The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers

Tetris is one of the most popular video games of all time, and Henk Rogers helped make it happen. He first discovered the game at a convention in 1988, and immediately saw how elegant and addictive it was. As a software developer based in Japan, Henk set out to obtain selected publishing rights, but waded into a tangle of red tape that stretched from Japan to the U. S. to the Soviet Union. He eventually ventured behind the Iron Curtain to bluster his way into the obscure government office that managed Tetris. While in Moscow, Henk also met the game’s inventor, Alexey Pajitnov, and the two of them hit it off. After much legal wrangling across many time zones, Henk and Alexey won the worldwide rights to the game; and today, Tetris has sold over 500 million copies. This episode was produced by Sam Paulson, with music by Ramtin Arablouei and Sam Paulson. Edited by Neva Grant, with research help from Katherine Sypher. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 5:10Guy Raz?

  Hey, you know, we hear a lot of stories on How I Built This about facing hurdles and overcoming obstacles. I recently talked about this with actor Billy Porter. He's won an Emmy, a Tony, and a Grammy, and is a red carpet icon. But he shared some pretty candid insights about spending nearly a decade in obscurity because he refused to be typecast and pigeonholed into the same roles again and again. You should definitely check out my interview with Billy Porter on my other podcast. It's called The Great Creators. Just search for The Great Creators with Guy Raz wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to thegreatcreators.com. And now, on to today's show.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Come January, it wasn't moving. Tetris wasn't moving. And what happens when they have product in January, like after Christmas, the distributors start dumping the rest of their inventory. They have to get rid of it because if it's not selling, it's never going to sell. Which means cut price, cut rate price. Yeah. And, oh my goodness. I had my sales guys call every distributor and say, "Hang on to your inventory. This is not like other games. It is going to take off much more slowly than other games. But once it takes off, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be a hit."

• 6:45Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:57Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Hank Rogers got hooked on Tetris and risked time, money, and a trip behind the iron curtain to spread the game around the world.

• 7:15Guy Raz?

  You can learn a lot by playing Tetris. Things like patience or strategy, even risk-taking and perseverance. You can also learn a lot by listening to How Tetris Came to Be because this is a story very much about patience, strategy, risk-taking, and perseverance. When Hank Rogers first encountered this obscure Russian video game at a convention back in 1988, he was instantly hooked. And he believed that others would be hooked as well.

• 7:48Guy Raz?

  But a lot of obstacles stood in Hank's way. There were Soviet bureaucrats, for starters. There were powerful companies like Atari claiming rights to the game. And executives at Nintendo who weren't convinced that Tetris was a gamble worth taking. This story is so full of intrigue, rivalries, and backstabbing that Hollywood made a fictionalized film based on Hank's life. That movie, by the way, is a lot of fun, but also partly made up. This version of the story that you're about to hear is not. It's the story of how Hank Rogers made Tetris one of the most popular video games of all

• 8:26Guy Raz?

  time, and how he and its original creator, Alexei Pajatnov, came to own it. Hank was born in the Netherlands, but his family moved to the US when he was a kid, first to New York and eventually to Hawaii. Hank's dad worked in the jewelry business and went on to move the family to Japan. But Hank stayed back in Hawaii to go to college.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  I always say that I majored in computer science and I minored in Dungeons and Dragons. We had a gaming club. And so what I did on the computer when I wasn't doing homework assignments is make little routines that would be like aids to the dungeon master so we didn't have to roll all those dice all the time. Because rolling dice is something a computer is really good at. And I'd have to store my programs on paper tape.

• 9:19Guy Raz?

  And to be clear, these were text-based games. These were not-- there were no graphics games.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Well, so the computer didn't have any graphics. So the information that I would give to the dungeon master is just reams of paper.

• 9:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  And--

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Basically, I took all the computer classes I could take. And at the end of like my third year, they called me in and says, Mr. Rogers. I said, what's going on? I said, what do you mean? He says, well, you haven't taken any of your core requirements. And I said, well, I've already been to high school. That was my New York attitude coming through. And they said, well, if you're not going to take your core requirements, you're not going to graduate. And I said, there must be some mistake. I'm not here to graduate. I'm here to get an education. And I think I already got it. Thank you.

• 10:13Guy Raz?

  So you don't finish university, but you end up moving to Japan to follow a girl who became your wife. And she was, is Japanese?

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:25Guy Raz?

  And I guess when you got there, you ended up joining your dad, working with your dad in the gem trade.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  For six years. I was mostly on the, I wasn't so much on the sales or any of that. I was on the figuring out new techniques for cutting new kinds of gem material. You know, that's sort of on the technical and mechanical side of that business.

• 10:50Guy Raz?

  How did his business do in Japan at the time?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  You know, like he, he went from rags to riches so many times. So, yeah, he was good at it. And but, but he never, he never did business properly. In other words, he never had an accountant. He never paid taxes. It was all just in his head. He would always just hand out money when he had money and, and not when he didn't.

• 11:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  He always did things by the seat of his pants. So he didn't, he didn't understand how to have a, you know, how can I say, a company with people that actually do the things that you need to get done without you.

• 11:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  That's, you know, that's a big, that's, okay. It's the first difference between my father and myself. I've got companies running all over the place. Even my first business, I, I had other people doing stuff so that the business would run even though I wasn't there at that moment.

• 11:52Guy Raz?

  So you worked with your dad for around six years. And I guess around 1982, you decide to leave and to start your own business. And it's related to the personal computer boom that's starting to happen, particularly in developed countries like the US and Japan. It's the early 80s, you've got the PCs coming to market, and it's going to change everything. You decide to start essentially a software company that would make, like, would create, like, role-playing games for PCs?

• 12:24Speaker 01

  The Japanese version of a PC, yes. Now, I didn't have a publishing company, and I didn't know how to publish or how to do any of that, or how to do business in Japan. I never studied business. And so I went to SoftBank. That was the, you know, SoftBank is this huge, multi-billion-dollar company today. But at that time, all they were was a little company doing distribution for computer software to computer shops. That's it. Anyway, I said, can you introduce me to a publisher? And they said, you know what, you really don't need a publisher. Just get your wife to answer the phone, and you can publish yourself.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  We'll introduce you to a company that can actually do the duplication of the cassettes and the discs, whatever, and you can pay them after we pay you. I said, wow, that sounds great. Okay. Sounds so simple. But of course, it wasn't so simple. And I didn't speak, read, or write Japanese at the time. So, yeah, that was a pretty interesting experience, starting a company without knowing anything.

