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Henk Rogers
M
Matthew
Henk Rogers: 我在1988年的拉斯维加斯消费电子展上发现了俄罗斯方块，并意识到这款游戏的独特魅力。我将它引进日本市场，并最终将其授权给了任天堂，这使得Game Boy成为当时最受欢迎的掌上游戏机。俄罗斯方块的成功并非我预料之中的，而是在试玩之后才发现其与众不同之处，它能够吸引所有玩家，让人欲罢不能。我与俄罗斯方块的创造者帕吉特诺夫建立了深厚的信任关系，并一起合作创立了俄罗斯方块公司。我与帕吉特诺夫建立信任的关键在于我们都是游戏设计师，并且对游戏本身有着共同的热情。我曾经是一名程序员，但我为了经营公司放弃了编程，因为编程是一项全天候的工作。我参与了俄罗斯方块游戏设计的初期，并设计了T-spin机制。在1995年接管俄罗斯方块后，我统一了所有平台上的游戏规则。我通过向山内溥（任天堂前社长）推荐一款围棋游戏，成功地与任天堂建立了合作关系。我与山内溥的谈判中，我展现了我的商业智慧和冒险精神。我仍然是一个游戏玩家，喜欢各种类型的游戏，包括俄罗斯方块及其衍生作品。我目前正在玩一款类似俄罗斯方块的益智游戏。我不会开发我不想让我的孩子玩的游戏。我认为游戏对孩子来说是件好事，因为它能帮助他们为未来的数字世界做好准备。我认为越简单的游戏越接近真正的游戏，而复杂的只是互动娱乐。我非常喜欢我的俄罗斯方块夹克，它经常收到赞美。我将公司交给了我的女儿，自己则专注于环保事业。我与帕吉特诺夫仍然保持着良好的友谊，我们经常一起喝酒聊天，但很少谈论俄罗斯方块。我经历了一次濒死体验，这促使我投身环保事业。我创立了蓝星球联盟，致力于推动全球100%可再生能源的转型。我的目标是到2045年让全世界都实现100%可再生能源的目标。我认为资本主义可以为可再生能源转型服务，因为可再生能源的价格正在下降。我相信我们可以通过共同努力，创造一个人类与自然和谐共生的世界。
Matthew: 我小时候非常喜欢俄罗斯方块游戏，它给我留下了深刻的印象。俄罗斯方块电影对我的经历进行了戏剧化的改编。我认为游戏对孩子来说是件好事，因为它能帮助他们为未来的数字世界做好准备。
supporting_evidences
Henk Rogers: 'A year later, he licensed the Tetris game rights to Nintendo, where it would go on to make their handheld platform, the Game Boy, the most popular portable game system of its time.'
Matthew: 'I am a big fan of Tetris. I actually had one of the first Game Boys that came out and I had the original NES and I remember having to cry at the age of 10 to convince my parents to buy that for me.'
Henk Rogers: 'To be honest with you, I didn't think that. Okay. I saw it at the Consumer Electronics Show. And my job was to bring games to Japan. I had a publishing company in Japan and I stood in line for each game and I play for a couple of minutes and then make up my mind, yes or no. Well, when I was standing in the line the fourth time on the Tetris machine, I'm only supposed to go do this once because there's many, many games. I thought there's something about this game that's different. And I was hooked. So I knew at least we had one customer.'
Henk Rogers: 'Then I took it back to Japan and everybody got hooked. I mean, like up and down. The accounting people, everybody. There wasn't anybody who didn't want to play Tetris. And that happened. is unique about Tetris. Some games people say, oh, I don't play games. And you show it to them and say, no, I don't do this. But Tetris, no. Once you get them started, they can't stop.'
Henk Rogers: 'It started before that. So in 93, the 95, Alex was supposed to get the rights back. Yep. But he said those guys, the Russians, the Alorg, by then it will be a private company and they will say that I had never had any rights back. And they'll try to steal those rights. And he calls them band-aids, whatever. And so in 93, he asked me to help him. I said, you know, I'm a publisher. I'm not a licensing. He says, I want you to do this. So we made a deal. A shake shook hands in 93. And that handshake is still alive today.'
Henk Rogers: 'Well, we were both game designers. I was the first game designer that he actually met. He'd seen people come from other countries trying to get Tetris rights and so on. They were like businessmen or trying to make money. And I was a game designer. You know, like the first evening we went out together and we talked about Tetris 2, you know, things like that.'
