Henk Rogers has a story to tell. The University of
Hawaii graduate brought the iconic video game Tetris to America from the Soviet Union, changing both the gaming and culture as we know it.
That story was turned into a Hollywood film staring Taron Egerton in 2023. The film focused on Rogers and his friendship with Alexey Pajitnov, the man who designed and developed Tetris in 1985 while working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre under the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, and on Roger’s effort to get the rights for
Tetris to bring it to the rest of the world.
But this month Rogers released a new memoir that offers a new retelling of that story — and much more — which he began writing as the movie was still being
developed.
“The script was so full
of Hollywood stuff, and I thought that what actually happened is just as interesting, if not more interesting,” Rogers told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in a recent interview. “And so I wanted to quickly write for the scriptwriter what actually happened, so that he could have the real story. But I didn’t make it in time, obviously. By the time I finished writing this, the movie was already in production.”
Rogers said that in the end, though the movie diverges significantly from the true story, he was satisfied with the final product and found it entertaining. But he still felt there was was more to tell, and showed people his notes.
“Somebody saw it and said, ‘You know, this would be a book if it was only another 60%-70% bigger,’” he explained. “And so then I thought about what could I do to make it 60%-70% bigger. And I decided to write the before and after. So it turned out to be my entire game career.”
The new book, “The Perfect Game,” was released this month by Di Angelo Publications. The book traces the Dutch-born Rogers’ beginnings as “sort of being a penniless student in Hawaii majoring in computer science and minoring in Dungeons and Dragons” to a becoming a game developer, entrepreneur and today a philanthropist pushing for renewable-energy
initiatives.
He’s still active on all fronts. Last week he was in Dallas for EarthX — a major environmental conference — and then in Brazil for a gaming conference.
Gaming has continued to evolve far beyond what he saw in the 1980s. Rogers said two parallel markets have now emerged, with games on personal computers and gaming consoles like Playstation and Xbox, and mobile games distributed as apps on phones and other devices.
Console and PC games have seen systems become more powerful to support games with advanced graphics. Today the price of producing “blockbuster” games now often exceeds that of many Hollywood movie productions, with the games themselves becoming expensive as well. Meanwhile, mobile games have become increasingly simple and in some cases “free-to-play,” meaning you don’t pay to download them. But mobile games have become enormously profitable.
“When I started my first mobile phone game company, people would buy a game for the price of a cup of coffee,” Rogers said. “Today nobody buys games. They just download them for free, and they suffer through the ads, which is
really weird. Like, spend the money for a cup of coffee so you don’t have to watch these stupid ads — and the ads are mostly for other games.”
Other “free-to-play” games make money through “microtransactions” that give players access to content that doesn’t come with the game initially. Rogers
describes it as “like going
to a movie, and every five to 10 minutes, they bug you for some more money instead of paying for the movie upfront. It’s just changed the form of the entertainment on the mobile.”
However, Rogers said that “on the console side, the production value of the games and the capability of the hardware, they’re both growing.”
As computer and console games become more expensive, smaller independent studios have begun launching cheaper games with simpler graphics. But Rogers said he believes the trend will continue toward high-end consoles and games, arguing that “nobody’s going to watch black-and-white TV anymore. Nobody’s going to watch tube TV anymore. Everything is now, you know, high fidelity, 4K to 8K screens, and getting better and better all the time.”
Rogers is also restructuring his philanthropic efforts around renewable energy. In 2024 he moved to shut down his Hawaii-based Blue Planet Foundation and merge it with his New York-based Blue Planet Alliance — which he is relocating to
Hawaii. The foundation was aimed at locally promoting renewable-energy projects in the islands, while the alliance was aimed at international efforts to fight climate change.
Rogers said, “We’ve passed the hump in Hawaii, meaning that we passed the law that (mandates) 100% (renewable energy) by 2045. We changed the business model of the electric company so they make more money by switching to renewables. Everybody seems to be on the same side on this now. When you talk to the utilities, they sound like us.”
However, he said he is troubled by recent talk of bringing in liquefied natural gas — or LNG — as a “bridge fuel” to make up
for the recent loss of coal
in Hawaii, calling it “a big step in the wrong direction. … It’s like switching from heroin to cocaine. It’s another addiction of something that comes from somewhere else, with all of the negatives.”
He said that to even get it to Hawaii requires massive investment to support terminals for delivery and for the energy facilities to generate power off of it — costs that he says outweigh any benefits, arguing that “the process of getting it out of the ground and transporting it leaks a lot of it into the atmosphere, and so we don’t need it. It’s not a bridge, it’s a pier — it goes nowhere.”
Internationally, Rogers’ organizations work with officials and organizations in island countries and territories to support similar efforts. Though he initially based much of the effort in New York, he’s concluded that “the city that never sleeps” didn’t offer everything he had hoped.
“I had the idea that New York would be a better place to, like, raise money because they have more rich people, but I don’t think that where the organization is domiciled has made much difference,” he explained. “In the beginning I was thinking that we were going to do lots and lots of activities in New York, because all of the (United Nations) representatives are there for each country.”
Ultimately, they’ve been bringing representatives from the islands to Hawaii.
“When we say we bring them to Hawaii, what we do is we bring four people, one person from the government, one person from the utility, one person from the regulatory agency … and one person from the community,” said Rogers. “So four people that generally don’t know each other and don’t work together back home, and we show them what we did in Hawaii, and everybody that was involved in the transition in Hawaii gets to talk.”
Since the election of Donald Trump to his second term as president, the former real estate mogul has made moves to slash renewable energy programs. Despite his close partnership with Elon Musk, who built electric vehicle company Tesla into a global business empire, Trump has vowed to increase both oil production and consumption and further dismantle green energy initiatives.
But Rogers argues it’s in America’s strategic interest to lead the way on renewable energy.
“The best thing that we can do diplomatically (and) militarily is to get these people out from all these
islands out from under
having to spend their hard-earned dollars to buy oil or diesel,” said Rogers. “We’re at 36% renewable energy in Hawaii, which is great. We’re on track. And these other places could totally … do it, and they would become our best friends. You know, don’t let China do it. … If we want to do something, this is what we need to.”
