Oh my god, I had no idea this story was so nuts!

We’ve all played Tetris and enjoyed its blocky goodness (until the pieces start coming down too quickly and that damn long piece won’t appear and it’s game over, man, GAME OVER!!!). Box Brown’s Tetris: The Games People Play tells its origin story and unfortunately it’s not nearly as fun.For a book ostensibly about Tetris, it takes it’s sweet time getting around to talking about it! It’s 70 pages before we meet Alexey Pajitnov, the Russian creator of Tetris. Up ‘til then there’s a truncated histo...

The story over the rights to Tetris is a fantastic example of how video games can open wide cultural doors; and how quickly those doors can then shut. I was shocked at the amount of politicl involvement there was behind this game! A fantastic look behind the scenes - Box Brown has outdone himself!

The story of Tetris, its creators, and its complex journey into the West is told in a beautiful graphic novel from Box Brown. We get to meet all the people involved in the creation and distribution of the legendary game that changed the world and launched the GameBoy, and we get a little history of gaming while we're at it.The art and color is beautiful. It's similar to Daryn Cooke's Parker books: one color shading the whole book, to great effect.You think you know the history of Tetris, but I p...

Box Brown's book is an entertaining enough look at Tetris and the parade of legal battles and government red tape the game went through because it was developed in Russia. The creators were two engineers in the 80's who just wanted to make a fun game just to see if they could do it and had no designs on making money off it. I mean, this was Russia, pre-Glasnost. You could be thrown in jail for even voicing that thought. So when the Russia government gets involved in the licensing, things definit...

Hard to make corporate licensing battles interesting, but they try.

Full disclosure: I am not a (video) gamer and read this because it was at my library in the new graphic novels section and because it had Box Brown's name on it. I like his sweet attractive artwork and I liked his Andre the Giant quite a bit. The history of psychology of games and gaming undergird this work, as the subtitle makes clear. And then you learn how Tetris emerged out of this, and lots of controversies about it, which I don't care about in the least, but it seems thorough and will appe...

I learned a lot about Tetris; for example I had no idea it came out of Russia during the Cold War and that there were so many lawsuits surrounding it. This graphic novel was interesting, but the artwork was not to my taste. Popsugar 2019-A Book Revolving Around a Puzzle or a Game

Box Brown came onto my radar when he released his graphic novel treatment about the life of Andre The Giant.  While I’ve yet to read it, the critical acclaim he received for his work at the time made me want to seek out his other writings.  Unfortunately, Box Brown, along with several other things, seemed to have moved to that corner of my mind covered in cobwebs - until this weekend when I spotted his follow-up to the Andre book, Tetris: The Games People Play.I really enjoyed this, which isn’t

Tetris is one of the great classic video games. Here, Brown recounts the long and sordid tale of who has had the right to produce this foundational game. Brown is widely known for his book “Andre the Giant: Life and Legend,” a sequential art biography of the titular wrestling star. Stylistically, Tetris is very similar to that other work in some ways. However, the Tetris story, as Brown tells it, involves many different men (only men) from several different countries. Each section of the story i...

This book gives you the history of Tetris in an unusual format, which is a pretty cool idea on its own, but some things didn't work for me that well.The bulk of the story is a bunch of people fighting over the rights to Tetris. There's a lot of characters, meetings, flying to Moscow and back. I agree that these things are important, but I don't know how to make that stuff more interesting. Some parts of the book read more like a list of facts than an actual narrative.The book did have more inter...

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

Missed opportunities. The actual story of Tetris, how it was made, the rights struggle, and all that happened after is interesting and complicated enough on their own. There was no real need to bring in an overview of Nintendo's playing card days, or an examination of cave paintings. And it was missing the detail that was needed to make sense of a fairly complex rights issue. But it's a really good story, and when Brown does concentrate on what's important, it's a good read. The art is relativel...

I had no idea Tetris had such a fascinating and controversy-ridden history! While trying to keep track of all the names throughout the story can get confusing, the essence still comes through. I appreciate how Brown ties gaming in with art and anthropology, even if it's just the tip of the iceberg.

I’M NOT CRYING BECAUSE OF A COMIC BOOK ABOUT TETRIS, YOU’RE CRYING BECAUSE OF A COMIC BOOK ABOUT TETRIS!

Brown tells the fascinating - and litigous - tale of one of the most famous games in history. He begins the book looking at the concept of games/gaming over the millenia, tracing the earliest games and how they were created and played. While this section of the book was very entertaining, I wish it had been a separate book entirely - it was inserted into the story after the Tetris characters were already introduced and seemed out of place and extraneous. MEMORIES! amirite?Like most people in my

Box does it again—an enthralling nonfiction work about another 1980s pop culture icon... TETRIS!Making a book brought back a lot of nostalgia for all of us here at :01 and Box it is always a pleasure working with Box!

Found on Neil Pasricha's newsletter. A beautiful graphic novel (is it a "novel" if it is a true story?) about the development of Tetris, its complicated escape from the USSR, and the ensuing confusion about who owned the rights. There's also a fair bit of Nintendo history, since they ultimately ended up with the rights for handheld, which raised Tetris to stratospheric popularity levels. I loved this story but agree with other reviewers that it's heavy on the rights ownership aspect; a bit litig...

3.5 Stars Interesting graphic novel about the history of Tetris, which I knew nothing about. I started to lose track of who was who with all of the lawsuits, but it was a fun read.

I spent a lot - maybe too much - of my childhood hunched in front of the TV, madly spinning Tetris blocks on my Nintendo. I was obsessed, my brothers were obsessed, and my mom was (the most) obsessed. Box Brown's latest pop culture history comic, "Tetris: The Games People Play," proves that we weren't the only ones. What we didn't know was that this simple and addictive video game had a wild and controversial evolution.Conceived by a Russian scientist and mathematician as a time-wasting puzzle g...