• 13:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you, I guess, the first sort of role-playing game that you guys launched was called The Black Onyx.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So The Black Onyx was the first role-playing game in Japan. And this is in the days when one person could write a game all by themselves.

• 13:53Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Do all the graphics, do everything.

• 13:56Guy Raz?

  And you weren't moving around a person, you were, it was just, you were typing text into the computer, right?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, I actually had a pseudo 3D that you walked through.

• 14:08Guy Raz?

  Oh, okay, all right.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  So.

• 14:10Guy Raz?

  So you had like a controller, use like a, was there a mouse?

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Use the 10 key, use the 10 key, there was no mice yet, this is before, before mice. No, you used the 10 key to forward, turn left, turn right, move forward, one square at a time.

• 14:28Guy Raz?

  I mean, the game became quite successful, but like, what did that mean for your small business, Bulletproof Software? Was it, I mean, I know it became like a big game in Japan, but did that mean that you guys were like rolling in cash or not quite?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Well, let me backtrack, because this is an interesting part of the story. So I went, SoftBank had said they would buy 3,000 copies for Christmas. And when it came close to Christmas, they realized that nobody understood what a role-playing game was. And so, and the little advertising that I did was just completely ineffective. So they rolled back their initial order to 600, and I thought, oh, we're dead in the water. Come January, I called my guys together, by this time I had, you know, some testers and some office people. I said, like, how do people in Japan find out about computer games? I said, well, they read about them in the magazine.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  So what I did was I got one of my guys to call all the magazines and make appointments, and we actually went to visit them. And I would show them how to play Black Onyx and leave them with the game. And every single magazine that we visited had rave reviews like a month later. And then SoftBank came back and we had, for April, we had 10,000 units. And May, 10,000 units, so we were like killing it. We were a number one game in Japan in 1984.

• 15:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I guess, writing your own game is one thing, but really, basically, you want to be a game publisher. And so you start to look for other existing games that you could license or bring to Japan.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  I had to make a decision at the end of year two, whether I was going to make another game, or whether I was going to focus on running the company. And, you know, there's, my wife had been a computer widow for two years, meaning I was like, on the computer day and night for, for two years, pretty much. And I said, you know, this isn't something that I can do for the rest of my life. So I started traveling around the world looking for games to bring to Japan. Because at the time, movies were coming from other countries, and music was coming from other countries. So I could see that all this culture was being imported from, a lot of from the US. And, well, games shouldn't be any different.

• 16:51Guy Raz?

  And I guess, one of the games that you played was Go, the ancient Chinese game of logic, I guess you could describe it in. And I read that you thought that this was a game that you could maybe publish in, in Japan. And I guess you had this idea of maybe working with Nintendo. Tell me, tell me about how that, how that came about, and why you decided to, to take it to Nintendo?

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, my wife had read an article in, in a magazine, saying that Mr. Yamauchi plays Go.

• 17:23Guy Raz?

  And this was the guy who was the head of Nintendo?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  The head of Nintendo. So I sent him a fax. "Mr. Yamauchi, my name is Hank Rogers. I can make a Go game for your Nintendo machine. I'm leaving on Saturday. I would like to see you before I leave." I didn't tell him the part about, "I live in Japan, and I was going to be back next week." On Tuesday, I sent the fax. Wednesday, his assistant sends me a fax. "Mr. Yamauchi will meet you tomorrow."

• 17:53Guy Raz?

  Wow. So he's a captain of industry in Japan. I mean, big deal.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  He's the ayatollah of the computer game business. I mean, this guy is iron fist.

• 18:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  You know, nobody gets to see him. And I get to see him in two days. It's like, wow, that's amazing. So I come into the office, and he's sitting across from me, and Yamauchi says, "I can't give you any programmers." I said, "I don't need programmers. I just need money." And he says, "How much?" And I said, Gosh, I mean, I'm thinking of what's the biggest number I can think of right now. And I said $300,000. And he said, he reached across the table and said, "Deal." That was it. It's like, wow, holy smokes. That was so fast.

• 18:43Guy Raz?

  And you didn't need a license because Go was not owned by anybody. It was an ancient game.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:48Guy Raz?

  So you were essentially going to program, code the game and for a fee for $300,000. And then Nintendo would turn it into a game. And that was it. That was the deal.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  That was the deal. I contacted the programmer in England, made a deal with him, convinced him to come to Japan. And we spent next nine months, you know, creating all the graphics. And we had little ninjas jumping around. The stones were floating. And when the stone landed, it would fall down on its shadow so that you could... Oh, it was just great graphically. It was a great game.

• 19:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  So nine months later, I'm back in the room with Yamouchi, and he wants to play. And so he's got the machine set up, and he's fumbling with the controller. And I realize this guy's never played any of the games on his machine.

• 19:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  He hasn't, he's just run the company. He hasn't like played any of those games. So, okay, fine. And he hands the controller over to the guy sitting next to him, and he points to where he wants to play. "I want to go there, I want to go there, I want to go there." After one game, after one game, Mr. Yamouchi says, "It's too weak for Nintendo." I'm like flabbergasted. I mean, it's a miracle that this thing can play Go at all. And, you know, I'm fumbling for words. I said, "Mr. Yamouchi, it's an 8-bit computer. There's never going to be a stronger Go algorithm than this." He said, "It's too weak for Nintendo."

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Like, which part didn't you understand? So, again, I had to think fast. I said, "Okay, Mr. Yamouchi, maybe it's not strong enough for Nintendo, but it's strong enough for my company. Let me publish it." And he goes, "What about my money, the $300,000?" I said, "Okay, I'll pay you a dollar per unit until you get your money back." "Deal."

• 20:52Speaker 01

  And so that's how I became a Nintendo publisher.

• 20:55Guy Raz?

  So essentially, Mr. Yamouche from Nintendo was like, hey, we don't want this game. We don't want to, we don't want to make it. But if you want to make it, you know, and on your own and sell it to people and they can use it on Nintendo system, that's fine. That's, that's your decision.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, he just didn't want to put Nintendo's name on the game.

• 21:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I got you. So basically, you do this deal where you're going to pay him back a dollar for every cartridge you sell until they get their 300,000 back and how to do.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  We sold 150,000 copies.

• 21:30Guy Raz?

  All right, so not bad.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Not bad. He didn't get his money back.

• 21:33Guy Raz?

  But it's all right. But you got your fee. You got your fee, right?

• 21:37Speaker 01

  I got my, and I got my fingers dirty in the Nintendo business.

• 21:41Guy Raz?

