Latest news with #HenkRogers
Newsweek
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
INTERVIEW: Henk Rogers Changed Gaming, Now He Wants to Change the World
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.
The Guardian
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It was just the perfect game': Henk Rogers on buying Tetris and foiling the KGB
When game designer and entrepreneur Henk Rogers first encountered Tetris at 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 in an Apple TV+ film 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 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 … 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 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 legendary Nintendo 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 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 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 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
Fox News
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
The Quiz #369 - Smells Like Teen Spirit
Enter the Heart-Shaped Box of trivia. Play. Share. Listen with the Founder of Tetris and author of The Perfect Game Tetris: From Russia With Love, Henk Rogers.
Fox News
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
The Man Who Brought Tetris To The World
After playing Tetris at a 1988 video game conference, video game designer Henk Rogers knew he'd encountered something special. The only problem? The game was designed and owned by a coder in the Soviet Union. So in 1989, Henk set off for Soviet Russia on an adventure game of his own to bring the beloved game to the masses. Founder of Blue Planet Software and The Tetris Company, Henk Rogers talks to Liz Claman about his dangerous journey he braved to bring Tetris to the rest of the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit
