In February 1989 Henk Rogers flew to Moscow on a tourist visa, with no invitation and no idea where the people who owned Tetris worked. He hired an interpreter, found the Soviet foreign-trade agency Elorg, and walked in. “You weren’t supposed to talk to anybody, let alone do any kind of business with anybody,” he told Retro Gamer. By the end of the week his company, Bullet-Proof Software, held the handheld rights to Tetris, which it sublicensed to Nintendo for the Game Boy, and Elorg had told him that nobody had ever been licensed to sell the game for consoles. Rogers was a small publisher in Japan, not a Nintendo employee, and he went to Moscow because the Tetris cartridge he was already selling turned out to rest on rights nobody had granted.
Fast facts
- Born: 1953, Amsterdam; moved to New York in 1964 and later to Hawaii.
- Early career: The Black Onyx, a role-playing game for Japanese computers; founder of Bullet-Proof Software in Japan.
- Tetris: saw it at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 1988; published it for the Famicom in December 1988; won the handheld rights in Moscow in February 1989.
- Later: founder of Blue Planet Software; co-founder of The Tetris Company with Alexey Pajitnov; founder of the Blue Planet Foundation, a clean-energy charity in Hawaii.
From Amsterdam to Yokohama
Sheff’s Game Over gives his early life. His family moved from Amsterdam to New York in 1964 for his father’s gem business, and then to Hawaii, where Rogers studied at the University of Hawaii, surfed before class, and spent his time in the computer-science building playing games on mainframe terminals. “For a gamer, programming is the ultimate game,” he told Sheff. He joined his family in Japan in 1976, taught English, worked in the gem business, and learned to play go from his father.
On a personal computer he wrote The Black Onyx, a game in the style of Dungeons & Dragons. Japanese players had no idea what a role-playing game was, so, Sheff writes, Rogers took it round the computer magazines and sat the editors down to play it until they understood. By March 1985 the American magazine Electronic Games was reporting that Black Onyx was “currently number one in Japan”. Edge later credited it with introducing the role-playing game to Japan a year before Dragon Quest. His company, Bullet-Proof Software, went on to publish for Nintendo’s Famicom after Rogers, a keen go player, won an audience with Nintendo’s president Hiroshi Yamauchi by offering a go program.
Tetris for the Famicom
“I first saw it at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, 1988,” Rogers told Retro Gamer. “By the time I’d played Tetris for the fourth time I realised I was hooked.” He licensed the Japanese computer rights from Spectrum HoloByte, and when he learned that Mirrorsoft had traded the console rights to Atari Games, he spent months negotiating a sublicence for the Famicom from Atari Games instead.
The Famicom version came out in December 1988 and started badly. Rogers had about 40,000 pre-orders when a hit needed far more, so he went back to Yamauchi. As Rogers tells it, Yamauchi called in Shigeru Miyamoto and asked whether it was really a great game. “All of your accountants and secretaries are playing this game on their lunch breaks and after hours every day,” Miyamoto replied. Nintendo’s sales force pushed distributors for more orders. The game sold out by February 1989, and Bullet-Proof ended up selling two million copies, a figure Sheff also gives.
Moscow
Minoru Arakawa of Nintendo of America had shown Rogers the Game Boy, still a secret, and offered to take a sublicence if Rogers could get the handheld rights. Rogers had already decided Tetris suited the machine: “It had a small screen, so it’d be hard to see bullets. A game with big geometrical objects was much more obvious.” After failing to get anywhere through the London agent Robert Stein, he went to Moscow himself.
At Elorg he was questioned for hours. Alexey Pajitnov was in the room, and the two got on at once; Pajitnov told Sheff that “he didn’t ask for protection in the deal. He offered me nothing and asked for nothing.” Rogers signed for the handheld rights, then proudly showed Elorg’s negotiator, Evgeni Belikov, his Famicom cartridge. Belikov said Elorg had never licensed Tetris for consoles. “I was a pirate in their eyes!” Rogers told Edge. He offered to pay Elorg for the Famicom cartridges he had sold and promised to return with a partner able to stand up to Atari Games: Nintendo. In March he was back in Moscow with Arakawa and Howard Lincoln, typing up the contract paragraph by paragraph in his hotel room, and Nintendo signed for the console rights on 22 March 1989. The fight that followed is told in the Tetris rights wars.
Rogers came out of it well. Sheff reports that he kept the rights to handheld Tetris on machines other than the Game Boy, and received a sublicence to sell the Famicom version in Japan on better terms than before.
Game Boy Tetris
Rogers also shaped the Game Boy version, by his own account in Retro Gamer. He decided that the direction pad should move the pieces and the buttons rotate them, and when Nintendo’s programmers found that one piece was coming up twice as often as the others, he worked out a fix with them in his Yokohama office over a weekend. He asked for Russian folk songs for the music because they were in the public domain. And he argued for Tetris as the Game Boy’s pack-in game instead of a Mario: “If you want to sell Game Boy to little boys then pack in Mario, but if you want to sell Game Boy to everybody then pack in Tetris.” Nintendo packed Tetris with the Game Boy everywhere except Japan.
