Have you ever played Tetris, the video game where you have to stack blocks of different shapes that come falling from the top of the screen? The game appeared first in the early 1980s and has been around ever since, but the first national competition of Tetris players to find a champion didn’t take place until 2010 in Los Angeles. That’s the subject of The Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters, the film we saw Sunday afternoon at the Orpheum.

The film followed gaming geek Robin Mihara as he tracked down the most amazing Tetris players he could find through a gaming web site and convincing them to play in the championship. The player he was really after, though, was Thor Aackerlund, who was crowned the Tetris champion by the Nintendo Corporation in a one-time competition during the 1990s to promote the company’s products. The gaming community raised Aackerlund’s gaming ability to legendary status even though he hadn’t been seen or heard from in decades.

Most of the fun in the movie comes from finding all the gamers, learning about them and watching them as they meet each other, most for the first time. The meet and greet only gets better when Aackerlund shows up. Oddly, what ought to be the film’s big finish, the competition, feels anticlimactic. It doesn’t add much to the film and feels tacked on. But I gave the movie four out of five because I liked the lead-in to the competition.