When Henk Rogers read the script for the Tetris movie — about his journey into the Soviet Union to get the rights to Alexey Pajitnov’s addictive game — he didn’t recognize some of the scenes. While some of those scenes in the 2023 movie brought tears to his eyes, Rogers decided that he wanted to set the record straight on the inside story of how Tetris came to sell hundreds of millions of copies.
He also survived a heart attack — the kind that kill most people who have it. He knew that he didn’t have all the time in the world to tell his story, which includes his post-gaming life and efforts to address climate change before it’s too late for us. And so he wrote The Perfect Game: Tetris, From Russia With Love, the story of his life and how Tetris came to be so beloved around the world that it’s still being played decades after he discovered it. The game is more than 40 years old, and it is still going strong.
Featuring a foreword by Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, the book chronicles Rogers’ groundbreaking contributions to the gaming industry, his relentless pursuit of innovation, and his deep commitment to sustainable energy.
A native of the Netherlands, Rogers moved to New York City in 1964, where he attended Stuyvesant High School and programmed his first computer. After majoring in computer science and “minoring in Dungeons and Dragons” at the University of Hawaii, he moved to Japan in 1976 and became a trailblazer in the country’s gaming industry.
He founded Bullet-Proof Software and developed The Black Onyx, Japan’s first role-playing game, which became the No. 1 game in Japan in 1984. His discovery of Tetris at the 1988 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas set the stage for one of gaming’s most dramatic business deals. Traveling to Moscow, he navigated tense negotiations with the Soviet Union, outmaneuvered corporate giants, and ultimately secured the handheld rights for Nintendo’s Game Boy, a move that forever reshaped the gaming industry.
I’ve known Rogers for a long time and he is always thoughtful and a bit of a showman. Rogers approached the business as a game designer himself, managing Tetris so that its fruits could be shared in a fair way. He set up the Tetris Company and shared the profits with Alexey Pajitnov, who created the game in the 1980s behind the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union. They’re still friends today, and Rogers turned over the family business to Maya Rogers, his daughter, who serves as CEO.
Rogers founded Blue Planet Foundation to drive Hawaii’s transition to 100% renewable energy, and in 2021, he launched Blue Planet Alliance, which helps communities worldwide break free from fossil fuels.
Our interview went to a lot of unexpected places. He talked about what is a game, what games used to be, what games have become, and where they could go next.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: So many things have been said and told about Tetris over the years. I wonder if there’s more left to tell. What led you to want to tell this yourself?
Henk Rogers: There’s so much. I put a lot of sweat into Tetris. When I took over Tetris in 1996, all the Tetrises before that were done out of control. The Sega Tetris, the Nintendo Tetris, they were completely different. The Nintendo Tetris, you control the block as it’s falling. Once it lands it locks down. The Sega Tetris, you can hard drop it, and once it lands you can manipulate it and move it around. When you watch the games, it’s like two different games. The person playing this game would have a hard time playing that game, and vice versa.
I said, “That can’t be. I have to standardize this.” I put a lot of thought into how I could make one rotation system to fit both players. I actually hired somebody to do this, to figure it out. It just wasn’t satisfying. It was kludgey. Then I decided to do it myself. I took almost a week to figure it out. At the end, the way it works now is that when the pieces fall, they look like they rotate. That’s the Nintendo rotation. Once they land and the player tries to move them, it does the Sega rotation. It does both. Both players can play that way.
GamesBeat: Going back even earlier, there’s so much to the Tetris story, when you first went to meet Alexey and so on. Were there things you never told other people, whether in interviews or anywhere else? Is it that you finally had the time to look back?
Rogers: I understand what you’re trying to say here. The problem is I don’t remember. I’ve done so many interviews. Alexey taught me how to drink Russian-style. I went to his house a number of times. We’d have what they call cognac, but it’s actually Armenian or Moldavian brandy, ararat. They come in tall, skinny bottles. We would finish the bottle, and then we would switch to vodka and finish that. I remember one time he wanted to go for straight alcohol, the stuff he used to clean his keyboard. I said, “No, I’m not doing this.” I was really drunk, but I wasn’t stupid enough to do that. He said, “No, it’s not the kind that’s going to kill you. It’s just very good vodka.” Ninety-five percent alcohol vodka. Are you serious? No. I was already completely zatzed.