  And, and I guess more importantly, you, you established a relationship with Nintendo. I mean, you had now an in to the top dog in Nintendo.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And then whenever I met him after that, I always set up the meeting on a day when I'm the last meeting, his last meeting, and then we'd play Go for the rest of the day. I had all this one-on-one time with Yamouche, which nobody had.

• 22:03Guy Raz?

  That's, that's what I'm wondering. Why would he give you some unknown 30-year-old at the time of day? And the guy's running Nintendo.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  I was, I was a Go player.

• 22:14Guy Raz?

  I'm surprised that his underlings didn't intervene and prevent you from, because you'd probably have to go through a secretary and make an appointment. And I'm surprised they weren't like, no, this guy cannot meet Mr. Yamouche.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Well, they did not have any say in what Mr. Yamouche did or didn't do.

• 22:34Guy Raz?

  That's like good contact, man.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  If, if he ever found out that one of his underlings had canceled a meeting, that person would be fired.

• 22:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So this is going to be a pression because eventually Nintendo's going to come back into this story. But, but you continue to pursue, you've got, you're running this company and, and you are running a publishing company. You're trying to, you know, you're trying to find a hit. And, and from a revenue standpoint, how is your business doing overall? Was it very successful, moderately successful, not successful?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  No, it was, it was, it was successful enough. You know, I was publishing, I published Star Wars. I published Electronic Arts, two of their, of their first four games. I was licensing games from all over the planet and publishing them in Japan.

• 23:24Guy Raz?

  And probably, I mean, because the video game industry was so new, there was probably, probably a lot of these companies were eager to get it to the Japanese market. And you, right, I mean, you were sort of had one foot in Japan, one foot in the US. You'd go back and forth.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the, the, the nice thing about me and, and publishing is that I got to make the decision. So I, I could go to a consumer electronics show, look at a game, I really like this game, okay, let's make a deal. I didn't have to send it back to Japan and have a, have a bunch of managers sign off, yes, I agree, yes, I agree, yes, I agree. I could make a decision. So I was always faster than everybody else.

• 24:05Guy Raz?

  And you were going to these trade shows in the US constantly looking for new games to, to bring back to Japan to license. And, and so you go to the Consumer Electronics Show, which still happens in Las Vegas every year, you're there in 1988, and you come across Tetris, which you'd never seen before?

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, there it was. And it, it just, it seemed out of place. You know, every other game was like graphics with little characters running around and bullets and god knows what. And here was a game that was just totally puzzled.

• 24:41Guy Raz?

  Just shapes, just geometric shapes.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  And that was very interesting to me, you know? Like, if you look at Go, it's just black and white stones.

• 24:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  It's the simplest looking game, and yet it's the deepest, most interesting game. So the fact that this, this game was like little squares didn't turn me off. I was just interested in, I just got hooked on it right there on, on the spot.

• 25:08Guy Raz?

  It's interesting, because I'm thinking back to 1988, and I was probably playing, I don't know, like Super Mario Brothers and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out and Zelda, The Legend of Zelda.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:20Guy Raz?

  There were some pretty sophisticated games. And you come across Tetris and you're like, wow, this is amazing. I mean, it's great, because it seems like counterintuitive that you would go to the flashy, cool games with characters.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, you would think. But no, that's not how my mind works, obviously. I got hooked on the game and I said, well, this is a great game. So and then I took it back to Japan, you know, samples, and sure enough, everybody else in the company got hooked on it, too. So it wasn't just me.

• 25:56Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Hank brings Tetris to Japan, gets a $2 million loan to keep production going, and then discovers that even though he thinks he has the rights to the game, he really doesn't. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 26:22Guy Raz?

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• 27:49Guy Raz?

  NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization, and how to position your business to prosper from it.

• 28:34Guy Raz?

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• 29:54Guy Raz?

  One more thing before we get back to the show. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. It's usually just at the top of the app, and it's totally free.

• 30:18Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1988, and Hank is hooked on Tetris and trying to find out everything he can about it. Who owns it? Who created it? And it turns out, the inventor is this Russian computer guy at the Academy of Sciences in what was then the Soviet Union.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Alexei Pajitnov is his name. And he's a mathematician, working mostly on voice recognition. And he needed to move to a new machine, and he was assigned to learn how do you program on that new machine? And he decided to make the pentamino puzzle. You get a little rectangle, and you have to put the pieces into the rectangle, and the last piece never fits. That's the pentamino puzzle. And he realized that it was so slow that he started thinking about, like, how can I make this faster? And then one of the things that he made is the routine to make the piece rotate.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  And the rotation was so fast that it started making him think that he should make a real-time game. And, well, he just took one of the blocks off the pentamino puzzle and made them into tetraminos. And, you know, well, that's basically Tetris. The falling blocks.

• 31:42Guy Raz?

  And this game, I guess, kind of was like wildfire in the Soviet Union. Like, office workers across the Soviet Union were, like, copying this game, like, from floppy disk to floppy disk and playing it.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Yes. Basically, they made the PC version. And that's what went viral. And it went viral to the point... Where they were losing productivity. I mean, it's like-

• 32:07Guy Raz?

  Everybody in the offices was playing Tetris.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Everywhere, everywhere. And it's like, yeah, you could say this could have been an insidious thing done by, by the West to stop people working in the Soviet Union.

• 32:20Guy Raz?

  Ah, it was like a Western conspiracy to get people to stop playing Tetris.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  It could easily have been, but you know.

• 32:25Guy Raz?

  And I guess even like already in the mid 80s, people from outside the Soviet Union, Westerners somehow discovered this game.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  It spread behind the Iron Curtain.

• 32:39Guy Raz?

  All right. So meanwhile, I guess you had learned that, that there were two different companies that seemed to have the rights to Tetris. One was in England. It was called Mirasoft. And the other was in the US called Spectrum Holobite. But I guess you thought that, that maybe you could get the license for Japan. Is that, is that what you were thinking?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was thinking, well, first of all, I, I said, well, I know Mirasoft because I've been to England also looking for games. So I knew them. Then I got in contact with Mirasoft. Then they said, you know, Gilman Louis is coming to Japan. He's going to deal the rights to Tetris. So talk to him. Fine. I knew Gilman Louis.

• 33:18Guy Raz?

  So this guy was a representative from?

• 33:20Speaker 01

  He was running Spectrum Holobite and they were a sister company with Mirasoft.

• 33:24Guy Raz?

  So he was coming to Japan to peddle this offer to see who, who would be the highest bidder?

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Yes. And I basically made him an offer for personal computers, for console and for arcade. Those are all the platforms I could think of in Japan.

• 33:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah. For the rights to get Tetris.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Yes. So, yeah, we had a deal. And two weeks later, he calls me and he says, I'm really sorry, but the, you know, the deal that we did couldn't have been made because meanwhile, Mirasoft has given all those rights to Atari games. So I go, what? And, you know, this is ridiculous. It was just like, they didn't need the Japanese rights for anything because they didn't have any business in Japan. And I, and I, are you kidding me? I was livid. We had made a deal. You know, when you shake a deal, you know, it's like, this is a lawsuit. I didn't threaten him with a lawsuit. I said, "We made a deal, Gilman." And he, you know, sheepishly came back. He says, "Okay, I'll see what I can do."

• 34:29Speaker 01

  And what he could do was, he could get me the personal computer rights back. So I had personal computers.

• 34:39Guy Raz?

  You'd only have the rights to make a game in Japan for personal computers. So floppy disk, basically.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:45Guy Raz?

  But you wouldn't have the console rights or the arcade game rights?

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:49Guy Raz?

  Okay, so that was a consolation prize. Were you happy with that?

• 34:53Speaker 01

  No, I wanted Nintendo.

• 34:56Guy Raz?

  You wanted the rights to put this on Nintendo because you, at that point, Nintendo was really kind of a dominant console.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Yes, it was the way to make money.

• 35:07Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  It's, you know, like, personal computers, you can copy that stuff. So there's only so much you can sell. But cartridges, you can't copy them.

• 35:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  If somebody wants to play a Nintendo game, they have to buy a Nintendo game.

• 35:21Guy Raz?

  But you did not have those rights. You only had the PC rights.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:25Guy Raz?

  All right, all right. So I guess you decided to reach out to Atari because you'd been told that they had the rights for Tetris on the console and you want to buy those rights from, presumably from them, right? I mean, to publish the game in Japan.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Then I started communicating directly with Atari Games and said, "Look, I want to license Tetris for the Japanese market." And I said to my team in Japan, I said, "Look, I'm going to the States. I'm not coming back until I have the Tetris rights." And so I went to San Jose, I met with Nakajima, the president of Atari Games, and made my pitch, why we should be the one to publish Tetris in Japan. And then it went radio silent. I was there for 10 days. And then I had my second meeting. I had dinner with, we had sushi and he agreed. He agreed to give you the rights to publish Tetris for consoles in Japan.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  For Nintendo. So it was very, very interesting. I think he must have needed money at this point. I think I made the deal for $300,000. It was a regular deal. And the deal enabled you to have the license to sell the cartridges for the Nintendo system. Okay. Yes. And that was in like 88? Yeah, well, it was, it was like probably September-ish. It takes two months to create the cartridges. So, you know, I was trying to make it in time for Christmas. How did you finance making the cartridges? Because you had to pay Nintendo to manufacture them. In the beginning, the orders weren't that big. The original order was 40,000

• 37:09Speaker 01

  units, which is not enough. You need 200,000 units in order to get a second order. That 40,000, that was another reason for me to meet Yamauchi, the head of Nintendo. So I miss Mr. Yamauchi. I don't know whether it's my sales or my marketing that sucks, but I think I may have one of the greatest computer games of all time and my salespeople could only get 40,000 units. And then he calls in Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, and says, Miyamoto, is this a great game? And Miyamoto says, yes. And Yamauchi says, how do you know? This is because your accountants, your secretaries, all of you people are playing

• 37:50Speaker 01

  this game at lunch and after work when they, when they don't have to play games. And so Yamauchi calls in Imanishi, who's the number two at Nintendo. I said, Imanishi, I want you to pull distribution and make them order more. That's like, wow, that's some serious action there. Wow. And that was simply because of his trusted lieutenant approved the game, liked the game. Well, there's that, and he liked me, I guess. I mean, why would he do something like that? You were his go buddy. Yeah, I was his go buddy. Anyway, they called around and we got another 30,000. So it was like 70,000. It wasn't enough. Still wasn't enough. But anyway, we published that Christmas, 70,000 copies of Tetris on Nintendo.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  All right, so how did it do? At first, it was miserable because you can't look at the box and understand what Tetris is. The only way that you can know what Tetris is is by playing it. No amount of advertising helps Tetris. You have to just play it. And so, come January, it wasn't moving. Tetris wasn't moving. And what happens when they have product in January, like after Christmas, the distributors start dumping the rest of their inventory. They have to get rid of it because if it's not selling, it's never going to sell. Which means cut price, cut rate price. Yeah. And, oh my goodness.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  I had my sales guys call every distributor and say, "Hang on to your inventory. This is not like other games. It is going to take off much more slowly than other games. But once it takes off, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be a hit." And some distributors actually listened to us. Well, by the end of January, Tetris was sold out everywhere. And based on what? How? Well, people started playing it. They just started discovering. Yeah, it went viral. But at the end of January, the orders started coming from distribution.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  They wanted more, and this time they wanted 200,000 copies of Tetris. And it's like... Wow, where am I going to get the money to? That was more money than we could muster.

• 40:11Guy Raz?

  You had to finance printing or manufacturing 200,000 more cartridges.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's $2 million. So I convinced my wife to convince her parents to put up all of their real estate as collateral for a loan.

• 40:27Guy Raz?

  Seems like a pretty good gamble, given that you had sold it out and people were kind of going crazy over it.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it seemed like a slam dunk, right? I mean, like, the game had taken off, they were clamoring for it, so we just had to rush to get this stuff into production. And, yeah, I saw no reason not to make that gamble, so to speak.

• 40:54Guy Raz?

  All right, so Tetris is starting to take off on the Nintendo consoles in Japan. And by the way, were they available on consoles in the US?

• 41:06Speaker 01

  That would be later.

• 41:08Guy Raz?

  Okay, that would be later. So right now, this is just licensed in Japan, it's on the console, Nintendo console. And meantime, you catch wind of a new product that Nintendo is working on. And this is going to be a handheld game system, which we now know and love as the Game Boy. But how did you find out about that product?

• 41:29Speaker 01

  You know, we are in the business. So everybody in the business knew that Nintendo is going to come out with this new machine. It wasn't like a big secret. Everybody in Japan knew about it. So when it was like going to come out and I saw the specs, I said, oh, my God. First of all, the screen is tiny. Second of all, it's all, it's black and white, and it doesn't have many dots on the screen. So most games that are on console are colorful and have a lot of detail. All that detail would be lost on this tiny screen. But Tetris would work just perfectly.

• 42:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So the first thing I imagine is you go to Nintendo to pitch them on this idea.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did go to Redmond and pitched it to Arakawa.

• 42:20Guy Raz?

  President of Nintendo America.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:22Guy Raz?

