Jean’s eerie short is inventive and oddly funny, but it’s also meditative, furthering a “Matrix”-like argument about the ways in which our virtual worlds might come to consume us.

That last idea comes from “ Pixels,” a short film by Patrick Jean, in which characters from nineteen-eighties video games-Tetris, Pac Man, Space Invaders, Pong, Donkey Kong-attack New York City and leave it, and later the entire Earth, in a lifeless, pixelated state. This raises some questions: Will the movie feature the game’s seven famous shapes, known as “tetriminos”? If so, will they be good or evil? Could they be spaceships that arrive near Earth and interlock to form a super ship, bent on our destruction? Or will the large shapes simply start falling from the sky before latching onto buildings and blowing them up, in a kind of choreographed meteor shower?

“And then you go up a level on the food chain to tell a story.” For the nature of that essence, he pointed to what Henk Rogers, the founder of the Tetris Company, once identified as the game’s appeal: that it speaks to people’s desire to create order out of chaos. “When you make a movie out of a video game, you don’t make it of the game itself, but you try to figure out what is the essence of that game,” Kasanoff said. He declined to offer any specifics about the story, but said that it would be a live-action movie.

“The response was not surprising, because how the hell are you going to make a movie out of Tetris?” Kasanoff told me on Thursday.

Tetris fanfic