Tetris: The Games People Play by Box Brown

One of the problems with reading fewer books is that you tend to concentrate on what you already know. And if, like me, you try to write something about those books as well, you could end up repeating yourself over and over, spamming links to your back catalog, and just generally digging yourself deep into the ground of your own obsessions.

In other news: I worry about the wrong things all the time, wasting brain-power on ridiculous thoughts and silly concerns.

This book, though, doesn't fall into my usual traps. I've read some Box Brown -- his book Andre the Giant, some other things here and there -- and I keep thinking I should read more of his stuff, but he's not one of my "favorites."

So I've just spent three paragraphs telling you about things that aren't relevant to this book and have nothing to do with it. Perhaps I'm out of practice with this blogging thing? (Or, maybe, I'm just bad at it.)

Brown has been making mostly non-fiction comics for about a decade now -- Tetris was his book after Andre the Giant, from 2016, but he's done three more books since then -- and they all seem to be about things loosely related to the media (child Hollywood stars, Andy Kaufmann, the history of the criminalization of marijuana). Other than that, there's no clear through-line: my guess is that he makes books about subjects that interest both him and his publishers (First Second, mostly)...which is not unlike a lot of other non-fiction writers outside of comics.

I don't think his name has any connection to the 19th century escaped slave and abolitionist speaker Henry Box Brown, but it can make him difficult to Google. His real first name is Brian, which seems to be creeping onto the covers of his most recent work.

Tetris is the story of the game, starting with Alexey Pajitnov and Vladimir Pokhilko at the Moscow Academy of Science in 1984 and rolling out through the years afterward, with a lot of game-company skulduggery and maneuvering over the rights, particularly in those early days. Brown tells it straight, starting with the creators just before they thought of the idea, and moving forward in time, introducing all of his other characters as they come into the narrative.

Brown's art is bright and crisp: mostly line art with an orange wash over the top of it. He has a lot of dialogue in this book, which is probably quoted from previous accounts (which were themselves probably paraphrased, since nobody was taping these conversations and half of them were in Russian). It's popular nonfiction about a popular thing, and Brown makes the twists and turns of the Atari-vs.-Nintendo plot interesting and differentiates all of his computer executives, Russian bureaucrats, and game programmers over the course of about 250 pages.

It made me want to play Tetris after reading it. I did play Tetris after reading it. I have to count that as success for a book.