“I’m convinced there’s a really interesting story in here, but I got really bogged down in who owned which rights to which versions of Tetris. Alexey, who invented Tetris, seems like a great guy who was willing to give up financial reward to see this great thing he made flourish. That’s pretty inspiring. He made this thing that was so good that it HAD to be shared with the world, even if it meant that he wouldn’t get rich off it while other people did.
But, as a book, there’s just a lot of rights and contracts and maneuvering, and I didn’t find those parts of the story to be high interest. It seemed to be more about the business of Tetris than the game or games in general, and a little bit about Nintendo history which has been covered pretty thoroughly in a number of other titles.
I like Box Brown’s work a lot, and I appreciate that he took on this topic. For me, it just didn’t quite hit the sweet spot.”