Pajitnov and The Tetris Company
Rogers stayed close to Pajitnov. He wrote to Elorg asking for a share for the author (“If someone plants an apple tree and it brings you many, many apples, you ought to give them some apples”), brought him to Japan in the spring of 1989, and with Pajitnov and Vladimir Pokhilko founded Animatek, a Moscow 3D graphics company that had nearly 100 staff by 1997. In 1991 he helped Pajitnov and Pokhilko and their families move to America, where Pajitnov worked for Bullet-Proof near Seattle.
Rogers left Japan in the mid-1990s after 18 years there and in 1996 founded Blue Planet Software in San Francisco. By his account the Soviet-era licences ran for ten years, and in 1995 Pajitnov licensed his rights to Blue Planet. Rather than fight Elorg, which held the trademarks, Rogers proposed putting every claim into one company: “I said, ‘Look, we shouldn’t fight about this. We should put all our rights into one company called The Tetris Company’.” It was owned half by Blue Planet and half by a subsidiary of Elorg, and Blue Planet wrote a document, “What is Tetris?”, that fixed how the pieces fall and rotate in every licensed version. Bullet-Proof also sold three million “Tetris Jr.” handheld games in Japan, made in China by a pirate maker whose production Rogers took over. “We made it legal,” he said.
Since 2000
A heart attack in 2005 made Rogers rethink what he wanted to do. The same year, by his account, he bought out Elorg’s share of the rights and put its trademarks, with Pajitnov’s rights, into a new company, Tetris Holding. In 2006 he and Minoru Arakawa founded Tetris Online in Honolulu to make online versions of the game. In 2007 he founded the Blue Planet Foundation to move Hawaii off fossil fuels, and he has since funded HI-SEAS, a Moon and Mars simulation habitat on Mauna Loa, and the International MoonBase Alliance. His daughter Maya Rogers became chief executive of The Tetris Company, and at the game’s 40th anniversary in 2024 Henk Rogers and Pajitnov were still appearing together for it. In 2023 Apple released the film Tetris, with Taron Egerton playing Rogers.
Sources
- David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999): chapter 4, “Inside the Mother Brain” (Amsterdam, New York and Hawaii, “the ultimate game”, Japan from 1976, go, The Black Onyx and the magazine editors, Bullet-Proof Software, Yamauchi and the go program); chapter 13, “From Russia with Love” (the January 1988 trade show, the Spectrum HoloByte and Atari Games licences, the Famicom release, two million copies, Arakawa’s offer and the Game Boy prototype); chapter 14, “The ‘Tetris’ Song” (Pajitnov’s “asked for nothing”, the handheld deal, Belikov and the cartridge, the contract written in Rogers’s hotel room, Rogers’s own rights, the apple-tree letter, Pajitnov’s trip to Japan); epilogue, “Forest of Illusions” (the move to America in 1991 and work for Bullet-Proof).
- Retro Gamer issue 100, March 2012, “Henk Rogers and the making of Game Boy Tetris”: CES 1988 and “hooked”, the tourist visa and walking into Elorg, the controls, the random-number fix, the folk songs, the pack-in argument, Miyamoto’s answer to Yamauchi.
- Edge issue 74, August 1999, Henk Rogers interview: 18 years in Japan, Blue Planet Software founded in San Francisco in 1996, Animatek and its staff, the Famicom pre-orders, Yamauchi and Miyamoto, two million copies, the Game Boy’s small screen, “I was a pirate in their eyes!”, ten-year rights, Pajitnov’s 1995 licence, The Tetris Company and its ownership, “What is Tetris?”, the Tetris Jr. handhelds.
- Electronic Games, March 1985, p. 10: Black Onyx “currently number one in Japan”.
- Edge issue 217, August 2010, Dragon Quest feature: The Black Onyx introducing the role-playing game to Japan the year before Dragon Quest.
- Edge issue 43, March 1997: Pajitnov and Rogers form The Tetris Company.
- Chris Remo, “The Man Who Won Tetris”, Gamasutra, 10 September 2009 (web, secondary): the heart attack, buying out Elorg in 2005, Tetris Holding, the Blue Planet Foundation. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-man-who-won-tetris
- Stacy Yuen, “Tetris Evolves into Facebook Phenom”, Hawaii Business, 11 April 2012 (web, secondary): Tetris Online, founded with Arakawa, in Honolulu since January 2006. https://www.hawaiibusiness.com/tetris-evolves-into-facebook-phenom/
- Henk Rogers, “About” (web, secondary): the Blue Planet Foundation (2007), HI-SEAS (2013), the International MoonBase Alliance (2017), the heart attack in 2005. https://www.henkrogers.com/about
- Wikipedia, “Henk Rogers” (web, secondary): Maya Rogers as his daughter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henk_Rogers
- The Tetris Company, World Tetris Day press release, 2024 (web, secondary): Maya Rogers as chief executive; Henk Rogers and Pajitnov at the Classic Tetris World Championship. https://tetris.com/news/world-tetris-day-press-release-2024
- Apple TV Press, “Apple Original Films unveils trailer for ‘Tetris’”, February 2023 (web, secondary). https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2023/02/apple-original-films-unveils-trailer-for-tetris-new-thriller-starring-taron-egerton/