Tetris: The Games People Play

By Box Brown

Box Brown has made a career uncovering the stories behind pop culture objects of a very specific milieu, namely early 80s Americana. He’s authored biographies about two infamous celebrities: pro wrestler André the Giant, and comedian Andy Kaufman. With last year’s Tetris: The Games People Play, Brown instead tackled a video gaming classic. The resulting graphic novel reveals that his approach to biography works just as well for talking about nonhuman subjects. After all, Tetris didn’t just emerge from the void like one of its signature puzzle pieces. Someone had to invent it, and others had to fall for its charms. Some people might be aware that the game was the brainchild of computer scientist Alexey Pajitnov, when he was still working at the Academy of Science in Moscow. Even fewer will know what measures were taken to export the game to the Western world during the final stages of the Cold War. Brown’s examination of the complex business machinations behind Tetris’ international success is very accessible because he keeps the attention centered on the personalities involved, and not on the technologies that made it possible.

Before getting into the story of Tetris, Brown lays out his thesis for the comic. His short examination of the history (and prehistory) of games leads him to conclude that they are an artistic enterprise, the creative fusion of the competitive spirit and the child’s act of playing. Games nurture analytical skills and model human behavior by connecting with the audience’s desire for diversion, whether it be the ancient board game of Senet, the 19th century Japanese card game Hanafuda, or the video game consoles manufactured by Nintendo and Atari during the early 1980s. Every games’ popularity is a reflection of their respective society. With Tetris, Alexey’s own contribution to history was to combine the pleasures of classic puzzle games with real-time problem solving made possible by video games into an endlessly iterating loop.

Alexey himself isn’t one of Brown’s more enigmatic protagonists. He’s portrayed as a Steve Wozniak type of figure who created Tetris in 1984, during his free time in order to give expression to his ideas and entertain his friends. He showed no interest in profiting from his creation. The game would soon become a viral hit in Moscow, shared through floppy discs. A version of Tetris would make its way to Hungary, where it would be discovered by Robert Stein of U.K.-based Andromeda Software.

From here, the story becomes a lot more complicated as Alexey gradually loses control of his own creation. Various American and Japanese companies would vie for the distribution rights to Tetris, and at some point had to negotiate directly with the Russian government agency named Elorg. Like many tales from the nascent personal computing and video gaming industry, many of the parties involved were stumbling over a mess of patent, copyright, and trademark issues. Tetris would be ported to virtually every popular computing platform even when the legality of its distribution was still far from settled. This confusing state of affairs would eventually culminate in a huge 1993 legal battle between Nintendo and Atari.

If Brown were appealing just to the gaming crowd, he’d get lost comparing the varieties of Tetris being produced during this time, and judging each on their technical merits. That would make for an unwieldy comic. Thankfully, he’s more interested in the various business personalities fighting for a piece of the game. His chapter breaks are structured around their involvement, each character being helpfully introduced with a formal portrait and accompanying caption, isolated on the page by inky black. His blocky cartoon style is even more minimalist than in Andre the Giant, all the better to facilitate his understated, third person narrative voice. The only thing keeping the art from becoming completely flat is Brown’s choice of vibrant yellow to add volume to his black and white forms. But Brown is first and foremost, a storyteller. The comic still proves to a page turner despite the large cast of characters and numerous plot twists.

With everything said, Brown’s sympathies lie ultimately with the humble Alexey. He sees him as a master of his craft. Alexey wanted more than anything for the world to know his beloved game. As he explained during a 2015 appearance: “If I made a big fuss about the money, they would immediately have crushed my efforts. They would have crushed Tetris. Tetris would have been left without a champion to stick up for it and guide it. We would not be here today.”

Cartoon: The Great Sasuke

Go to: The Nib, by Box Brown

Webcomic: Untitled

Go to: Box Brown (via Heidi MacDonald) 

André The Giant: Life and Legend

By Box Brown

I’ve never been more than a casual viewer of pro wrestling, but even as a kid I was aware of André René Roussimoff, more famously known by his wrestling handle André the Giant. Officially billed at a height of 7 ft. 4 in. and weighing in at 520 pounds, he was the image of what a wrestler should look like - a true giant of a man. Roussimoff’s manufactured rivalry as the heel to babyface wrestler Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea would culminate in their 1987 match at Wrestlemania III. The event would bring an unprecedented level of mainstream media attention to the World Wrestling Federation (now called World Wrestling Entertainment), the last pro wrestling promotion left in the United States after having absorbed all its rivals. Roussimoff’s iconic status was further enhanced by a few memorable film and television appearances, his early death at the age of 46 due to heart failure, and a viral street art campaign created by Shepard Fairey. If there’s any professional entertainer who’s identity has been completely subsumed by his own legend, it’s André the Giant.

