas trade show and having his mind blown.Like its namesake, Jon S. Baird’s “Tetris” is clever, crafty and shockingly entertaining. Both origin story and underdog dramedy, the movie presents a fictionalized account of Henk’s epic quest to obtain licensing rights to multiplatform versions of the game. Assembling a story that’s equal parts astonishing and bamboozling, Baird and his screenwriter, Noah Pink, pit communism against capitalism and individual passion against corporate greed. Hacking gleefully into the deal-making weeds, the filmmakers refuse to shy away from wordy conference-room negotiations and head-spinning double-crosses as Henk bets his home, and at one point his freedom, on a long shot.While the Tetris player competes only with herself, Henk — played by Egerton with bushy-tailed zeal — must battle multiple, more powerful adversaries. There’s the weaselly Robert Stein (Toby Jones) of Andromeda Software; the infamous publishing magnate Robert Maxwell (the great Roger Allam), friend of Mikhail Gorbachev (and father of Ghislaine Maxwell), who would go on to pillage his companies’ pension funds; and, not least, the Soviet authorities who own the game, including a cartoonish K.G.B. goon seeking to line his own pockets.There are enough characters here for an entire television series, and Pink sweats blood to cram them all in. At times, the film’s sheer complexity can muddy its identity and stymie its merry momentum. To counter the denseness, Baird works vintage color graphics into pixelated animations that illustrate the movie’s chapters, and some location shooting in Aberdeen, Scotland (Baird’s hometown), doubles ably for Moscow. As Henk racks up frequent-flier miles on three continents (he has an ultrapatient wife and a brood of adorable children in Tokyo), Baird remains staunchly by his superhero’s side. He even gives him an 11th-hour car chase.Though too goofy to work as a Cold War thriller — the unveiling of Nintendo’s revolutionary Game Boy console presents like the discovery of penicillin — “Tetris” is alert to the restrictions and dangers of a Soviet Union on the brink of implosion. In one of its most enjoyable sequences, Alexey takes Henk to an underground nightclub, where a reveler excitedly screams that the Estonians have declared independence. The blocks have begun to fall.Fast and fizzy and relentlessly buoyant, “Tetris” finds its heart in the connection between these two men, the game’s modest creator and its tenacious evangelist. (Hang out for a few minutes during the end credits to see their real-life counterparts interact.) When we watch them play together, we see Henk, for the first time, relax; maybe he’s realizing that in business, the only person you can trust is the one who has nothing to gain.TetrisRated R for blue language, red scares and dirty money. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      in Theater

      Stars Battle It Out on London Stages

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      In West End productions, Jonathan Bailey and Taron Egerton play a fighting couple, and Kit Harington from “Game of Thrones” plays the warrior king in “Henry V.”LONDON — There’s no nudity in “Cock,” the 2009 Mike Bartlett play that opened Tuesday in a starry revival at the Ambassadors Theater here. But by the time its 105 minutes, no intermission, have come to an end, you’ve seen its characters stripped emotionally bare.The play has had quite a trajectory, from its London origins in the Royal Court’s 80-seat studio space to a run in New York (where it had the longer, less provocative title “The Cockfight Play”) and now to a commercial West End perch where tickets are going for three figures — prices you might find for a big musical like “Cabaret.”The show’s director, Marianne Elliott, is a significant force in London theater, and the cast is led by Jonathan Bailey and Taron Egerton, two theater-trained actors more widely known these days onscreen. Bailey came to prominence in the Netflix series “Bridgerton,” while Egerton was a hugely charismatic Elton John in the biopic “Rocketman” and has starred in several of the “Kingsman” films.The play’s author has enjoyed his own ascent. He won acclaim in London and on Broadway for “King Charles III,” which predicts how England’s monarchy might evolve after the queen dies, and has two new plays due in London this spring, one of which, “The 47th,” imagines Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for the presidency. (That one opens next month at the Old Vic.)“Cock,” by contrast, features no real-life characters. Only one of them gets an actual name: John (Bailey), a young man in crisis as he pivots between the affections of his male partner of seven years, a broker known simply as M (Egerton), and a female teaching assistant, W. After John and W have sex, he begins contemplating a new life.Jade Anouka acquits herself beautifully as the outsider to a gay relationship on the ropes: a woman who asks for courtesy from M and is met with condescension and worse. He dismisses her job in the classroom as “babysitting,” and some of his euphemisms for the female anatomy will raise an eyebrow or two.Bailey and Jade Anouka in “Cock.”Brinkhoff-MoegenburgThis defining trio widens in a climactic dinner party scene to include M’s father, F (a feisty Phil Daniels), who arrives in time for his son’s home-cooked beef and a “goopy” cheesecake that hasn’t gone quite according to plan. Not that we ever see food or, indeed, props of any kind. In keeping with the stripped-back demands of the writing, the action plays out on a curved bare set, designed by Merle Hensel and illuminated from above by the tubular rods of Paule Constable’s lighting.The playbill credits a gender and sexuality consultant to the production, John Mercer, and includes a glossary of “LGBTQ+ terms,” such as “asexual” and “polyamory.” Some of those weren’t much in use when the play was written, but John would probably have rejected them, anyway: Asked repeatedly to decide who, or what, he is, he simply cannot answer, preferring an identity beyond labels.I must confess to wondering midway through whether John was worth all this fuss. If this production is less moving than the Royal Court original, that may owe something to a different emphasis in the casting. In that show, the wraithlike Ben Whishaw fit perfectly with John’s pencil-drawing wiriness as described in the text. A vigorous, muscular Bailey, by contrast, looks more than able to take care of himself, and he brings to the part the same manic energy that distinguished his bravura performance in Elliott’s 2018 West End production of “Company,” for which he won an Olivier.Egerton made headlines early in the show’s run when he fainted during the first preview, but he recovered quickly enough to joke about it on social media. Inheriting a part originated by Andrew Scott, Egerton brings a sad-eyed defensiveness to his role, reminding us that, in British parlance, to make a mess of things is “to cock things up.”Kit Harington in “Henry V,” directed by Max Webster at the Donmar Warehouse.Helen MurrayAnd things get really messy in the play’s final scene. “Off we go into battle,” remarks F as the episode begins. His readiness would be equally at home on the battlefield of “Henry V,” currently lit up by some star wattage of its own through April 9 at the Donmar Warehouse, where the “Game of Thrones” star Kit Harington is in firm command of the challenging title role.Presented in modern dress and with multiple gender flips (as is the Shakespeare norm in London these days), the production charts a neat path between the potential jingoism of a play celebrating England’s military prowess and the dubious aspects of its martial conquests. England’s success comes at sizable cost to France, whose princess, Katherine (Anoushka Lucas), is more or less ordered to be Henry’s bride, without much say in the matter.The play is from the same director, Max Webster, whose show “Life of Pi” received nine Olivier award nominations last week; that adaptation of the Yann Martel novel, still running in London, features inventive puppetry and stagecraft. In “Henry V,” however, the impact comes from the characters, particularly Henry, who abandons his drunken, carousing ways to become a man of war. If Harington finds a compelling ambivalence in the role, that’s because Henry, rather like John in “Cock,” discovers he is a man divided: a sensitive soul whose legacy, he comes to realize, is forever linked to slaughter.Cock. Directed by Marianne Elliott. Ambassadors Theater, through June 4.Henry V. Directed by Max Webster. Donmar Warehouse, through April 9. More