![]() “Yamauchi says to me, ‘I can’t give you any programmers.’ I said, ‘I don’t need programmers,’” Rogers recalls. Rogers pitched a Famicom port of a British Go video game to Yamauchi via fax and was in his office two days later. 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. 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. “So the first 100 people that made it to the end of the game, I sent them a real black onyx. “My dad used to be in the gem business I worked for him for six years,” Rogers says. 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. Rogers must have cut an unlikely figure indeed: He had a Dutch passport, an American accent, and lived in Japan with his Japanese wife. You know, my story was too unlikely for it to be a story.” “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. “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. (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.) But the rights were in a mess, and the Russian communist state held all the cards. 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. 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. “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. And it was thanks to this kinship that they formed an instantaneous bond in that meeting room in 1989. But they are both game designers, too, even if neither of them particularly planned to be. 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. 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. Later, they founded a company together to manage the rights to Pajitnov’s timeless creation. 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. Since around 2003 Gerasimov has lived in Australia, where he worked in complex systems research with the CSIRO before joining Google about a year and a half ago.Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers have known each other a long time. Sydney Morning Herald reports: “Vadim Gerasimov was just 15 when he was taken under the wing of two Russian computer engineers – Alexey Pajitnov and Dmitry Pavlovsky – at the Moscow Academy of Sciences and helped them create Tetris. It was released on June 6, 1984”.Īnd did you know? One of the original makers of Tetris is now working at Google – Google Australia, specifically, on the Google Wave project. is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov. The alt text reads “Celebrating 25 Years of The Tetris Effect - courtesy of Tetris Holding, LLC”, and the logo is linked to a search for tetris. Google Australia, China and some other places where it’s Saturday already are displaying a special logo doodle celebrating Tetris.
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