This past week, The Super Mario Bros. Movie crossed the one billion dollar worldwide box-office threshold and has more than doubled the take of the the #2 movie of the year, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. It’s easily the best-performing movie based on video game of all time. And while I enjoyed it, I just saw a 2023 video-game themed movie that I liked even better. With a fantastic lead performance by Taron Egerton (Rocketman) and a breakneck pace that just seems to get faster and faster the more you play…err, watch, Apple’s Tetris is almost as much fun as the game itself.

Unlike that Mario movie, Tetris isn’t set in the fantastical world of the game itself. Instead, it tells the story of the race to get the worldwide licensing rights for the game back in 1988. That doesn’t sound like an exciting setup, but Tetris plays a whole lot better than it sounds. Our hero is Henk Rogers (assigned the role of “Player One” in a set of fun 8-bit animations setting up the story), a lower-level video game developer looking for the next big thing. He discovers Tetris at a trade show and makes a deal to purchase the distribution rights for PC, game consoles, and arcade games in Japan, where he lives with his Japanese wife and family. Literally mortgaging his house and family’s security for this shot, Henk approaches Nintendo with an offer to make the game from them. When a part of that deal falls through, the CEO gives him another chance to obtain the rights to the game for an exciting new handheld Nintendo device about to be unleased on the world–the GameBoy. To make that happen, Henk has to go to the country where the game was created to try to buy the rights. That county is the Soviet Union, which, even with Gorbachev’s glasnost taking effect, was not all into that capitalism thing yet. In his attempts to win the rights to the the game, Henk is treated with suspicion by almost everyone, double-crossed by at least a few folks, menaced by a corrupt KGB agent, and grudgingly befriended by Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris. Henk has to navigate his way through constant surveillance, spies, other bids by a more connected (and more corrupt) British company, and an honest to goodness car chase to try to literally win the game.

Egerton’s performance is a huge part of the movie’s charm. He is incredibly winsome and transparent as Henk. While he certainly cares about the people in his life–whether it be his family or those he just met–he is truly motivated by that chance to make the big deal, thus making him a big deal. Despite his unveiled ambition, you still just can’t help but like him. Russian actor Nikita Yefremov, playing Pajitnov, also does a wonderful job with a much different role. Trapped in a world with no freedom or ownership of even your own ideas, we see Alexey slowly come out of his shell of fear as he realizes that he truly has done something remarkable.

The biggest star here, however, is the story itself. There really isn’t a ounce of fat on this movie at all. For most of its run time, it somehow matches the fun of playing the game at its faster speeds. Everything comes at Henk (and you) as fast as those four-block shapes, and watching how he moves as fast as possible to put everything in its proper place is simply a blast. Add on top of that a fun, Tetris-inspired score (the video game movies have done a great job of that this year), and you have a movie that is somehow as exciting as a video game even if it’s about what should be the most boring part of the life cycle of a video game.

It’s no Super Mario Bros., but it doesn’t need to be. If you want to have some fun watching an April 2023 movie about a video game, you don’t have to go any farther than your own TV. Which is where we played all the best video games back then.

Tetris is streaming on Apple TV+.

(Photo credit: Apple TV+)