Henk Rogers

Abstract

Henk Rogers (born 1953) is a Dutch-born, New York-raised, Hawaii-educated game publisher who moved to Tokyo for love in 1976, wrote one of Japan’s first successful role-playing games in 1984, and in February 1989 flew to Moscow on a tourist visa, walked uninvited into the Soviet software export agency, and came out with the handheld rights to Tetris. He then talked Nintendo into packing the game with the Game Boy instead of Mario, which is why 35 million people learned Tetris on a bus. In 1996 he and Alexey Pajitnov formed The Tetris Company to hold what the Soviet state had let go, and Rogers, whose company was the one honest party in a chain of bad licences, has managed the most-played game in the world ever since. After a heart attack in 2005 he decided to spend the money on getting Hawaii off oil and putting a base on the Moon.

Henk Rogers. Image: Al Pavangkanan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Amsterdam, New York, Honolulu, Tokyo

Rogers was born in Amsterdam on December 24, 1953, and moved with his family to New York, where he graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1972 and went on to the University of Hawaii at Manoa to study computer science. There he met Akemi, a Japanese student; he followed her to Japan three times and in 1977 they married and settled in Japan.

He had played Dungeons & Dragons in Hawaii and found that Japan had nothing like it. Bullet-Proof Software, which he founded in Yokohama in 1983, published The Black Onyx for the NEC PC-8801 in January 1984, a dungeon crawl with a party of characters, in Japanese, that Rogers had written himself. It sold 150,000 copies and is the game from which the Japanese role-playing tradition descends; Shigeru Miyamoto said the pleasure of watching a character grow stronger fed into The Legend of Zelda.

Moscow

In 1988 Rogers saw Tetris at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and licensed the Japanese console rights through the chain of sublicences that ran, via Robert Stein and the Maxwell family’s Mirrorsoft, back to a Soviet agency called Elorg. His Famicom version, released that December, sold two million copies. Then Nintendo showed him a handheld it had not announced, the Game Boy, and asked whether he could get the rights for that too. Rogers examined the paper trail, concluded that nobody in the chain actually held the rights they had sold, and in February 1989 flew to Moscow on a tourist visa and presented himself at Elorg’s offices. The same week Stein and Kevin Maxwell arrived separately to shore up their own positions. Rogers put his Famicom cartridge on the table, was told he had published a game he had no right to, and wrote a cheque for the breach instead of arguing. Elorg’s director Evgeny Belikov gave him the handheld rights, then the console rights, for Nintendo; Mirrorsoft and Atari, whose NES version was already manufactured, were cut out, and Nintendo’s lawsuit sent Atari’s cartridges back to the warehouse. The full account, with the three bidders and what happened to each, is in Alexey Pajitnov and Tetris.

The other decision was the bundle. Nintendo of America’s Minoru Arakawa intended to ship the Game Boy with Super Mario Land. Rogers’s argument, which he has repeated for thirty-five years, was that Mario would sell the machine to boys and Tetris would sell it to everyone. The Game Boy launched in 1989 with Tetris in the box and sold 35 million copies of the game (see Nintendo: A Century of Play).

The Tetris Company

Pajitnov, who had written the game at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1984 and had signed his rights over to the state for ten years, emigrated in 1991; Rogers had befriended him in Moscow and helped him leave. When the rights reverted at the end of 1995 the two founded The Tetris Company in 1996, which licenses the name, the shapes and the rules, and in 2005 their Tetris Holding bought Elorg’s remaining rights outright. Rogers’s Blue Planet Software managed the licence for two decades; his daughter Maya Rogers now runs Tetris Inc. The game has been released on every platform with a screen, and the company’s guideline, which fixes the seven colours, the rotation system and the scoring, is why a Tetris on a phone plays like a Tetris on a Game Boy.

Blue Planet

In 2005 Rogers had a heart attack in Honolulu, survived, and drew up a list of things to do with the rest of his life. The first was to end Hawaii’s use of carbon-based fuel for electricity: the Blue Planet Foundation, founded in 2007, lobbied for the 2015 law that committed the state to 100 percent renewable electricity by 2045, the first such law in the United States, and Blue Planet Energy (2015) sells lithium-iron-phosphate battery systems for homes and islands. The second was the Moon: he chairs the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems, and founded the International MoonBase Alliance in 2017, which now operates HI-SEAS, the University of Hawaii habitat on the slope of Mauna Loa where NASA-funded crews had spent up to a year in isolation rehearsing Mars. The 2023 film Tetris, with Taron Egerton as Rogers, tells the Moscow story with a car chase the real trip did not include; his memoir, The Perfect Game, appeared in 2025.

📚 Sources

Henk Rogers — Wikipedia
The Black Onyx — Wikipedia (the January 1984 PC-8801 release, 150,000 copies, the Miyamoto remark)
Tetris — Wikipedia, licensing history (the Stein/Mirrorsoft chain, the December 1988 Famicom release, the February 1989 Moscow negotiations, the Game Boy bundle and its 35 million copies, The Tetris Company in 1996, the 2005 Elorg purchase)
Brown, Box — Tetris: The Games People Play, First Second, 2016 (the Moscow week from Rogers’s account)
Blue Planet Foundation (the 2007 founding and the 2015 Hawaii 100 percent renewable law)
HI-SEAS — Wikipedia (the Mauna Loa habitat, the NASA-funded isolation missions, operation by the International MoonBase Alliance)
Rogers, Henk B. — The Perfect Game: Tetris: From Russia With Love, Di Angelo Publications, 2025
Image: Henk Rogers face crop.png by Al Pavangkanan (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons