Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers have known each other for 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. They later formed a company together to manage the rights to Pajitnov’s timeless creation. When they spoke to me via Zoom to promote the new Tetris movie on Apple TV Plus — a film that concocts a must-see, frothing Cold War spy thriller based on the extraordinary true story of Rogers’ first negotiations with the Soviet Union — , the two communicate with sideways glances and hands on shoulders, teasing and correcting each other like the old comrades they are.
They’re chalk and cheese in a way. Pajitnov, who still speaks with a thick Russian accent, is a thoughtful, kindly science teacher guy, while Rogers is a thoroughly skilled salesman, leaning conspiratorially into the camera to spin his threads. But they’re both also game designers, although neither of them particularly intended to be. And it was thanks to that kinship that they instantly bonded in that meeting room in 1989.
“I walked in on Thursday… I think it was maybe Wednesday,” says Rogers, who has a habit of referring to distant events as if they happened last week. He was uninvited and unannounced in Moscow to try and 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 Tetris would be the perfect game for it. But the right was in chaos, and the Russian communist state held all the cards. (This part of the story is fairly accurately told in the film; though elsewhere it indulges in wild inventions, Pajitnov and Rogers say it fits the spirit of their adventure.)
“There were about eight guys sitting on the other side of the table and they gave me the third degree: who the hell am I and what have I been doing? And Alexey was one of them,” Rogers recalled. “It was hostile at first … I think what they were trying to do was they were trying to figure out what my point of view was. You know, my story was too improbable to be a story.”
Rogers must have been an unusual 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 with a minor in Dungeons & Dragons. He drew on that experience to write and publish The Black Onyx, which he swears was the first role-playing video game in Japan when it was released in 1984.
“My father used to be in the gem business; I worked for him for six years,” says Rogers. “So I sent an actual black onyx to the first 100 people who made it to the end of the game. That was marketing back then, you know!”
When Nintendo blew up the Japanese computer 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 film he is depicted sneaking in to sell the big man Tetris, but in reality he had earlier bonded with Yamauchi over a shared love of the traditional Japanese board game Go. Rogers faxed Yamauchi a Famicom port of a British Go video game and was in his office two days later.
“Yamauchi says to me, ‘I can’t give you programmers.’ I said, ‘I don’t need programmers,'” Rogers recalled. “‘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. I just pulled a number out of the hat. And he reached out across the table and shook my hand and said, ‘Deal’.”
Hiroshi Yamauchi (Togo Igawa) and Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) seal the deal in the Tetris movie.
Image: apple
From then on, Rogers would make sure that when he met Yamauchi it was the last meeting of the day so they could play Go together. Yamauchi was short on Go partners (in Japan at the time it was considered “monk activity, ritual stuff,” Pajitnov notes), and Rogers fed Nintendo’s inscrutable patriarch gossip about the industry. Yamauchi was feared from within Nintendo, and he appreciated Rogers’ unvarnished view from the outside.
“He fired the president of Nintendo Europe because he didn’t agree with him. It was just like that. bam! You know, iron fist,” says Rogers. “When everyone else is kissing your ass, it’s hard to figure out what’s really going on. I was just outside I bowed no lower to him than to anyone else. I treated him like an equal. And I don’t think many people could or would do that.”
Indeed, sitting at that table in Moscow, Rogers had serious support. This was not necessarily immediately clear to the Russian negotiators. But Pajitnov immediately had a good feeling about this strangely self-confident foreigner.
“He was a game designer! He was my first colleague in the world!”
“I see a different type of adventurer with a very long black mustache,” says Pajitnov. “And basically we realized that finally the right person for the rights to Tetris had come along. At least that was my understanding. First, he was very professional in business, his understanding of the industry. And second, he was a game designer! He was my first colleague in the world! Because in Russia at that time there was no such profession. I was the only one.”
Pajitnov, a puzzle enthusiast, had written Tetris while working as a researcher at the Computing Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The game quickly spread in Russia and around the world, but Pajitnov knew that if he tried to claim ownership of it, he would surely fail. Instead, he skillfully opted for the long game. He thought that if he helped the game be handled well, he would be able to make money in the long run.
“Once I realized that this is a good game and that I have some kind of obligation to release it, I realized that if I’m looking for money, I’m definitely going to lose,” says Pajitnov. “Because in the Soviet Union at that time there was no such thing as intellectual property. Since the game was developed on state-owned hardware and whatnot, that will be the end of it.
“So basically I’ve made the decision that I’m going to do whatever it takes to have a very nice release of the game. So I gave the rights to this game to the data center and then got everyone on my side.”
Nikita Efremov as Alexey Pajitnov in Tetris.
Image: apple
Playing the party game meant that Pajitnov secured Tetris – and ultimately himself – a bright future.
“I realized it’s not my last game. I was pretty sure I could compensate myself [the] Future with Tetris advertising. And that was a strategically very correct decision,” says Pajitnov with satisfaction. “So I never complain about it.”
Rogers chimes in, eager to share another example of his friend’s tactical prowess: “He did something very interesting early on: he submitted his game to a computer game competition. And that’s how everyone knew it was their game by submitting it and having a copyright notice on it. And he won second prize.”
The commercial success of Tetris may not have had an immediate financial impact on Pajitnov, but it still “turned his life upside down,” he says. “Because instead of being a programmer and a mathematician like I was supposed to be, I became a game designer. It’s a completely different attitude and way of life. I should make a tool, make a tool, make a tool, make a tool, make money, make a tool, go to the office and so on. And now I was able to deliver joy and happiness right from the screen.”
“That’s profound, that’s profound, man! Giving happiness!” raves Rogers, who exudes the vibes of the Hawaiian good life at all times.
That’s how Pajitnov ended up at Rogers’ table with no personal financial interest in the deal but negotiating on behalf of his game (or “my baby,” as he calls it). They were in the offices of ELORG, a Soviet state monopoly on the import and export of computer hardware and software. (In their bid to unify Tetris rights, Rogers and Pajitnov’s Tetris Company would eventually buy what remained of ELORG after the fall of the Soviet Union.)
While predominantly a businessman in the hustle, Rogers could code and he was knowledgeable about game design. The film dramatizes a scene where the pair are hunched over Pajitnov’s computer, dreaming up improvements to Tetris. That never happened, but that doesn’t mean Rogers didn’t make hugely impactful design contributions to the game. It was Rogers who introduced the ability to stack and erase up to four lines at a time in his early Japanese computer and console versions of Tetris. This has become an integral part of the Tetris core design; It’s key to scoring strategy and keeping the player interested in the slow early stages, and it’s a key component to the game’s deep, lizard-like satisfaction.
Despite their very different backgrounds and characters, Pajitnov knew right away that he had found a kindred spirit. “I immediately feel connected. And then I still have a lot to discuss with my colleague! I have about a dozen titles to show. And so we became friends very quickly after that.”
Taron Egerton as Henk Rogers and Nikita Efremov as Alexey Pajitnov in Tetris.
Image: apple
The rest, as they say, is history. Things hardly went smoothly, whether you believe the film’s offbeat spy-thriller version of the events, or the more sober (but still gripping) accounts in David Sheff’s book Game Over, or the BBC documentary Tetris: From Russia With Love. But the course was set for Rogers and Pajitnov to join forces as the primary custodians — and beneficiaries — of the Tetris brand.
“We have done a very good job of cultivating the brand,” says Pajitnov. He points to the company’s establishment of a core design for Tetris that must be the basis of any licensed version, while Rogers avidly notes that any improvements or new features that outside developers bring to the game automatically become part of The become a tetris company. Rogers says he tells every licensee that they “have to beat every other Tetris version that’s come out so far… Your version has to be better.”
It seems to work. Pajitnov points to recent successes with Tetris Effect (an “absolutely amazing game”) and Tetris 99 (“My favorite… This is a gift for my baby”). And he still believes that the ultimate two-player competitive version of Tetris is out there, waiting to be discovered. “I expect to have something much deeper [terms of a] Two-player version,” he says. “There’s a lot of that, a lot of variations, but somehow I feel like we’re not there yet.”
Tetris is now almost 40 years old and has dominated the lives of these men for decades. Don’t they get bored?
“Would you ever get bored with the goose that lays the golden eggs?” Rogers exclaims incredulously. “Are you kidding me?”
“I’m with him there,” says Pajitnov with a smile. These two men come from very different backgrounds, but they both come from a time in video games – and from a unique situation – when there were no rules and no standards of success. You shot for the moon and grabbed what you could grab on the way back down.
Rogers has the last word and he doesn’t apologize. “Feed the geese!”
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