I learned how to drink with Alexey. I’m still struggling to get away from it. We’ve toned down. Whenever I’m with Alexey, every other day, a bottle of wine. It’s rare that we do what he calls “a bit, a little.”
GamesBeat: We’re so far into successive generations of gamers now that there are probably a lot of people who don’t know the Tetris story, even after the movie. It’s a chance to retell some history for people who don’t know the game.
Rogers: It’s part of the game industry now. Very few games like that are still around. Pac-Man, I don’t know if it’s still around. I don’t know if you can buy Pac-Man on the iPhone or not. The character is iconic, but the game is not something everyone remembers.
GamesBeat: Why did you call it The Perfect Game? What was the argument for that?
Rogers: There are several arguments. I’m not saying Tetris is the perfect game, but the book is The Perfect Game. It’s my search for the perfect game. Another way of looking at it, I created the first RPG in Japan. That could be the perfect game. I’m not saying Tetris is the perfect game. It’s implied. The perfect game is a game that you create that’s still being played after you’ve lost interest. I’m not saying I’ve lost interest, but I’m just saying there are very few games like that.
GamesBeat: I suppose that’s the proof. If it’s still around after decades, there’s something about it that catches on with any generation.
Rogers: The secret sauce is that culture changes, but mathematics doesn’t change. We’re talking about geometry here. It hasn’t changed since Euclid, a couple thousand years ago. It’s still around. A triangle is still a triangle. A square is still a square. Nothing is going to change there. Betty Boop may make a comeback, but she’s not exactly today’s character. She had an appeal in the ‘30s or whenever it was. If someone created a new Betty Boop today she would be different.
GamesBeat: Did you have a particular reaction now after the Tetris movie? How well did that capture the story?
Rogers: There’s a bunch of things about the movie. When I read the script I thought, “My God, this is going to be such a bad movie.” That’s what I thought. It’s because I don’t know how to read a script and imagine what the movie is like from there. I didn’t imagine it. Alexey and I worked hard to try to fix it. “No, that’s not what happened! This is what happened!” All those things. That’s when I started writing the book, to set the record straight.
By the time I was done writing, the movie was already shot, so it was too late. And when I finally saw the movie I was expecting the worst. My God. I cried several times in that movie about things that never happened! They captured something, the feeling of something that never happened, but it would have happened. The whole thing about Maya and me missing her performance. That probably happened in a different way.
GamesBeat: Did you feel a sense of dread going into the Soviet Union the first time?
Rogers: Oh, yeah. Like going to North Korea. This could go badly. If I get caught, what am I going to say? I’m trying to do business on a tourist visa. I didn’t exactly look like a tourist, wearing a suit and carrying an attache case. The thing that made me a bit like a tourist was I had a video camera. I could pretend. I did a bit of sightseeing. That was my cover if I needed one.
GamesBeat: Did you try to sneak into Nintendo as well?
Rogers: Well, I didn’t have to. I walked through the front door. That story is in the book. My wife found out that Hiroshi Yamauchi played Go, reading a magazine article. I sent them a fax on a Tuesday. “My name is Henk Rogers. I’d like to make a Go game for the Famicom. I’d like to meet you. I’m leaving for the states on Saturday.” I didn’t say I lived in Japan. I left out that detail. But I said, “I’d like to meet you before I go.” Wednesday I got a fax back. “Mr. Yamauchi will meet you tomorrow.” Whoa.
There I was in a meeting with Yamauchi, my first meeting conducted all in Japanese. I didn’t want anything to be lost in translation. I found out that my interpreter wasn’t really interpreting. Whatever. The conversation was very short. He said, “I can’t give you any programmers.” I said, “I don’t need programmers. I just need money.” So he said, “How much money?” I wasn’t prepared for that at all. I just pulled a number out of my head, $300,000. He reached across the table and said, “Deal.” What? That’s it? Holy shit. Now I had to go find the guy who actually made the Go game over in England and make a deal with him. I hadn’t talked to him yet. I didn’t actually have a game.
