The Tetris Story book, a new volume covering the full 40-plus-year arc of one of gaming’s most enduring titles, is set for release on 30 August 2026 from Irish video games journalist Anthony McGlynn and Pen & Sword Books’ White Owl imprint, with pre-orders open now at £22.
From a Moscow Computer Lab to the Kill Screen
The story McGlynn is telling begins in the early 1980s, when Alexey Pajitnov and Vladimir Pokhilko created the game in a computer lab in Moscow. The publisher describes the book as tracing every coincidence, piece of luck and happenstance that led from that moment to a history-making event in 2023: Tetris player Willis ‘Blue Scuti’ Gibson reaching the game’s ‘kill screen’, a feat no one had ever achieved before. Gibson was a young teenager playing on a Nintendo Entertainment System when he effectively ‘beat’ a game that had been considered unbeatable for decades.
According to Indigo, The Tetris Story charts the Soviet mind game’s story in totality for the first time, which is a considerable claim given how much ground there is to cover. Tetris has threaded its way through the Cold War, the home computer boom, the rise of Nintendo, the birth of mobile gaming and the emergence of competitive play as a genuine spectator pursuit. Fitting that into a single volume is no small task.
The Nile lists the book at 200 pages, which makes the scope of what McGlynn is attempting all the more interesting. Tight, focused histories of games can work extremely well when the writer knows the material deeply, and McGlynn’s previous coverage of Tetris suggests he does.
Over Two Dozen Interviews and Some Unfamiliar Voices
The book is said to feature over two dozen interviews with developers, organisers, professional players, historians and more. In a LinkedIn post about the announcement, McGlynn noted that several of the people he spoke to have ‘either never gone on the record before, or rarely speak publicly’, which adds a genuine archival dimension to what might otherwise have been a well-trodden subject.
The connections McGlynn promises to draw are bracingly eclectic. His own teaser mentions the game connecting The Crow and Jackie Chan with Call of Duty, along with the Scottish cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. The book also includes, according to its publisher, ‘anecdotes on the founding of Xbox, Roger Dean creating the game’s logo, and how Tetris helped bridge language barriers.’ That is quite a thread to pull.
It is worth acknowledging that this is not the first serious attempt to document the Tetris phenomenon. Over the last decade alone, readers have had Dan Ackerman’s The Tetris Effect: The Cold War Battle for the World’s Most Addictive Game, Henk Rogers’ memoir The Perfect Game: Tetris: From Russia With Love, and Box Brown’s graphic history Tetris: The Games People Play. The territory has been visited before, sometimes well.
What McGlynn’s version offers that those earlier books could not is the 2023 kill-screen moment itself, an event that reframed what players and historians thought they understood about the game’s limits. Gibson’s achievement landed like a thunderbolt in the Tetris community, and a history of the game that runs all the way up to that moment has a different shape from any book written before it happened. The promise of previously unheard voices makes the prospect of those 200 pages feel considerably more substantial.
The Tetris Story is available to pre-order now from The Times Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon and other online retailers, priced at £22, ahead of its 30 August 2026 publication date.