  Why did you have to go to Nintendo US, right? Why not pitch it to Nintendo in Japan?

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Because Nintendo US has a policy to include a game with every new hardware platform that they sell.

• 42:35Guy Raz?

  I see. So you thought, wait, if we can get this included with every Game Boy, slam dunk. It's like when U2 released that record on every iPod, right? Everybody would have Tetris.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Yep, it would be an explosion. And it kind of was. So I went to Redmond and talked to Arakawa. And I said, Mr. Arakawa, you should include Tetris with the Game Boy. And he said, why should I include Tetris? I have Mario.

• 43:04Guy Raz?

  Greatest probably brand that they had at that point.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I said, if you want little boys to buy your Game Boy, then include Mario. But if you want everyone to buy your Game Boy, include Tetris. And then he calls in his experts. And they all came and said, yep, Tetris is being played by everybody. It's completely genderless. It's the first game that was being played by women.

• 43:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Just by that alone, it could double the sales. And then I said, and then you can still sell Mario afterwards because every kid's going to want to have Mario.

• 43:40Guy Raz?

  And that convinced him?

• 43:41Speaker 01

  And that convinced him.

• 43:43Guy Raz?

  So they agree to sell this with every Game Boy. But then you still had more work to do, right?

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Well, of course, I didn't have the rights for handheld.

• 43:54Guy Raz?

  And did they know that at Nintendo? Did they say, well, or did you have to say to them, look, I don't have the rights, but I'm going to get them. So let's just, you know?

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's part of my business strategy. I never lie to anybody. I never say I have something that I don't have.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  I would say, I can get you the rights. And by that time, by the way, I had already hired Robert Stein to get me the handheld rights.

• 44:21Guy Raz?

  And I guess we even mentioned to him, Robert Stein is kind of a key player in the story because he was. This guy who early on negotiated with the Soviets to get the license for Tetris, for other companies overseas. And so I guess presumably he knew the right people in Russia, like he knew where to go.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:46Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you had hired him to be your agent in Moscow to get you the handheld rights to the game?

• 44:52Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 44:52Guy Raz?

  Okay, I got you. So you were fairly confident this is going to be a pretty straightforward transaction?

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I'd been faxing him, this is still the days of fax, I've been faxing him every week, like, what's going on? When are you going to give me the rights? And so on and so forth. And he just like, yeah, I'm going to do it soon, I'm going to do it soon, I'm going to do it soon. And so that's kind of the situation I was in when it became February of 1989. So what happened was Arakawa made me a deal. I made him an offer and he shook my hand. It was like a million dollar upfront, which was like, yeah, right on, great deal.

• 45:34Guy Raz?

  He would pay you a million dollars upfront?

• 45:37Speaker 01

  A million dollars upfront. It was a dollar a unit for a million units. That was his minimum guarantee.

• 45:43Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  We shook hands on that. And then I'm back in Japan and I'm like, now I'm really on Stein. Come on, we got to get this deal done. Let's go, let's go. It turns out that Stein had to clear up the original contracts that he had because they were crap. They were really bad, badly written contracts. And it was like, it was like taking candy from a baby kind of stuff.

• 46:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  The Soviets just didn't have any experience with intellectual property. And here they were, you know. They were getting a percentage of a percentage of a percentage.

• 46:25Guy Raz?

  The Russians weren't getting anything.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  They weren't getting anything.

• 46:27Guy Raz?

  But you were not getting, you were not getting enough communication or feedback from him. It was making you nervous. And so you had to, you decided to take drastic action, I guess.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I took drastic action. I got a tourist visa and went to Moscow myself.

• 46:42Guy Raz?

  In February of 89, you fly to Moscow. This is like at the height of Glassnost, right?

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, Perestroika and Glassnost were just starting to happen. So it wasn't the, like, going to North Korea today.

• 46:58Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  You know, it was already, people were already feeling a little bit of freedom.

• 47:02Guy Raz?

  Right. The Berlin Wall would come down several months later, but, but still, it was a time of liberalization.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:09Guy Raz?

  But you decided that you had to go there to figure out what was going on because you had no insight.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, I needed to get there before Stein licensed it to Mirasoft or somebody else.

• 47:24Guy Raz?

  Right. Because then you would lose the opportunity to have Tetris on every Game Boy.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  I would, yeah, I would, I would, I'd be losing out on the million dollar deal. Come on.

• 47:33Guy Raz?

  Right, right. So you get to Moscow in February of 1989. And of course, that's where Tetris was invented by Alexei, by Alexei Pajinov.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:45Guy Raz?

  And he was like a software guy who worked for the, for the government. Like, he didn't, he didn't have the rights to the game, right? But, but there was this one Soviet organization that you, I guess you could maybe talk to about the rights. And it was, it was called like Elorg or Elorg?

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Yes, Electronorg Teknik.

• 48:05Guy Raz?

  Okay. And it was, it was this Soviet organization that oversaw software and hardware exports, I guess.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, export imports. I don't exactly know what, but they were, they were definitely the ones that had the power to speak to people outside.

• 48:20Guy Raz?

  Hmm. So, so what happened when you went to Moscow and?

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Showed up there at L ORG. You like, you walk into the lobby and you say, what? Well, it's before, it's before this, okay? I'm outside the door and my interpreter says, you can't go in there. I said, what do you mean, I can't go in there? He said, you need, you have a tourist visa. You can't go in there. I said, I said, look, I didn't come all this way to stand in front of a door and go back to Japan, get a visa and then come back. No, that's not how it works. I'm going in. Are you coming with me? No, I can't. It's like, okay, fine, I'm going in. And I went in and it's a lobby of, you know, office building kind of place. And there's the window off to the side. You could see that's the window where you're supposed to present your credentials.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, obviously I didn't have any credentials, so I didn't go to that window. I just stood there in the lobby and waited for somebody to speak to me. Yeah. So it took a while, but you know, maybe like, I don't know, 10 minutes. Finally, somebody came and talked to me and she said, what are you looking for? In English, she asked you? In English, yes, in English. And so I showed her, I'm the publisher of this game, I'm Tetris, and I'm looking for someone to talk to me about the Game Boy rights. And, and she said, okay, wait here. And she disappeared and a little while later comes down the stairs, come this old man, and that's, that was Mr. Belikov. And who is Mr. Belikov?

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't know who he was at the time. I had no idea who anybody was. But Mr. Belikov would be the one that I would negotiate this whole deal with. So he comes down, was he mad? Was he puzzled? Was he? No, he was, he was puzzled, you know? Hello?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  And, you know, who are you? What do you want? And I said, I'm the publisher of this game in Japan. And he took the Tetris cartridge box into his hand and, and he looked at it and looked at it and he looked at me and he said, we never licensed console rights to anyone.