GamesBeat: Were you aware of all the competition for Tetris as it was happening? Robert Maxwell and–
Rogers: I didn’t understand there was real–Spectrum Holobyte had the game. Mirrorsoft had the game. None of these guys were smart enough to think this was going to be a big game. It was one of 40 games that Spectrum Holobyte was releasing that year. They were trying to play up the Russian angle. They didn’t think Tetris was a great game. It just got lost among all their other games.
I was already in the Nintendo business in Japan. I made the connection that this was going to be a great console game. When the Game Boy came along then I realized this was going to be the perfect game for the Game Boy. By that time everyone knew, at least at Nintendo in Japan. Internally everyone was playing it. That’s when I went to Arakawa and said, “You should pack in Tetris.”
GamesBeat: There’s an interesting angle to this today. In your story, the business guy is actually the good guy. Usually in game industry stories the business guy is the villain and the developers are the good guys. There’s some kind of conflict between those two sides. It feels like you managed to find some space where the situation for the developer got better over time. You found a happy medium between business and creation.
Rogers: I have great respect for developers. I understand. I’m one of them. I feel they need to be treated fairly. For example, Alexey. He created the game. He needs to be treated fairly and respected for the creation of the game. There are other games where they’ve been taken away from their creators. I don’t know who created Bejeweled, but someone did, and then it became Candy Crush and everything else. It’s been copied and whoever created it is never credited. It’s a sad thing. I feel proud that I was able to make sure he got the credit.
The other thing is, when I first showed up, I looked like a businessman. Alexey, when he saw me, when the whole group saw me, I seemed like some kind of shyster trying to make a fast buck. They spent the first couple of hours just interrogating me. During that interrogation Alexey figured out I was actually a game designer. That changed his attitude completely. I was the first game designer he’d ever met. In the Soviet Union there were no game designers. Then of course it went from suspicion to trust. We could talk about game design.
GamesBeat: It’s been an interesting evolution to a point where developers have some more control today. The platforms in the early mobile days took 70% of their revenue. It’s down to 30% now, which isn’t as bad. Epic is bringing it down to 12%. There’s been a progression, where developers can take more control over their business. That seems like part of this story as well.
Rogers: Everyone should take a reasonable percentage of the pie. The amount of work you put in should have something to do with the amount of money you get out. If the game developer spends all of their energy, they should get the majority of the money. It’s hard work.
GamesBeat: How would you divide the book up? There’s the Tetris story, but there’s also your own life in here. You retired and you’ve gone on to fighting climate change. How much of that is in the book?
Rogers: The book really took a chunk of my life. I was spending four or five hours a day writing when I was in writing mode. That’s a lot of time. My normal day is Zoom, Zoom, email, email, that kind of thing. To block out four or five hours a day, it was lucky that I had COVID. I wasn’t meeting people or flying around the world. I was staying put. That gave me a chance to do it. I don’t know if I have another book in me. We’ll see. Chapter two is about climate change, The Perfect Climate or whatever it would be.
GamesBeat: You figured out a life after gaming, though.
Rogers: Oh, yeah. I’m way past that. In 2005 I had already figured that out. I found my missions in life. I had 100% blockage, the widowmaker. In the ambulance I thought, “No, I’m not going. I still have stuff to do.” When people have that happen to them, 95% of them die. I was one of the lucky 5%. I survived. I have two stents. I walked out of the hospital four days later with two band-aids from the angioplasty. It was incredible. If I had been on the big island that day I would have died. There’s no way they would have gotten me anywhere in time. I was already in the ambulance being taken for observation when it happened. The doctor said, “When you called that ambulance, it’s the best decision you made in your entire life.”
Anyway, in the recovery room I started to think about what it meant. I’d just sold my company a month before. My wife had enough money. She didn’t need me anymore. My kids were all out of college. They didn’t need me anymore. I found my missions in life. The first one was in the back of the newspaper. “We’re going to kill all the coral in the world.” I moved to Hawaii from New York City when I was 18. From the concrete jungle to the beach for a year, surfing and diving. No way are we allowed to kill all the coral in the world. I’m not going to let that happen.
