When game designer and entrepreneur Henk Rogers first encounteredTetrisat the 1988 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, he immediately knew it was special. “It was just the perfect game,” he recalls. “It looked so simple, so rudimentary, but I wanted to play it again and again and again … There was no other game demo that ever did that to me.”
Rogers is now co-owner of the Tetris Company, which manages and licenses the Tetris brand. Over the past 30 years, he has become almost as famous as the game itself. The escapades surrounding his deal to buy its distribution rights from Russian agency Elektronorgtechnica (Elorg) were dramatised inan Apple TV+ filmstarring Taron Egerton. “I suggested that Johnny Depp or Keanu Reeves should play me, but apparently they were way too old,” Rogers says.
The casting wasn’t his only concern when he read the screenplay. “It was terrifying. I didn’t know anything about how a script becomes a movie. I thought: ‘This is a crap movie … a car chase?! There is so much bullshit in there!’”
Still, it can’t have been more terrifying than the KGB interrogation awaiting Rogers when he made that fateful trip to Russia in 1988. Tetris may now be one of the most successful video games in history, with more than 520m sales, yet it was conceived by Alexey Pajitnov while he was working on artificial intelligence and automatic speech recognition at the state-owned computing centre of the Academy of Sciences in the Soviet Union – and he certainly wasn’t supposed to be coding puzzle games. Those trance-inducing tetrominos were almost sealed away behind the iron curtain, the exclusive property of the Soviet regime.
Thankfully, however, a complex series of shaky international rights deals involving several companies, including Robert Maxwell’s Mirrorsoft, finally culminated in the Japan-dwelling Dutchman Rogers snapping up the Japanese computer rights, and then hopping on a plane to Russia hoping to secure a similar deal for handhelds. After he arrived in Moscow on a tourist visa, the KGB watched Rogers’ every move. Sneakily – and very much illegally – he managed to gain entry into Elorg, the state-owned company with a monopoly on all Soviet-made computer software. As he came face to face with the reclusive coder behind this mesmerising game, Rogers swiftly discovered he’d been duped. The Tetris rights Rogers “owned” had been sold without Russian knowledge – and the Soviets weren’t too pleased.
“I was in a room with seven people, some of them KGB types, being given the third degree for a couple of hours, like: ‘Who the hell are you coming into the Soviet Union?!’” says Rogers. It was there that he first met Pajitnov. “Alexey was suspicious of me at first, because he’d met other people who had come sniffing for Tetris’s rights. He always felt that they were just slimy capitalists looking to make a dollar.” The film’s retelling of this encounter feels surprisingly faithful, with the tense interrogation scene and resulting paranoia of KGB surveillance matching Rogers’ own descriptions.
“When he figured out I was a game designer, Alexey’s demeanour changed completely,” recalls Rogers. “Alexey had never met a game designer before … Therewereno game designers in the Soviet Union, because there was no game business in the Soviet Union. You had your job, and games would be something that you did on the side.”
Intrigued to meet a fellow nerd, Alexey quietly asked Rogers to find him after the meeting. With the KGB watching their every move, and millions of dollars on the line, Rogers was aware of the danger that they both faced. “As a foreigner, I had to be careful. So I waited downstairs by the door and escorted him to my room in the middle of the night, quietly showing him my version of Tetris.”
Rogers and Pajitnov have been friends ever since, and once the Soviet Union was dissolved and Elorg’s stake sold, they formed the Tetris Company together in 1996. Up to that point, Pajitnov had made no money from the game at all.
Despite the 2023 film taking some factual liberties (“I cried about things in the movie that never happened, I cried about my daughter singing after I missed her recital – they made that shit up!”), Rogers says that he got a kick out of seeing his story on the big screen. “It premiered at South by Southwest and the audience can be very critical. But they were cheering when I first saw the Game Boy. They were cheering for a device! At the end, we all got to come on stage: Alexey, myself, and Taron. We got the biggest standing ovation from the audience. It felt like I won an Oscar.”
However, compelled to share a more grounded retelling of his story, Rogers has just released a book:The Perfect Game: Tetris, from Russia With Love. It’s a fun, if slightly arrogant look at the events that brought the puzzle sensation to the world, littered with endearing, memory-correcting interjections from Pajitnov.
While the film highlights Rogers’ undeniable charm and business acumen, it buries his contributions as a game developer. While living in Japan in 1983 he founded Bullet-Proof Software and created the influential role-playing game The Black Onyx, which gave the genre the iconic health bar and also introduced RPGs to a Japanese audience. The game’s manual was written by Hisashi Suzuki who would go on to become president of Squaresoft, creator of the Final Fantasy series. The Black Onyx was apparently also a huge influence on legendaryNintendodesigner Shigeru Miyamoto: “Miyamoto credited Black Onyx – thereby crediting me – for teaching him about role playing games,” says Rogers. “He said it was what led to him creating Zelda.”
Is it strange though, that Rogers’ story has overshadowed that of Tetris’s creator, Pajitnov? “Alexey and I play very different roles,” replies Rogers. “The role that I’m playing right now, telling the story, he would never play that role. He’s more of an introvert. If you give him a chance, he’ll sit in a room and do mathematical proofs. In terms of connecting Tetris to the world, the world would have to search him out and he would come kicking and screaming.”
New versions of Tetris are released every few years, a recent highlight being 2019’s psychedelic Tetris Effect, which saw the creator of the Dreamcast classic Rez, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, reimagine the game as a transcendental audiovisual experience complete with VR version – a concept dreamed up during a hedonistic weekend at Burning Man. “Gucci – we call him Gucci – is a good friend,” says Rogers. “We went toBurning Mantogether, where we blue-skyed in the desert about what Tetris Effect would be – a Tetris in VR – and he built that product.”
While Rogers still enjoys games (“Minecraft really did something outside the box.”), his priorities changed after a near fatal heart attack in 2005. “I’m done with game publishing,” he says. “I know how much work it is and how much money it takes and my heart has to be in it. And now, my heart is in fighting climate change.”
Rogers now lives in Hawaii, and over the last 20 years his Blue Planet Foundation has successfully lobbied the island nation to commit to clean energy by 2030. He is slowly convincing neighbouring islands to stop purchasing foreign oil and to invest in sustainable alternatives. If anyone can save the planet, it’s the man who outsmarted the Maxwells, escaped the KGB, and got us all dreaming of difficult little blocks blocks endlessly falling into place.
The Perfect Game by Henk Rogers is published by Di Angelo