• 50:36Guy Raz?

  You showed him a Nintendo cartridge of Tetris and he said,

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:40Guy Raz?

  "You don't have the rights to this."

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Nobody has the rights to this.

• 50:43Guy Raz?

  Did he even know what it was? Did he know what a Nintendo system was?

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Kind of. I think he figured it out pretty quickly. I don't know if I described it to him.

• 50:50Guy Raz?

  He knew it wasn't for a PC.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 50:52Guy Raz?

  And so did he say, "Come into my office? Like, let's talk."

• 50:54Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no. That's, no, no. I did not know who he was and I did not want to just talk to an underling. I wanted to talk to somebody who could make a decision. And so I said, "I will come back tomorrow. I would like to meet someone to talk about the Game Boy rights." But you missed the point just now. I'm standing there and he's just told me that I don't have the right to publish the 200,000 cartridges.

• 51:26Guy Raz?

  And by the way, to be clear, you thought you already had those rights. They were for the console, which you would leverage the $2 million for.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Yes. So I'm in the middle of that. They're already in manufacture. I'm not going to get my money back. If somebody else swoops in and gets those rights, I am totally screwed.

• 51:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  And so I...

• 51:54Guy Raz?

  You could destroy those games.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And so I decided, "I'm going to focus on the Game Boy deal. Let me do that one thing which is absolutely clear." And so I said, "I'll come back tomorrow." So he said, "Yes, come back tomorrow at 1 o'clock, whatever." And the reason I wanted it to be the next day is because I wanted him to have the right people in the room, right. And the next day, in the room, eight people and me, I was being interrogated.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Who are you? What are you doing? And you know, I'm a Dutchman who sounds like an American who has a publishing company in Japan, publishing, you know, game that he claims to have licensed from.

• 52:40Guy Raz?

  And did they, were they, did they seem hostile? Like, hey, like, like, sort of looking at you like you were a thief? Like you had stolen this, the rights to this?

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was very strange. Yeah, they were very suspicious.

• 52:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  I mean, who the hell am I?

• 52:58Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment. A secret shot of vodka to celebrate a deal. And Hank starts a new company with the one guy who hasn't made a dime of Tetris. It's inventor. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 53:33Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. So it's early 1989 and Hank Rogers is in Moscow, hoping to get the rights to publish Tetris on the Game Boy. And he's sitting in the one Soviet office where he might be able to negotiate that, Ilorg, which oversees the export of computer software. Trouble is, the meeting feels more like an interrogation. And then Hank learns that one of the people in the room is Alexei Pashinov, the inventor of Tetris.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  He had to be in the room because he's the only one in the room who knew anything about computer games, besides me. Those guys, the lot of them, had, had no clue. All they understood was, was money, license, you know, that kind of stuff. They didn't understand what a game was.

• 54:22Guy Raz?

  So when you met Alexei, was, were you like?

• 54:28Guy Raz?

  Such an honor to meet you. I love your game. Do you remember what you said to it?

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I'm in love with your game. You've created something amazing. And, you know, it's very interesting because Alexei, and I talked to him about the game, and Alexei, that was the thing that flipped him, because he'd never met a game designer before. That was the first game designer that he met. He'd met other people, like Robert Stein, who were Wheeler dealers and trying to license, but they weren't game designers. I was a game designer.

• 55:06Guy Raz?

  So you had to untangle, so this conversation really had to begin by untangling the facts, figuring out what happened. Because as far as you were concerned, you had the legitimate rights to this, but they probably wanted to understand what happened. And you had to start to say, well, there's this guy Stein, and they probably knew Stein. And so this must have been a very complicated conversation.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Well, OK. So I had to explain to them how the whole business works. I basically taught them everything they needed to know about what the computer game, what's the difference between console and personal computer and arcade, and how each of these things made money, and how the, I basically explained everything to them.

• 55:52Guy Raz?

  And there was somebody in the room translating everything you were saying?

• 55:55Speaker 01

  They were, for those that weren't, that didn't speak English, yeah, they would stop every once in a while and go into Russian, whatever, discussion.

• 56:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  And it's funny, because when they get into a discussion, sometimes it sounds like they're fighting.

• 56:11Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  It's like, are they talking, like, trying to decide which Gulag they're going to send me to? Is that what they're? It was kind of creepy, you know, because they're arguing with each other and then they would come back and start speaking English to me again.

• 56:27Guy Raz?

  So you start to explain all this to them and at the end of the, what was a couple hours presumably, at the end of it, were they like, oh, OK, we get it now. Thank you so much for explaining this.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Well, they visibly relaxed and they said, OK, make us an offer.

• 56:47Guy Raz?

  For, for what?

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. First of all, they asked me, so, Mr. Rogers, when do you plan to come back to Moscow? And I said, what do you mean, come back to Moscow? They said, well, you know, we have to think about this and make our decision. And I said, this is not how it works. When I leave here, I either leave here with the Game Boy rights or I leave here without the Game Boy rights, but I'm not coming back. I started realizing that I have to be forceful with them because they're forceful with each other. You know what I'm saying? Like, there's not a, like, warm and fuzzy, nice conversation. No, it's all kind of adversarial. They were that way with each other. So then I started realizing I have

• 57:31Speaker 01

  to be that way, too. And so they said, well, make us an offer. I said, OK. I went back to my hotel and I made a little one-page legalese document and I presented it to them the next day. And I gave them a week and we managed to hammer out an agreement within that week. And the offer that I'd made them was I would pay them 25 cents for every Game Boy Tetris that was sold. And I'd, you know, we'd sort of like, on the back of the envelope, how many units will Nintendo sell that include Tetris? And that number was something like

• 58:16Speaker 01

  30 million. So 30 million times 25 cents is a big number.

• 58:21Guy Raz?

  So if you sold 10 million units, they'd get $2.5 million, basically?

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 58:27Guy Raz?

  OK. And, I mean, in today's terms, it doesn't sound like a lot of money, but... That was a lot of money back then?

• 58:34Speaker 01

  That was an impossibly huge amount of money for them.

• 58:37Guy Raz?

  Right, I got you, okay. So you were taking a gamble, but you knew that this game was already taking off in Japan? And that you already had the agreement from Nintendo USA to put it with every Game Boy sold as a bundled game that was included?

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:54Guy Raz?

  So they agreed, and it took you about a week to make this deal?

