Tetris legend Henk Rogers’ new book is a Nintendo blockbuster

The making of Tetris, as the tagline to the Apple Original movie goes, is a “story you couldn’t make up”, and now the real-life lead character from that film has written a book about his extraordinary life in video games, and beyond.

From infiltrating the Soviet Union, to befriending the president of Nintendo, and joining the fight for a sustainable environment, Henk Rogers has certainly lived a life worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster. The Perfect Game: Tetris, From Russia With Love, a new memoir as colourful as the puzzle classic’s seven tetrominoes, provides a riveting recount of his journey that will be entertaining for everyone, but extra special for video games fans.

After moving to Japan and marrying his wife in the late 1970s, Rogers founded Bullet-Proof Software and developed The Black Onyx, one of the first successful Japanese-language RPG games. Bullet-Proof went on to become one of the most successful Japan-based game publishers of the era, but its fate was turbo charged after Rogers discovered the Russian puzzle game Tetris.

Inspired by the bits missed – and changed – by the 2023 movie, Rogers explores in greater detail the incredible story behind how he secured the rights to the original Tetris. There are fewer car chases in this version, but it’s no less dramatic. The events leading up to the Game Boy edition of Tetris, and how Rogers travelled to Soviet Union to unravel a web of contract tomfoolery, on the backdrop of KGB spies and fierce corporate rivalry, is consistently entertaining and told here in unprecedented detail.

Key to the Tetris story is of course the Tetris creator himself, Alexey Pajitnov. In an inspired choice, The Perfect Game features annotations from Pajitnov throughout, in his own broken English, which imbues Henk’s tales with a spirited personality. In one standout sequence, Rogers recalls “the elevator from hell” in Alexey’s apartment building, only for the Russian to defend the “poor” machine in an editorial intervention, claiming it worked perfectly fine for him and his neighbours.

Perhaps the most gripping sections for fans detail Henk’s relationship with Nintendo – specifically, its president, the iconic Hiroshi Yamauchi, who controlled the Game Boy creator with an iron fist for more than 50 years. Henk was one of the great Nintendo president’s only friends, and Perfect Game offers an incredibly rare glimpse at what Yamauchi was like as a person outside of work hours.

In business, Yamauchi had a ferocious reputation as a formidably powerful man not to be crossed. But somehow, through a mix of courage, luck, and lucrative business deals, Rogers earned his friendship. It’s suggested that his confident nature may have first impressed Yamauchi, though the pair ultimately had very different personalities.

At Nintendo, if you crossed the president, you were instantly fired, but Rogers recalls how he was able to get away with much more than most, possibly because he was viewed as a foreigner. “He once asked me to sell him Tetris,” he writes. “I said I would trade Tetris for Mario, making it clear to him that Tetris meant to me what Mario meant to Nintendo. You fight fire with fire.”

Crucially, the pair shared a common passion for the ancient board game Go and would often schedule business meetings at the end of the day so they could play and talk candidly about the video game industry. Eventually, Henk’s relationship with Yamuachi led to special treatment from Nintendo, who allowed him to order game cartridges earlier than others, as they knew he would ultimately ask their boss anyway.

In Perfect Game, Rogers recounts how, after he approached Yamauchi for help improving Tetris’s initially sluggish Famicom sales, the president instructed his sales team to drum up more orders, and even permitted Henk to put Nintendo’s seal of approval on the game box – virtually unheard of for software not developed by Nintendo.

Despite the danger of disagreeing with the boss, a general manager later pleaded with Rogers not to use the Seal of Approval, explaining that if he did, every other publisher would be asking for it and Nintendo would need to open a whole new testing department to cater to demand.

Later, Rogers recalls how he and Yamauchi eventually drifted apart, as Yamauchi retired and Rogers returned to the West, and the suggestion that Nintendo’s president died without a meaningful reconciliation with his friend makes for sombre reading.

Beyond video games, Rogers’ memoir reads just as much like a blockbuster. The native Dutchman frequently travelled the globe, relocating from Hawaii, to Japan, and back again. In 2005, a month after selling his mobile games company for millions of dollars, he suffered a 100% blockage of the widow-maker, the largest artery in the heart, which he was later told had a survival rate of just 5%.

The experience inspired Henk to spend the rest of his years doing something that mattered to him: protecting the climate of his beloved Hawaii. He later founded several community and sustainability-oriented organizations and companies, including Blue Planet Foundation, which led the campaign to make the Hawaii the first state with a 100% renewable energy law.

He even turned his gaze skyward, founding space exploration venture the International MoonBase Alliance. He’s also chairman of the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES), and owns HI-SEAS, a 1,200 square-foot Mars habitat where crew members live in Mars-like conditions for up to 12 months to help space agencies learn from their experiences.

While you may think you know Henk Rogers’ life story then, there’s more than enough here to power a Hollywood sequel.

The Perfect Game: Tetris, From Russia With Love is available now and available at Amazon.