Ackerman said he sent his book “The Tetris Effect” in 2016 to the Tetris Company, which allegedly copied it for the movie and threatened to sue him if he pursued his own film or television spinoffs.
The “Tetris” film premiered on the Apple TV platform in March. Ackerman asked the court for money damages equaling at least 6% of the film’s $80 million production budget.
Ackerman’s “The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World” was published in 2016. The book describes the Soviet history of the popular puzzle game and the fight for its global licensing rights as a “Cold War thriller with a political intrigue angle,” according to Ackerman’s lawsuit.
The lawsuit said that Ackerman sent a pre-publication copy of the book to the Tetris Company earlier that year. He said the company refused to license its intellectual property for projects related to his book, dissuading producers who were interested in adapting it, and sent him a “strongly worded cease and desist letter.”