Tetris’ Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers reflect on their bromance

Henk and Alexey Pajitnov know each other for many years. Creator of the infamous “Henk Rogers” TetrisThey met at a Moscow government office 34 years ago. Later, they founded a company together to manage the rights to Pajitnov’s timeless creation. Zooming in to discuss the promotion of 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. Rogers on the other side is the salesman who conspiratorially spins his tales while Pajitnov speaks with a Russian accent. Both are game designers, even though they didn’t intend to. They formed an immediate bond because of this kinship in the 1989 meeting room.

“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. Rogers was uninvited to Moscow to seek the rights for his handheld device. TetrisRogers believed that he was Japan’s authorized publisher. Rogers was told by Nintendo that Nintendo was prepping the Game Boy for release. Tetris This would have been the ideal game. However, the rights were in chaos and the Russian communist government 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 is a remarkable figure. His Dutch passport was combined with an American accent and he lived in Japan together 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 Black OnyxHe claims that it was Japan’s first ever role-playing game when it launched 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 TetrisHe was a great man but had actually bonded with Yamauchi over their mutual love for the Japanese traditional board game Go. Rogers faxed Yamauchi an Famicom porting of a British Go game and was there 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. The number I pulled from my hat was just what I needed. And he reached across the table and shook my hand and said, ‘Deal.’”

Apple image

Rogers made sure Yamauchi would meet him only once a day to play Go. Yamauchi was starved of Go partners (in Japan it was regarded then as a “monk activity, ritual stuff,” Pajitnov notes), and Rogers would feed Nintendo’s inscrutable patriarch with gossip about the industry. Yamauchi was feared within Nintendo, and he appreciated Rogers’ unvarnished outside perspective.

“He fired the president of Nintendo Europe for disagreeing with him. Just like that. Bam! You know, iron fist,” Rogers says. “If you’ve got everybody else kissing your ass, then it’s hard to find out what’s really going on. He was outside. I didn’t, like, bow deeper to him than I bowed to everybody else. He was an equal to me. And I don’t think many people could do that or would do that.”

Rogers had some real backing when he sat down in Moscow at the table. That wasn’t necessarily immediately apparent to the Russian negotiators. Pajitnov was right across the table and immediately got a great feeling for this foreigner.

“I see another kind of adventurer, with a very long black mustache,” Pajitnov says. “And basically, we discovered that finally, the right person had come for the rights of Tetris. I think so. His business acumen and knowledge of the industry was first-rate. He was also a game designer. I was his first friend in the whole world. This was because such a career wasn’t possible in Russia at the time. I was the only one.”

Pajitnov was a puzzle lover and had previously written TetrisAs a researcher for the Computer Center of Soviet Academy of Sciences. It quickly became popular in Russia, and all over the world. However, Pajitnov was aware that he would likely fail to obtain ownership. Pajitnov decided instead to enjoy the lengthy game. He believed that, by making sure the game was handled properly, he would eventually be able cash in.

“As soon as I realized that this is a good game and I have a kind of obligation to try to publish it, I realized that if I seek money, I will lose for sure,” Pajitnov says. “Because in the Soviet Union, no such stuff as intellectual property existed at that time. The game was built on state-owned hardware, so it is likely that it will come to an end.

“So basically, I made the decision that I will do whatever is needed to have a very nice publishing of the game. That’s why I granted the rights for this game to the Computer Center, and then I got everybody on my side.”

Apple image

Pajitnov was able to ensure his bright future by playing the Party game. Tetris — and, ultimately, himself.

“I realized that it’s not my last game. “I was certain that I could make up the difference for myself. [the]Future use of the publicity Tetris. And that was a strategically very right decision,” Pajitnov says, with satisfaction. “So I never complain about it.”

Rogers butts in, eager to share another example of his friend’s tactical smarts: “There was something very interesting that he did early on: He submitted his game to a computer game contest. He submitted the game and put a copyright note on it so that everyone knew it was his. The winner was he 2..”

Tetris’ commercial success may not have had an immediate financial impact for Pajitnov, but it still turned his life “upside down,” he says. “Because instead of being a programmer and mathematician as I was supposed to be, I became a game designer. It’s a totally different kind of attitude and approach to life. To make tools, I had to create tools, to use them, make money and take the tool to work. And now I was able to deliver pleasure and happiness directly from the screen.”

“That’s profound, that’s profound, man! Deliver happiness!” enthuses Rogers, who exudes the vibes of the Hawaiian good life at all times.

That was how Pajitnov ended up across the table from Rogers, without a personal financial interest in the deal, but negotiating on behalf of his game (or “my baby,” as he calls it). The two of them were at ELORG’s offices, which was a Soviet-controlled state monopoly for the export and import of software and hardware. It was in its pursuit to unify. Tetris rights, Rogers and Pajitnov’s Tetris Company would ultimately buy what remained of ELORG after the fall of the Soviet Union.)

Rogers might have been more of a hustler than a businessman, but Rogers could still program and knew game design. The film dramatizes a scene with the pair hunched over Pajitnov’s computer, coming up with improvements for Tetris. That never happened, but that’s not to say Rogers didn’t make hugely impactful design contributions to the game. Rogers was the one who designed both early Japanese console and Japanese computer versions. TetrisThe ability to simultaneously clear four lines and stack them was introduced by. This is now an integral part our core. Tetris design; it’s key to scoring strategy and to holding the player’s interest in the slow early stages, and it forms a vital component of the game’s deep, lizard-brain satisfaction.

Pajitnov, despite their different personalities and backgrounds, knew immediately that he was in a similar situation. “I immediately feel that we are connected. Then I feel connected and have plenty to talk about with my coworker! About a dozen titles are available for me to display. And so we became friends really fast after that.”

Apple image

As they say, the rest is history. Things hardly went smoothly, whether you believe the film’s outlandish spy-thriller version of events, or the more sober (but still thrilling) accounts in David Sheff’s book It’s overThe BBC documentary Russia with Love Tetris. But the course was set that would see Rogers and Pajitnov team up as the primary custodians — and beneficiaries — of the Tetris brand.

“We did a very good job to maintain the brand,” says Pajitnov. He points to the company’s establishment of a core design for Tetris that must be the basis of every licensed version, while Rogers eagerly notes that any improvements or new features outside developers bring to the game automatically become part of The Tetris Company’s intellectual property. Rogers says he tells every licensee that they have to “beat all the other versions of Tetris that have come out so far… Your version has to be better.”

It appears to be working. Recent successes of Pajitnov with Tetris Effect (an “absolutely great game”) and Tetris 99 (“My favorite… That’s a gift to my baby”). He thinks that this is the most competitive two-player version of Tetris There is more out there that needs to be found. “I do expect to have something much deeper in [terms of a] two-player version,” he says. “There are lots of them, lots of variations, but I kind of have the feeling that we are not there yet.”

Tetris is almost 40 years old now, and it has dominated decades of these men’s lives. Don’t they get bored of it?

“Would you ever get bored with the goose that lays the golden eggs?” exclaims Rogers incredulously. “Are you kidding me?”

“I’m with him on this,” says Pajitnov, with a chuckle. These two men have very different backgrounds, but they both come from a time in video games — and from one unique situation — when there were no rules and no standards for success. The goal was to reach the moon, and then you took whatever you could on your way back.

Rogers has the final word, and he’s unapologetic. “Feed the goose!”