Review:
As the title says, this graphic novel is about Tetris, but it's also about Nintendo and (to a lesser extent) Atari/Tengen.
This graphic novel's art style wasn't to my taste at all, but I picked this up more for its subject matter than how it looked. I've read a few video game history books and therefore knew a little Tetris history before going in. It was also one of the games I played a lot on my family's NES growing up. This book included a good deal more information than I'd previously known.
While this was an interesting read, I really wish the flow hadn't been so choppy. It started off with a brief mention of some sort of ancient Egyptian game, and then there was so much about Nintendo that this, at times, felt at least as much like a history of Nintendo as a history of Tetris.
It didn't help that the legal and political history of Tetris was a genuinely tangled nightmare. I had trouble keeping track of all the people and companies involved, and what everyone's motivations were and what they'd been promised.
Nothing about the general tone of the graphic novel prepared me for the moment when it was revealed that Vladimir Pokhilko, a friend of Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov who was involved in the development and marketing of the game, committed murder-suicide, killing his wife and their son. We literally went from a page with grinning men (Henk Rogers and Alexey) to body bags.
Anyway, this was occasionally unfocused and confusing, but still a decent read overall.
No comments:
Post a Comment