‘It was just the perfect game’: Henk Rogers on purchasing Tetris and foiling the KGB

Wchicken sport fashion designer and entrepreneur Henk Rogers first encountered Tetris on the 1988 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, he instantly knew it used to be particular. “It was just the perfect game,” he remembers. “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 emblem. Over the previous 30 years, he has grow to be virtually as well-known as the sport itself. The escapades surrounding his deal to shop for its distribution rights from Russian company Elektronorgtechnica (Elorg) have been dramatised in an Apple TV+ movie starring 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 handiest fear when he learn 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 may possibly’t had been extra terrifying than the KGB interrogation watching for Rogers when he made that fateful shuttle to Russia in 1988. Tetris would possibly now be one of the crucial a hit video video games in historical past, with greater than 520m gross sales, but it used to be conceived through Alexey Pajitnov whilst he used to be running on synthetic intelligence and automated speech popularity on the state-owned computing centre of the Academy of Sciences within the Soviet Union – and he without a doubt wasn’t meant to be coding puzzle video games. Those trance-inducing tetrominos have been virtually sealed away at the back of the iron curtain, the unique assets of the Soviet regime.

Thankfully, then again, a fancy sequence of shaky global rights offers involving a number of firms, together with Robert Maxwell’s Mirrorsoft, in any case culminated within the Japan-dwelling Dutchman Rogers snapping up the Japanese laptop rights, after which hopping on a airplane to Russia hoping to protected a identical deal for handhelds. After he arrived in Moscow on a vacationer visa, the KGB watched Rogers’ each transfer. Sneakily – and really a lot illegally – he controlled to realize access into Elorg, the state-owned corporate with a monopoly on all Soviet-made laptop tool. As he got here head to head with the reclusive coder at the back of this mesmerising sport, Rogers abruptly came upon he’d been duped. The Tetris rights Rogers “owned” have been offered with out Russian wisdom – and the Soviets weren’t too happy.

“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 used to be 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 movie’s retelling of this stumble upon feels unusually trustworthy, with the nerve-racking interrogation scene and ensuing paranoia of KGB surveillance matching Rogers’ personal descriptions.

“When he figured out I was a game designer, Alexey’s demeanour changed completely,” remembers Rogers. “Alexey had never met a game designer before … There were no 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 satisfy a fellow nerd, Alexey quietly requested Rogers to seek out him after the assembly. With the KGB staring at their each transfer, and hundreds of thousands of bucks at the line, Rogers used to be conscious about the risk that they each confronted. “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 had been buddies ever since, and as soon as the Soviet Union used to be dissolved and Elorg’s stake offered, they shaped the Tetris Company in combination in 1996. Up to that time, Pajitnov had made no cash from the sport in any respect.

Despite the 2023 movie 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 were given a kick out of seeing his tale at the giant display 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, forced to proportion a extra grounded retelling of his tale, Rogers has simply launched a guide: The Perfect Game: Tetris, from Russia With Love. It’s a a laugh, if moderately boastful have a look at the occasions that introduced the puzzle sensation to the sector, affected by endearing, memory-correcting interjections from Pajitnov.

While the movie highlights Rogers’ simple attraction and trade acumen, it buries his contributions as a sport developer. While residing in Japan in 1983 he based Bullet-Proof Software and created the influential role-playing sport The Black Onyx, which gave the style the enduring well being bar and likewise presented RPGs to a Japanese target audience. The sport’s handbook used to be written through Hisashi Suzuki who would cross directly to grow to be president of Squaresoft, author of the Final Fantasy sequence. The Black Onyx used to be it seems that additionally an enormous affect on mythical Nintendo fashion designer 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 atypical regardless that, that Rogers’ tale has overshadowed that of Tetris’s author, 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 variations of Tetris are launched each few years, a up to date spotlight being 2019’s psychedelic Tetris Effect, which noticed the author of the Dreamcast vintage Rez, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, reimagine the sport as a transcendental audiovisual enjoy entire with VR model – an idea dreamed up right through a hedonistic weekend at Burning Man. “Gucci – we call him Gucci – is a good friend,” says Rogers. “We went to Burning Man together, where we blue-skyed in the desert about what Tetris Effect would be – a Tetris in VR – and he built that product.”

While Rogers nonetheless enjoys video games (“Minecraft really did something outside the box.”), his priorities modified after a close to deadly center assault 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 during the last 20 years his Blue Planet Foundation has effectively lobbied the island country to dedicate to scrub power through 2030. He is slowly convincing neighbouring islands to forestall buying international oil and to spend money on sustainable possible choices. If someone can save the planet, it’s the person who outsmarted the Maxwells, escaped the KGB, and were given us all dreaming of inauspicious little blocks blocks ceaselessly falling into position.