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Apple's First 'Tetris' Movie Trailer Is Packed With '80s Intensity

"I still see falling blocks in my dreams," says Taron Egerton's Henk Rogers, who turned the game into a worldwide phenomenon.

Meara Isenberg Writer
Meara covers streaming service news for CNET. She recently graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, where she wrote for her college newspaper, The Daily Texan, as well as for state and local magazines. When she's not writing, she likes to dote over her cat, sip black coffee and try out new horror movies.
Meara Isenberg
Taron Tetris

Taron Egerton's Henk Rogers goes on a Soviet odyssey in his quest for Tetris.

Screenshot by Meara Isenberg/CNET

Video game movies and shows seem to be all the rage these days. Soon joining the pile of options will be Tetris, an Apple TV Plus thriller about the origins of the ultrapopular game. The film got its first trailer Thursday. 

Tetris lands on the streaming service March 31. 

The movie is "inspired by the true story of how one man risked his life to outsmart the KGB and turn Tetris into a worldwide sensation," according to the trailer's description. That man, Henk Rogers, is played by Taron Egerton of Rocketman and the first two Kingsman movies.

Thursday's trailer opens with Egerton's Rogers raving about "the perfect game." 

"I played for five minutes, I still see falling blocks in my dreams," a mustachioed Egerton says. "It's poetry. Art and math all working in magical synchronicity."

The iconic game was created by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984, and he worked with Rogers to get it out to the wider world later in the decade. My CNET colleague Dan Ackerman dives deeper into how the game became a global sensation in his book The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World

The movie trailer, meanwhile, has an appropriately '80s soundtrack, with Europe's 1986 hit The Final Countdown setting the mood. 

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