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Henk Rogers is known in Hawaii for, among many things, founding the Blue Planet Foundation, which spearheaded the state’s renewable energy policy. He’s also credited for the establishment of Tetris, the stacking puzzle game that is one of the most popular video games in history, its presence on gaming platforms and in arcades now ubiquitous.
How he first got involved in that venture is dramatized in the new film “Tetris,” a harrowing, fact-based thriller. It tells how Rogers, then a software game developer and publisher living in Japan, journeyed to Russia in the mid-1980s armed with little except confidence and street smarts, managed to befriend Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, and navigate the Soviet Union’s deteriorating but still intimidating power structure to bag the digital deal of a lifetime. Taron Egerton, star of the 2019 biopic “Rocketman,” portrays Rogers in the film, which debuts Friday on Apple TV+.
“It’s surreal. It’s like an out-of-body experience,” Rogers said about seeing the film. “I didn’t move quite as quickly as the guy in the movie did because they squeezed a year and half of my life into two hours, but the feeling got across.”
Although technically about a business deal, the high-paced film hurtles along like an international espionage caper, featuring intriguing figures from politics and business, including Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union; Robert Maxwell, a notorious, powerful British politician and media baron; his ill-mannered son, Kevin Maxwell; Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo, the huge Japanese video game company; and several Russians, some of them rather sinister. Director Jon S. Baird delves into these characters in a fascinating exploration of competing interests at a time of political upheaval.
In a simpler story, “you would have had the West being the good guys and East being the bad guys, but I think you’ve got two heroes here, Henk and Lexey, Lexey being from Soviet Communist Russia. Then your bad guys are the KGB, and also the Maxwell family. It’s more sophisticated, the dynamic there,” Baird said, characterizing the film as a “buddy movie about these guys from completely different cultures.”
With sales of more than 520 million units on devices such as computers, arcade games and hand-held devices, Tetris is now ranked as one of the most successful video game franchises in history. It’s won numerous awards from the software and gaming industries, and has almost 30 mentions in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Pajitnov, a programmer for the Soviet Academy of Sciences who designed games to test its equipment, invented the game with some colleagues in 1984. Named Tetris — a combination of “tetra,” the Greek work for “four,” and “tennis” — it was so addictive that government ministries shut it down because their workers were occupied playing it.
Pajitnov, who moved to America in the 1990s and is now a U.S. citizen, is portrayed in the film as a man burdened by Russia’s blighted past. His country, with its history of oppression, had persecuted his father. Capitalism was theoretically against the law, so his opportunity to make money off his game was minimal and would even have been considered dangerous.
Pajitnov said the depiction of his life was “generally accurate” — his father was in fact a dissident — “although they exaggerated some details.”
He and Rogers worked on refining the script, which originally was inspired by a BBC documentary about Tetris. “I realized that we really did a really good job, spiritually and emotionally, because it’s very true stuff, what happened to us at that time,” Pajitnov said.
Rogers said they spent “serious time” on the script, especially when it came to depicting life in the Soviet Union. “We wanted to make sure that came across.”
Pajitnov recalled Soviet Russia in the 1980s as “a very controversial and mixed-up time.” A long period of economic stagnation had given way to a new government, led by Gorbachev, who implemented reforms known as perestroika, or economic reform, and glasnost, openness in government.
“It was … close to the end of the Soviet Union,” Pajitnov said. “People were really scared of the unknown, of (the) future. At the same time, the breath of freedom — of perestroika, of glasnost — was really fascinating, and everyone felt it.”
Into that scenario came Rogers, seeking to resolve a licensing issue so that he could bring Tetris to Japan with Nintendo. Pajitnov, who had met few foreigners at that time, remembered being mystified at first by Rogers, who is of Dutch-Indonesian descent.
“I was invited to … meet another strange businessman, from Japan, and he is not Japanese, but rather European,” Pajitnov recalled. “And when I saw this complete Indonesian guy, it was a complete mess in my head.”
Rogers, for his part, had little idea what he was getting into, except that he “was going to be breaking a bunch of laws” in going to the Soviet Union to do business without a proper business visa. “I didn’t know anybody,” he said. “I didn’t know how to find anybody. It was total disorientation.”
Rogers found that concepts like property ownership, personal computers and private business were foreign to the Russians, not to mention consumer electronics such as game consoles and Game Boy-like devices. Rogers eventually figured out that other Western businessmen like Maxwell were fleecing the Russians through vague, confusing contracts, so he told his lawyer to draw up a contract “that’s no more than 20 pages, no big words, because I have to explain everything in this contract. And it has to be fair, because we don’t have time to go back and forth.”
Rogers credits his years in Hawaii — he had spent spent six years in New York City before coming to Hawaii, where he attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa “so I could get computer time” and “play Dungeons and Dragons” — for teaching him to be straightforward and easygoing with people.
“New York kind of made me a tough ass,” he said, “but Hawaii mellowed me out. For the rest of my career, I became a nice guy, and that served me well.”
He believes he and Pajitnov bonded because both were programmers. “Alexey figured out right away that I was not just some con artist, I was a game designer. I was the first game designer outside of the Soviet Union that he’d ever met,” he said.
The two became fast friends, and they eventually formed the Tetris Company, which now manages and licenses Tetris products worldwide.
Rogers is based mainly in New York City these days, where he can more easily meet with diplomats and world leaders as he tries to promote renewable energy around the world, a cause he took up after suffering a heart attack in 2005.
“I’ve done my thing in Hawaii, getting (legislation passed to achieve) 100% renewable energy, and now we gotta do it to the rest of the planet,” he said.
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WATCH IT
“Tetris”
Available to stream on Apple TV+ starting Friday.
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