Reddit reviews The Tetris Effect: The Game that Hypnotized the World

>Media tycoon Robert Maxwell’s influence on the UK and international games’ software industry is the stuff of legend. As Dan Ackmerman’s writes in The Tetris Effect, Maxwell’s part in the international battle for the rights to Tetris resulted in legal battles between his son, Kevin Maxwell, Nintendo and the Soviet state – the ramifications of which would be massive for this video game publishing company, Mirrorsoft.
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>It was an Intellectual Property war that Maxwell would end up losing, but the battle for Tetris tells only a sliver of the story around Maxwell’s involvement in the history of the video games industry. Based on archival research of Maxwell’s companies, this is the surprising and controversial story of Maxwell’s rise from the sunrise industries of Sinclair computers to the establishment of what was, at the time, the UK’s biggest games company.
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>Born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch in Czechoslovakia in 1923, Maxwell fled from the spectre of Nazi occupation (most of his family would perish within the walls of Auschwitz) and enlisted in the Czechoslovak Army in World War II; he was eventually decorated with the Military Cross following his exemplary service in the British Army. Naturalised as a British subject in 1946, he changed his name via deed poll and began building a publishing empire which began with Pergamon Press but would eventually encompass the British Printing Corporation, Macmillan Publishers and Mirror Group Newspapers, the latter of which is perhaps the organisation he is most associated with today. In 1964, he was elected as Member of Parliament for Buckingham; the culmination of an amazing rags-to-riches story.