GamesBeat: The last time I was in Maui it was hard to find places where there was no bleached coral anymore.
Rogers: That’s just the beginning. That has to do with the warming of the ocean. We’re not even talking about ocean acidification yet. That’s happening, slowly but surely. It’s not just coral that will be affected. It’s going to be plankton. We’re talking about destroying the food chain of the ocean. Coral is something we can see. Plankton we don’t see. We don’t realize that plankton is the most important thing in the ocean.
GamesBeat: Peter Moore told me his own story more than a year ago. He had a heart event and didn’t know what was happening. He looked at his Apple watch and it told him he had an emergency going on. He called his wife, who knew something about what was going on, and she said, “Stay there. I’m coming to take you to the hospital.” She saved him, her and his Apple watch.
Rogers: I have a little insert here. That’s my blood sugar. I ate an apple this morning, and that’s sending me across 250. An alarm goes off.
GamesBeat: At CES this year they had mirrors that would look at you and judge the color of your skin. They were calculating blood pressure and blood oxygen.
Rogers: I want to create a medical device. You hold it in your hand, and your fingers are touching the back of the device where it can sense a bunch of stuff. And then on the front you’re playing Tetris. It can measure your hand-eye coordination and your cognitive ability. Not only does it have a physiological five minutes, but also a mental five minutes. I think we’ll correlate what happens in your brain when you play Tetris to things like Alzheimer’s, all these different mental things. I think that’s going to be a medical device.
GamesBeat: There was a company called Skillprint that was going to watch you play games and figure out what kind of career might be best for you.
Rogers: That sounds like the Soviet Union. Figure out what you’re going to be when you grow up and send you to the proper school and all that. Scary stuff.
GamesBeat: It turned out that games can tell a lot about you, though.
Rogers: What games can tell you is how much willpower you have. I see young people playing games, and they’re striving to have the epic win. That epic win feeling, “Yes! I did it!” That’s how I want them to live their lives. We need an epic win over climate change and plastic in the ocean and ending war. I think games give us practice at achieving the epic win.
GamesBeat: What do you think about what games have become? Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is out shortly. You could call that the perfect game.
Rogers: The question is, is that a game? To me it’s an interactive fiction. It’s like going to a movie. It’s an interactive story. A game, to me, feels like something where I’m trying to mentally outpoint you, something like that. Originally games were played between people. Now a lot of games are solitaire. Playing poker and playing solitaire, that’s two different things. They lump them all together and call them games. If you say a game is a pastime, then a lot of things can be a game.
Early on in my career I vowed that I would never work on a game that I didn’t want my children to play. I’d like other people to have that same feeling about the games they create. Of course that cat’s out of the bag, so to speak.
GamesBeat: Did you think the Nintendo-like atmosphere or design sensibility was the part of it you loved the most, as opposed to the larger things that games became?
Rogers: I love the way games have grown. Not only in terms of beauty and complexity, but in terms of the audience. That’s grown. Interactive entertainment is so much better than passive entertainment. Sitting on a couch and watching a TV show, that’s the previous generation. Now, when young people sit in front of a TV, they want to interact. They want to choose their path. That’s a healthy thing. It’s a move up from the couch potato.
GamesBeat: The game industry has had a tough two and a half years. Lots of layoffs and studios closing. What do you think about the health or state of the industry?
Rogers: During COVID everyone had more time. That time translated into games. The industry grew and maybe became a little bloated. It’s an adjustment. But it’s like a course correction in the stock market. It’s not permanent. The thing that I think is a bit unhealthy is that a few games make all the money. If you’re the third or fourth game you’re struggling. It would be better for the industry if more games were making money instead of just a few games making a lot of money.
GamesBeat: What direction do you think games should go in to get back some of that growth, or to become a more rational industry?
Rogers: I like Minecraft. What’s going on in the world, I think–things like TikTok or Instagram are where people are spending more time. What does that mean? They want to create something. They don’t want to just watch other people doing stuff. They want to do something. Games like Minecraft, where you create something, where your friends enjoy what you’ve created–that becomes more interesting. It’s your creative juice. If games become something where you get to create part of it–I have lots of ideas about that. But I’m out of the game business.
