:ussr-cry: Seeing that big portrait of Lenin :back-to-me:
Seeing all the other ways the USSR is gonna be protrayed :back-to-me-shining:
you could probably make a good comedy about this. The guy just wanted to share his game with the world, but he kept getting mired in various legal nonsense. He visited several continents and countries, talking to interested publishers – and because he didn’t really understand international “intellectual” property law, all these companies invented various “rights” for themselves, carving out little monopolies. Only Nintendo can publish Tetris on a Video-Game Console, only EA can publish it on a computer – that kind of thing. It’s sad and absurd.
But I bet that's not what this film will be.
edit: oh my god, it’s about the lawyer schmoozing him! what a waste.
edit edit: in the vain of a generic “international thriller” christ that’s sad
There’s so many irl stories I wish I could make the movies for and this has been one forever. Oppenheimer is another and that dude that was a spy who was put in charge of finding himself. I wanna do Coen brothers esque comedies about this stuff
Ive said this so many times also, we need a JFK assassination comedy already.
There really hasn’t been? That seems like such an obvious choice now that you bring it up.
Between this and that movie about the Jordan shoe line saving Nike, I’m starting to realize that capitalism has seeped so deeply into the American psyche that all of our historical content will be tied to whatever consumer products were commanding the zeitgeist at that particular time.
Soon we’ll get a movie about the Clinton scandal told through the lens of Gushers fruit snacks.
Pretty sure none of this happened.
The real story is pretty simple: Pajitnov worked for the Soviet software company Elektronorgtechnica. Contrary to popular belief the Soviet Union did have copyright, although it was not customary to pay royalties to programmers - but because of the widespread belief that the Soviets didn’t hold copyright on their artistic work Tetris was shamelessly cloned by every two bit western game dev ever (I think Nintendo was the only official licensee?). In 1991 he fled the collapsing Soviet Union for America (understandable tbh) and started fighting for his copyrights in western courts. Founded the Tetris company, made some more games, retired.
edit: okay the more I think about it the more I hate this trailer even if it’s tounge in cheek they threw away a perfectly good story about an underdog inventing something cool and fighting a horde of corporate lawyers for some kind of action spy plot? wtf?
A yes the scary, heavily closed off USSR of…the late 80s? For real we love treating fucking Perestroika-era USSR like it was still under Stalin.
This is a big part of Moshe Lewin’s thesis in The Soviet Century. Lewin is strongly anti-Stalin, but he also pushed back against the narrative that the USSR was completely unchanging through the decades - that even if you assume the worst about life under Stalinism, that didn’t hold after 1953. For example, he looks at the period after Stalin at the number of violations of people who got in trouble for political crimes. I don’t have the number handy but it’s shockingly low (even to someone like me who’s very pro-USSR). Even moreso, most of the violations didn’t automatically mean prison sentences, usually it was just talking to the person and telling them to knock it off.
