He studied primitive man and the types of games they created and played, theorizing in his comic that gaming, a combination of humans’ sense of competition and playing, was born in the artist’s mind. “I wanted to go back and see where gaming comes from within the human condition and how it relates to art,” Brown says. Unsure where to begin his own story, Brown decided take it back in time – 17,000 years.

Brown, who usually focuses only on one character in his comics, such as his book Andre the Giant: Life and Legend, made a pseudo “family tree” for Tetris’ cast of characters, tying together how they were all connected through the story of the game. However, the story of Tetris and all the players involved was a tall order to organize. “It was crazy, the story’s insane.”īrown finally got the idea of adapting the story behind Tetris into a comic after he was approached by his editor after a conversation about the game with fellow-artist Faith Erin Hicks, who illustrated The Last Of Us comic series. But it wasn’t until seeing a documentary about the game that he began to understand just how tumultuous its life had been. He explains he’d always heard rumors about Tetris, how certain publishers didn’t have the rights to the game so their copies were illegal. “Everybody knew it and played it and put in their 10,000 hours Tetris,” Brown says. Everybody in the house. And I think a lot of people have stories like that.” He explains his wife’s mom used to lock herself in the bathroom with Tetris so no one else in the family could play. “My Mom and Dad, and my sister, and my Grandma.

“When Tetris came out for Game Boy, everybody that picked it up just started playing it constantly,” says Brown. The story behind the game is currently being adapted into a comic book, appropriately named Tetris, by Philadelphia-based author Box Brown, founder of Retrofit Comics and the winner of a 2011 Ignatz Award. Marketed as “It’s like Siberia, only harder,” the game capitalized on the world’s curiosity of peeking behind the Iron Curtain and made entire households into gamers. Created by Alexey Pajitnov, a Russian computer engineer in the 1980s during his spare time out of his love for puzzles and games, Tetris became a worldwide phenomenon. It’s a tale wrought with peaks and valleys of legal drama, high hopes for riches, and even a murder-suicide.

Tetris is one of the most successful video games of all time, but the story of its creation is not necessarily an uplifting one.

Chris ware building stories puzzle