As an Apple TV Plus film based on the true story of the struggle for the rights to Tetris is released, the game’s creator and publisher remember their first meeting.
Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers have known each other a long time. The man who created Tetris and the man who (more or less) sold it to the world met 34 years ago in a government office in Moscow. Later, they founded a company together to manage the rights to Pajitnov’s timeless creation. Talking to me over Zoom to promote the new Tetris movie on Apple TV Plus — a film which concocts a watchable, frothy Cold War spy thriller out of the extraordinary true story of Rogers’ initial negotiations with the Soviet Union — the pair communicate with sideways glances and hands placed on shoulders, teasing and correcting each other like the old comrades they are.
They’re chalk and cheese, in some ways. Pajitnov, who still speaks with a strong Russian accent, is a thoughtful, kindly science-teacher type, while Rogers is every inch the slick salesman, leaning into the camera conspiratorially to spin his yarns. But they are both game designers, too, even if neither of them particularly planned to be. And it was thanks to this kinship that they formed an instantaneous bond in that meeting room in 1989.
“I came in on Thursday… I think it was Wednesday, maybe,” says Rogers, who has a habit of referring to long-distant events as if they happened last week. He was in Moscow, uninvited and unannounced, to try to secure the handheld rights to Tetris, for which he was (or believed he was) the licensed publisher in Japan. Nintendo had let him in on a little secret: It was preparing the Game Boy for release, and Rogers knew that Tetris would be the perfect game for it. But the rights were in a mess, and the Russian communist state held all the cards. (This part of the story is quite accurately told in the movie; although it indulges in wild fabrications elsewhere, Pajitnov and Rogers say it’s true to the spirit of their adventure.)
“There were, like, eight guys sitting on the other side of the table, and they were giving me the third degree: Who the hell am I, and what was I doing? And Alexey was one of them,” Rogers remembers. “In the beginning, it was hostile… I think what they were trying to do is, they were trying to figure out what my angle was. You know, my story was too unlikely for it to be a story.”
Rogers must have cut an unlikely figure indeed: He had a Dutch passport, an American accent, and lived in Japan with his Japanese wife. He had moved there after attending the University of Hawaii, where he “majored in computer science and minored in Dungeons & Dragons.” He leaned on this experience to write and publish The Black Onyx, which he swears was the first role-playing video game in Japan on its release in 1984.
“My dad used to be in the gem business; I worked for him for six years,” Rogers says. “So the first 100 people that made it to the end of the game, I sent them a real black onyx. That was marketing then, you know!”
When Nintendo blew up the Japanese computing and gaming scene with the Famicom/NES in the 1980s, Rogers talked his way into the office of the company’s fearsome president, Hiroshi Yamauchi. In the movie, he’s portrayed sneaking in to pitch Tetris to the great man, but in reality he had bonded with Yamauchi earlier over a mutual love of the traditional Japanese board game Go. Rogers pitched a Famicom port of a British Go video game to Yamauchi via fax and was in his office two days later.
“Yamauchi says to me, ‘I can’t give you any programmers.’ I said, ‘I don’t need programmers,’” Rogers recalls. “‘I need’ — this meeting went so fast, I couldn’t believe it — ‘I need money.’ And he said, ‘How much?’ And I thought of the biggest number I could think of: $300,000.
