The man who brought Tetris to the west reveals what the movie of his life got right and wrong, how he influenced Nintendo, and why he has now swapped gaming for climate change campaigning
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.
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