INTERVIEW: Henk Rogers Changed Gaming, Now He Wants to Change the World

Newsweek

19-05-2025

Entertainment gossip and news from Newsweek's network of contributors
Henk Rogers is best known as the man who brought Tetris to the world. In 1988, Rogers stumbled upon the game at a Las Vegas trade show, and quickly worked to secure the exclusive rights to the game, striking deals with gaming giants like Nintendo to bring the game to the masses. The rest is history, but now Rogers is looking forward to the future — and he's got big plans to redefine his legacy.
Rogers doesn't spend much time in the gaming world anymore. He still checks over pitches to The Tetris Company every now and then, alongside Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov, but the daily ins and outs of the company are handled by his daughter. Instead, Rogers has his mind turned to the bigger problems in the world, with climate change and pollution at the top of his list.
Henk Rogers on stage during a panel at Gamescom Latam in Sao Paulo, Brazil in May 2025.
Henk Rogers on stage during a panel at Gamescom Latam in Sao Paulo, Brazil in May 2025.
Gamescom
I sat down for a chat with Rogers at Gamescom Latam in São Paulo, Brazil, who was there promoting his new book, The Perfect Game - Tetris: From Russia With Love. It's a first-hand chronicle of the real story behind the popularization of Tetris, written in response to Jon S. Baird's Apple TV film Tetris. It started its life after Rogers read an early script for the film, with the intention of passing on some notes so scriptwriters could give it a little bit more authenticity. There was so much to the story that Rogers never finished his notes in time, and after the movie was finished, he thought to expand the timeline, detailing his time as a game developer before Tetris and what happened after.
It's a fascinating story, and the book is well worth a read, but our conversation quickly turned to something more important than Tetris: the state of the world. Since 2005, Rogers' attention has been focused solely on making the world a better place, and it starts with renewable energy. After a serious heart issue – a 100% blockage in the widowmaker artery – and a frightful ambulance ride, Rogers started to take stock of his life.
"In that ambulance, the first thing I said was 'You can't be f***ing kidding me, I haven't spent any of the money yet,'" Rogers recalls. "The second thing I said was 'No, I'm not going, I still have stuff to do.' And in the recovery room I got to thinking, what did I mean by stuff? I already made enough money, my wife doesn't need me anymore, my kids are all done with college. What's this stuff?"
Rogers says he started to work backwards, to figure out, in his words, "what's going to piss me off at the end of my life if I don't do anything about it." He came up with a list of missions he needed to complete before his time on earth came to an end, and the first came to him in the back of a newspaper in Hawaii.
"It said 'Oh, by the way, we are going to kill all the coral in the world by the end of the century.' What the hell are you talking about?" Rogers says. "It's ocean acidification, caused by carbon dioxide being absorbed into the ocean, caused by us. Okay, mission number one: end the use of carbon-based fuel. It's that simple, full stop."
The cover of The Perfect Game - Tetris: From Russia With Love.
The cover of The Perfect Game - Tetris: From Russia With Love.
Di Angelo Productions
He founded the Blue Planet Foundation in 2007, with the lofty goal of ending the use of carbon-based fuels in Hawaii first, and then the rest of the US. That might sound like an unattainable mission, but he's already well on his way. In 2015, with the Blue Planet Foundation leading the charge, Hawaii passed a law requiring the transition to 100% renewable energy by 2045.
Since then, 15 other states, including California, New York, and Illinois, have passed similar legislation. Half of the US population now lives in a state that is legally required to transition to renewable energy, and Rogers is directly responsible for making that happen. But the US is just one country, only 4.3% of the world's population, and if Rogers' goal of ending the use of carbon-based fuels was going to happen, he needed to think bigger.
"My new NGO is called the Blue Planet Alliance," Rogers tells me. "What we're doing is we're bringing island countries first to Hawaii to show them what we did and then teach them how to do it, and then send them back. So far, we've brought 26 islands in two countries to Hawaii."
These island regions are just the first step. Once his model is proven and adopted in smaller nations, he plans to roll it out to bigger countries, bigger polluters. And then, once he's done with climate change, he wants to keep going, fixing other problems facing the world. Much like Tetris, it's all about placing one block at a time, planning ahead, and clearing out the world's problems, one line at a time.
"My message isn't just about renewable energy, it's about anything that's wrong with the world. Pick a date and say that's your deadline. By then, it has to be fixed. Once everybody understands it has to be fixed by then, it becomes easy to understand the roadmap to get there."
Right now, Rogers is remembered for his contributions to gaming, but he isn't taking no for an answer when it comes to fixing the rest of the world. His legacy, as he sees it, can't be about something as simple as a puzzle video game, it has to be bigger, bolder. And it has to be successful, no matter what.
"That's all there is to it," an impassioned Rogers says to me. "Nothing is gonna stop me from doing this, and that's just what we need to do. Nothing's going to stop us from fixing climate change by 2045. It's as simple as that."
Disclosure: Oliver Brandt attended Gamescom Latam as a guest of Abragames, with flights and accommodation provided by the organization.