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, next Friday, we signed the deal. We broke Gorbachev's rule, which says no alcohol in the office. And we broke out a bottle of vodka and all had a shot. And they posted people by the doors and the windows to make sure nobody was watching. And so after I signed the contract, lockdown handheld, Mr. Belikov asks me, "Mr. Rogers, how would you like to license the console rights?" And like, wow, that sounds, yes, of course.

• 59:35Guy Raz?

  And of course, he could offer you that because, as he already told you, nobody owned the console rights at the time, right? Not you, or Atari, or Nintendo, no one.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Nobody.

• 59:46Guy Raz?

  Okay, and at this point, this all gets a little complicated and sort of tied up in legal red tape. But I guess eventually, when all was said and done, you made out pretty well. You secured the rights for Nintendo in Japan. And then you also had the rights, the worldwide rights, to Tetris on the Game Boy, right?

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:00:09Guy Raz?

  And what happened when Tetris was shipped off with the Game Boys?

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Oh, they ended up doing 30 million.

• 1:00:18Guy Raz?

  30 million?

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  30 million packed in and another 5 million as just sold as a boxed product.

• 1:00:25Guy Raz?

  Wow. And meanwhile, I mean, in the early 1990s... The Soviet Union dissolves, right?

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:00:33Guy Raz?

  And so a lot of these kind of government organizations get privatized. And Alorg becomes a private company. And Alexei, the inventor of the game, he actually had to make a deal with them, I guess, that in 1995, he would finally get the rights, well, the rights would revert back to him, right?

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:56Guy Raz?

  Because he had not made a dime off Tetris at this point, the guy, right? He had not made a cent.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Not a cent.

• 1:01:02Guy Raz?

  All the money was going to the Soviet agency. And who knows who was scheming off the top, right?

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. So all the people who ended up, like, how did Belikov go from being an administrator of a government organization to owning it?

• 1:01:22Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  How did that happen?

• 1:01:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  I remember there was a very interesting moment in time when it was just the transition, when it became a private company. And it was Mr. Belikov called me up in a panic and said, you know, the money that you cabled me, can you like, get it back and then send it to this new bank account?

• 1:01:44Guy Raz?

  Yes, to the attention of M. Belikov.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:50Guy Raz?

  So Alexei had anticipated this all. And they were going to put up a fight because there's some real money to be made.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:01:55Guy Raz?

  And how did you manage to prevent that from happening?

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  And which is why Alexei asked me to help him. And it's 93 and he said, look, I'm going to make you an offer. You're going to represent me. You're going to take care of me and you and me are going to be partners. And basically made me offer and we shook hands in 93. That handshake is still alive today.

• 1:02:23Guy Raz?

  Okay. He said, you get a cut, I'll get a cut, but I want you to be in charge of resting the rights away from these.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not resting the right. I want you to make sure that I get my rights back.

• 1:02:40Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  But anyway, during 95, the Lorg came. We had the meeting in Redmond and I was ready to, I mean, I was representing Alexia. I was ready to give them 20% and they were ready to give me 20%. You know, so we were very far apart.

• 1:02:56Guy Raz?

  You were far away.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Very far apart. And I remember being in a room and it's all Nintendo lawyers. And then there's Mr. Belikov and his lawyer. And I said, well, I'm not a lawyer, but I kind of feel that at some point there's going to be a jury of Americans that are going to decide who owns the rights to Tetris, whether it's the former Soviet Ministry of Import and Export of Software or the creator of the game.

• 1:03:28Guy Raz?

  So what happened?

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  So basically, I started hammering out the deal with Belikov. And we end up making the Tetris company and it's 50/50. That's because they had the copyright and trademark in 60 countries and that was just too much for me to try to fight.

• 1:03:47Guy Raz?

  So they would own half of the rights and you and Alexia would own the other half, essentially? That was the agreement you made?

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  That's how we divided the money. So basically, we just decided to, I don't know, call it a truce.

• 1:04:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So now you have an incentive to expand the brand because you own 50% of it. Like, if you were just a licensee, you have no incentive to make it better because you're essentially, they own the IP. And so you're like, well, why aren't we going to make it better?

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  You understand it exactly. And I said, look, before we split the money, I'm going to need the money to brand manage this game. And so I want a percentage off the top to do all of the licensing and to do all of the brand management. The problem was that up till then, everybody who licensed Tetris from a Lorg basically had no guide about how to build Tetris. And so the versions of Tetris that came out of different publishers were very different. Give you an example. A Game Boy player in Japan could not play the arcade because the it's like the brakes and the gas pedal were reversed.

• 1:04:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  So it was my job to standardize Tetris across all platforms. And we've done that.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  But seven years into it, Belikov's team got greedy. And they said, well, we don't actually want you to do brand management. We just want to find somebody to license Tetris. Because we don't want to pay you for to doing brand management. Without understanding that that brand management is really, really important.

• 1:05:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah. They wanted to stop paying you the fee to manage it. And that presumably created another conflict.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that created a conflict. And in all of the deals up till then, the way it worked is I get one vote, Belikov gets one vote. If it's yes, yes, then it's a it's a deal. If it's yes, no, then it's no deal. So basically, at that point, for the next three years, no deals went through because every deal that I brought to the table, he said no. And every deal that he brought to the table, I said no.

• 1:05:56Guy Raz?

  Which was impossible and untenable. So you had to figure out either to buy them out or for them to buy you out. And they were probably not going to buy you out.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so during that during those three years, I was I had gotten a license to Tetris for mobile phones in the US. And I was I hit it out of the park in the US.

• 1:06:17Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  I made a company called Blue Lava Wireless.

• 1:06:21Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  And I I basically published Tetris and other games.

• 1:06:27Guy Raz?

  And I read that you guys were doing like more than $20 million in sales.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And that's, I don't know, 50% profit. But at the end of three years, my license ran out. And during that three years, we were Belikov and me were we were duking it out. We were in court. I'm on the way to proving that he has no rights at all in New York. And so we were on that we were on the way.

• 1:06:55Guy Raz?

  And meanwhile, there's this company jammed at. That comes along and offers to buy Blue Lava Wireless and obtain a license to Tetris. But what was their incentive to buy it if your license for mobile was about to expire?

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what I had to do is I had to collect the worldwide rights to Tetris Mobile into Blue Lava Wireless. And in order to do that, I had to get rid of Belikov. So I raised the money to buy out Belikov.

• 1:07:29Guy Raz?

  You raised the money to buy out the former Elorg guys, or they were still called Elorg, I think, but that was a private company.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Yep. I ended up buying them. I own Elorg now.

• 1:07:39Guy Raz?