GamesBeat: A platform like Roblox is interesting because it feels to me like the new ground floor for people who want to break into the industry. This is where they can do it. I’ve interviewed some CEOs who are 23 years old. They have teams of 30 people. They were able to get there because they’ve been making games for 10 years inside Roblox.
Rogers: I’m working on a game–I don’t call it a game anymore. MileagePlus is a game, but nobody thinks it’s a game. They take it seriously, so to speak. Whenever I give a speech about climate change, people ask, “What can I do?” I say, “I don’t know what you can do. I can get up here and speak and hopefully inspire you, but you have to figure out what you can do and do that.” I realize that I haven’t helped those people at all, because they’re looking for advice.
I’m creating an app, and it’s things to do. In the beginning they’re small things. Turn out the lights in a room with no people. Pick up some rubbish and put it in the can. Get a point, get a point, get a point. Once you get a bunch of points you go up a level. Then you get bigger things to do. Do a bunch of those and so on. It’s a role-playing game, but it’s in the real world. You’re doing real things.
There are two ways to make points. One is you do the actions, and the other is you create an action. If you create an action, put it in the system, and someone else does it, then you get credit for that as well. It becomes a competition to see who can make the most actionable actions. The AI will make sure you’re not doing anything stupid like destroying something or making things worse. It will vet the actions. But basically it’s up to you to create an action. When everyone is creating actions for everyone else, I think that’s going to cause the world to clean up. They may be small actions, but when you do something and realize that a million other people have done it as well, that’s a big deal. Right now if you do something nobody knows. It’s lost.
GamesBeat: Do you think there’s a whole industry that could be made out of clean technology and games?
Rogers: We go from doing things in the virtual world to doing things in the real world. AR is kind of like that, but AR is still mostly about things that don’t exist coexisting with the real world. Here I am saying that there are things in the real world that need to be done. I don’t want to convince you in a virtual world to do something that you’re going to do in the real world. I want to do something in the real world. That’s kind of the transition I’m in.
GamesBeat: I talked to the CEO of Nvidia about the Earth-2 simulation they have. They take all their GPUs, put them into a supercomputer, and that creates the best simulation of the Earth they can make. They use it to model climate. Their hope is they could predict climate change for decades to come using this simulation of the Earth. I asked them if they could just repurpose this into a game, or the metaverse, and he said, “Yes, we get that for free.” The by-product of doing this is you get a foundation for Earth-sized games.
Rogers: I had the same idea, except for Mars. The problem with Earth–the spot where the Empire State Building is, who gets to build there? What do they get to build there? There’s a relationship between virtual land and real land that’s going to cause conflict in the future. Doing it on Mars, it’s a land grab. You can have whatever you want. You can sell land on Mars. Just add water.
GamesBeat: The technology that’s been going into simulations and into games, it’s the same technology. It’s all the Unreal engine, things like that. You can make a digital twin of a BMW factory, design that, and bring the perfected design into the real world. Then you put sensors on that factory and feed back data to the digital twin, so the digital twin gets better. That feedback cycle continuously improves everything. It’s a meeting of games and enterprise that I feel like nobody expected. Engineering things for a better planet can be brought into this process, too.
Rogers: You look at something like Gran Turismo. Race car drivers actually practice driving in simulations. I was listening to a guy talk about how an armored personnel carrier took out a Russian tank. How did he do it? He said, “The thing with the camera in it, I just shot at it over and over again. I’d done it in Counter-Strike.” Or whatever it is. He’d used a technique he found in a video game in real life and took out a Russian tank.
GamesBeat: With Tetris, do you feel like people develop a skill there that somehow becomes useful?
Rogers: No, I don’t think it’s a skill. It’s a therapeutic thing. Tetris has the same effect, I think, as meditation. The problem with Tetris is that you play it too long. If you were to meditate for three hours, you’d have to be a yogi or whatever. For an ordinary person, 10 or 15 minutes should be enough. We’re figuring out medical connections to Tetris as we speak – how it mitigates post-traumatic stress, they’ve figured that out. That’s another direction for Tetris, all these medical applications.
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