As Box Brown tells it in André The Giant: Life and Legend, there’s a certain inevitable quality to Roussimoff’s involvement with pro wrestling. Born and raised in southern France, Rousimoff was neither brilliant, athletic, handsome or charismatic. But he was unusually large for his age. So large that the local school bus refused to take him as a passenger. The young Rousimoff had to be driven to class by riding on the back of the truck of his neighbour, Nobel Prize-winning playwright Samuel Beckett. After leaving school, he employed his tremendous strength while drifting between various odd jobs. So the choice to become a wrestler seems to have been arrived at by default. Where else could Rousimoff exploit his size to achieve a modicum of wealth and fame?

But once he fell into pro wrestling, Roussimoff became fully committed to its itinerant lifestyle. Much of the graphic novel portrays life outside the ring being spent hanging out at restaurants, airport and hotel lobbies, or squeezing into the cramped seats of airplanes and buses. This would be a lonely and difficult existence for anyone, let alone someone suffering from acromegaly. Brown’s art is particularly effective here because his representation of Roussimoff is both archetypical and humanizing. He’s drawn a bit larger than he was in reality, but this only heightens the character’s discomfort. He looks awkward in every panel trying to navigate a world not built to accommodate his size. His impressive bulk belying the physical fragility that would eventually contribute to his death.

Unsurprisingly, Rousimoff would inspire numerous anecdotes during his lifetime conveying contradictory impressions about him. Some would exaggerate his freakish power while others would portray him as a gentle spirit. Brown’s remarkable achievement is that he manages to pull together these disparate sources into a cohesive biography. Brown’s aesthetic is similar to that of Seth or James Kochalka. Minimally designed figures outlined with thick strokes and soft contours. This imbues not just Roussimoff, but all the other heavyset wrestlers with an oddly endearing appearance. I’ll assume that most of these stories are already familiar to hardcore fans, but Brown organizes them in such a way that doesn’t require much prior knowledge from the reader.

There’s indeed a great deal of fondness for the subject-matter that comes across the entire book. Brown patiently guides the uninitiated through the world of wrestling kayfabe. Roussimoof’s career spanned an era when the WWF and other promotions still insisted that its matches, and even its wrestlers' ludicrous personas were 100% genuine. Of course any savvy viewer, or anyone who’d been in a real scrap, could tell that the televised fights were staged (or a work, to use pro wrestling parlance), but the promotions had tasked their wrestlers to maintain the act whenever in public. As far as Brown can tell after examining his taped appearances, Roussimoff never broke character, even if it meant flipping someone’s car over when responding to a skeptical fan’s challenge (though Brown admits he’s unsure about the veracity of the story). As Hogan stated in an interview “He loved this business and he protected it.” Some of Brown’s best set pieces are his blow-by-blow analysis of Roussimoff’s more famous matches. They illuminate how wrestlers will sometimes put themselves into real danger in order to sustain the illusion of a true brawl.

Though Brown’s research is extensive, his book is far from the last word on André the Giant. Brown was mostly limited to examining 2nd and 3rd-hand sources, and the resulting biography’s emotional distance reflects his dependence on those sources. While Brown’s willing to streamline some events in order to smooth over conflicting testimonies and better fit the dramatic needs of the narrative, he isn’t able to penetrate far past Roussimoff’s tough exterior. Whatever private struggles he must have had with acromegaly and the rigorous demands of his profession are left off the page. And the reader is only vaguely informed about his soured domestic life. Ultimately, Bown’s André Roussimoff remains an enigmatic presence.

Brown adopts the same circumspect attitude towards the wrestling industry as a whole. When the WWF’s Vince McMahon admitted in 1989 that wrestling matches were artifice, he did so in order to keep state athletic commissions from imposing stricter standards (like conducting proper medical exams or hiring ringside doctors) or from more properly supervising the promotion’s events. The tactic worked to some degree. While some in the wrestling community bemoaned the death of kayfabe, the uncovering of one form of artifice simply allowed the promotion to continue kayfabe on a more subtle plane. What remains largely hidden from the public are the exploitive practices that take a huge toll on the wrestlers they market. Roussimoff cycles from the squared circle to heavy drinking sessions at hotel bars to the surgery table. But Brown's unvarnished account never calls into question the promotion’s ethical responsibility towards its employees. While he mentions that Roussimoff was the highest paid wrestler of the era, he leaves out how the WWF would build a massive "sports entertainment" empire based on his infamous reputation, even long after his death.

Brown does include one scene were a younger Roussimoff meets with Vince McMahon Sr. in New York, who outlines how he’ll turn the burgeoning talent into a legend. “You’re an unstoppable force!! No running dropkicks or leg scissors. You don’t move for nobody.” he commands. McMahon then decides to take Roussimoff on the road. “We keep moving him from town to town so he never gets overexposed… And we let the legend grow. By the time you get back to town you’re ten feet tall!!” However this might have impacted Roussimoff personally whether for better or worse, it certainly proved to be a most profitable strategy for the company.