  So now with them out of the picture, with the Elorg guys out of the picture, you and Alexi owned 100% of this company.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Yes. And the company that I sold, Blue Lava Wireless, what I did was I gave that company a 15-year license to Tetris from the Tetris company. So we never lost the ownership of Tetris.

• 1:08:01Guy Raz?

  And they bought you guys out for like $130 million. They paid a lot of money.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, they paid a lot of money. It's good.

• 1:08:07Guy Raz?

  So, all right, so this happens, 2005, you're free and clear. You sell Blue Lava. Finally, you own, you guys own Tetris. And like a month later, you get a massive heart attack. You're playing golf and you're like near death. Like you were just on the edge of death.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was actually tennis. The ambulance driver said that he didn't think I was going to make it.

• 1:08:32Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  When I got to the hospital, they rolled me straight into the OR. I was still conscious. I signed the paper saying, yes, you can operate, which is nice because if I couldn't sign, my wife would have had to sign. She didn't know where I was.

• 1:08:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  So I would have died.

• 1:08:52Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  I have two stents. I have two stents. But in that ambulance on the way to the hospital, the first thing I thought of was, you've got to be kidding me. I haven't spent any of the money yet.

• 1:09:02Guy Raz?

  I made all this money and now I'm about to die.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Are you going to take me out? The second thing I said, no, I'm not going. I still have stuff to do. And so in the recovery room, I started thinking about, what did I mean by that?

• 1:09:14Guy Raz?

  Before you tell me about that, were you, I mean... I mean, I've talked to you, I've seen you. You seem like a pretty healthy guy. I mean, was it just the stress and the lifestyle of just grinding for all those years that led you to that point? Were you not living a healthy life? Or were you just genetically predisposed to it, or what?

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  The doctor said, "Don't change a thing. Don't change your exercise, don't change your diet, you're fine. This is an anomaly." So, yeah, I mean, you could say that it was stress and all this kind of stuff, but I just generally don't take stress. Maybe I do, and I just don't realize it. But I'm pretty relaxed about things.

• 1:09:58Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right, so this happens, and you've achieved success, financial success, and yet, like, you were near death. You must have had some big thoughts, I would imagine, Hank.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I kind of worked it back from the end of my life. You know, I thought about, what is it that's going to upset me if I didn't do something by the end of my real life, the next time? And I found my bucket list. I searched for and found my missions in life.

• 1:10:29Guy Raz?

  Tell me what you started thinking.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Well, the first one came to me in the back of the newspaper. It said, "Oh, by the way, we're going to kill all the coral in the world by the end of this century. And what's causing that is ocean acidification. What's causing that? It's carbon dioxide. What's causing that? We are. So, mission number one is to end the use of carbon-based fuel." And I started a foundation in Hawaii called the Blue Planet Foundation, and we worked to end the use of carbon-based fuel in Hawaii.

• 1:10:57Guy Raz?

  So, you decide that you're going to devote your life to environmental causes? That it was, you were moving away from video game? I mean, you still own the license to Tetris, but you were going to shift your focus on climate change causes, issues?

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Well, it's not just climate change. I have four missions, but yeah.

• 1:11:15Guy Raz?

  Please, tell me what they are, yeah.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  First mission is to end the use of carbon-based fuel. Second one is to end war, which is, goes back to when I was a student in high school.

• 1:11:25Guy Raz?

  It's ambitious, but okay, I like it.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  And number three is to make a backup of life by going to other planets and bringing life to other planets.

• 1:11:32Guy Raz?

  I like it.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  And number four is to find out how the universe ends and do something about it. I think the reason that the last one exists is to make the other ones seem reasonable when they're, they could seem unreasonable.

• 1:11:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Okay, so in the scope of things, compared to the end of the universe, you know, fixing climate change is just a blip.

• 1:11:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  And I'd just like this blip to happen faster. And to me, people ask me if I have hope. I say, no, I don't have hope. I have determination because we're going to fix this. There's no doubt in my mind that we're going to fix this. How much damage we do to this planet on the way to fixing it, that's up to us.

• 1:12:12Guy Raz?

  So Hank, I mean, when you, when you think about, you know, the journey you took, I mean, you know, from sort of kind of jewelry guy with your dad and, you know, kind of building this, this game company and then coming across Tetris and really making a gamble, right? Putting a lot of emotional energy and time into the, into this game and risking a lot and, you know, believing in it to where you are now. I mean, obviously, you know, you made a lot of money off of this and, and now you can deploy that money for some of the causes you, you are, you know, are committed to.

• 1:12:53Guy Raz?

  How much of where you are now, do you think is, is because of, of how hard you worked and your, your intelligence and how much do you attribute to luck?

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  Oh, it's, it's all because of hard work. I mean, this is not like I rolled a dice and something happened. I like to compare it to surfing. I used to, I used to surf and basically, you know, someday a giant wave is going to come. And if you haven't surfed the small waves and worked and worked and paddled and paddled and, and learned all that stuff, then when that big wave comes up, you're just going to get killed. You need to know how to surf before you, you know, and you can't read about it in a book. You've got to get out in the water and try stuff.

• 1:13:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah. By the way, is Alexi still involved with the company? Is he just kind of a passive owner in a sense?

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  Well, he is as involved as I am. So whenever something comes up, we both have to agree to a license. That's the way it is now. So we look at every deal. We still go to, like, we were just in Vegas at the licensing show. So we're merchandising to all kinds of brands that want to use Tetris on, I don't know, shoes, backpacks, cups, who knows? So there's that whole side of the business that we're still involved in.

• 1:14:24Guy Raz?

  And Alexi lives in the United States now, right?

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  Yes, he does. You know, and if we're in the same jurisdiction, like if we're both in Seattle or both in New York, every other night, bottle of wine guaranteed. We worked hard to keep Tetris alive. People ask me if I'm Mr. Tetris. I said, no, I'm Dr. Tetris. Alexi is Mr. Tetris. I'm Dr. Tetris. We're best friends forever. That's the way it is.

• 1:14:50Guy Raz?

  That's Hank Rogers, co-founder of The Tetris Company. And by the way, even though he and Alexi are no longer running it, it is still pretty much in the family.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  My daughter runs it now. So she takes care of the whole thing. My daughter Maya, she, when she was 15, she asked me, so I asked her, what do you want to be when you grow up? And she said, I don't know, but I want to make more money than you. So she's on it.

• 1:15:20Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show, and it's totally free. This episode was produced by Sam Paulson with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei and Sam Paulson. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Katherine Seifer. Our audio engineer was Gilly Moon. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Casey Herman, Alex Chung, Carrie Thompson, Elaine Coats, John Isabella, Chris Messini, and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.