Henk Rogers: 'So when you say the first evening, you mean in Russia, when you got together in Russia? Yeah, in Russia. Yeah, right. I mean, I watched the movie. You see me drop into the Soviet Union on a tourist visa and... search for the Elorg which was the name of the on the copyright notice and found them and told him look I want to meet and talk about Gameboy and they Next day we met and Alexi was there. That's when I met Alexi for the first time and in the beginning He was suspicious like, you know, who is this guy? First of all, I'm Dutch I have an American accent and I live in Japan and You're a spy. What the hell? You know, that's smells to high heaven. But after a little bit of a conversation, he quickly realized that I was an actual game designer.'
Henk Rogers: 'I wrote the first two role-playing games for my own company. And then I made a decision. It's coding or running the company. I couldn't do both. And I... I decided to give up coding because coding is like a 24/7 job. You know, you code, you eat, you sleep, you code, you eat, you sleep. And coding was the thing that I loved to do the most in my entire life.'
Henk Rogers: 'It used to be my favorite Tetris piece because in the beginning I worked on the Tetris game design. On the slow levels, Tetris can be a little bit boring while you're trying to get up to a faster speed. And so I said, well, let's make it so that you get more points for clearing more lines at the same time. Single, double, triple Tetris. I came up with that. And so that was my favorite piece at the time. And then years later, somebody from Nintendo showed me, watched the T-block and there's a slot and you drop it in and then you can spin it. And it's like, wow. Theoretically, it can't do that, but because the Tetris block only exists in this spot or in this spot, it can pass through other things. So that is called, we call it a T-spin. And so I add a T-spin to Tetris and then you get a T-spin single or a T-spin double and that gives you more points.'
Henk Rogers: 'So in '95, when I took over Tetris, I standardized Tetris across all platforms. And before '95, there was Nintendo and then there was Sega. Nintendo, the piece, as it's falling, you control it and you move it. Once it lands, it locks down right away. The Sega version, you can drop it and then you can spin it. And so, boom, you can spin it. So it looks like it's being played faster. And that was the arcade in Japan and this was the handheld and the console. They were completely different because the way the pieces rotate are different. And I said, "No, they have to do this." All players have to be able to play either this way or this way. So basically we combined the two.'
Henk Rogers: 'Well, they, at the time, when I first was a publisher for personal computer games, they didn't want to have anything to do with the personal computer games. They thought that our games take too much time and they're not enough graphics jumping around. And so they were getting their games from arcade companies like Anamco, Taito, all those. And so they basically said no to my company, to Square, Enix, T&E, Falcom. They just said, no, we don't need you guys.'
Henk Rogers: 'So I found out, my wife read an article that Mr. Yamauchi plays Go. And I had gotten a game from England, a Go game, 9x9 on the Commodore 64. Commodore 64 has the same CPU as the Nintendo 6502, or the same as the Apple II. And so I sent Mr. Yamauchi a fax. Mr. Yamauchi, my name is Hank Rogers. I can make a Go game for your Nintendo machine. I'm leaving on Saturday. I'd like to meet you before I go. I didn't tell him that I lived in Japan. I just left out that little detail. That was Tuesday. Wednesday, I got a fax. Mr. Yamauchi will meet you tomorrow. Thursday, I meet Mr. Yamauchi. He says, I can't give you any programmers. And I said, I don't need programmers. I just need money. And he said, this is going really fast now. I said, how much money? And I'm thinking of the biggest number. I said, $300,000. And he reaches, deal.'
Henk Rogers: 'He says, "It's too weak for Nintendo." I said, "Mr. Yamauchi, it's an 8-bit computer. It's a miracle that it plays Go at all. This has got to be fine for kids to learn how to play Go." And he says, he repeats, like, which part of, "It's too weak for Nintendo, didn't you understand?" And again, I have to think fast. So I said, "Mr. Yamauchi, it may be too weak for Nintendo, but it's not too weak for my company. Let me publish it." And he goes, "What about my money?" And I said, "I'll pay you a dollar for every unit that I sell until you get your money back. Deal." '
Henk Rogers: 'That's how I became a Nintendo publisher.'
Henk Rogers: 'You know, I once upon a time had a VR company, Avatar Reality, and it was all about the avatar. I thought everybody would be good at the environments, but they would suck at the non-player characters, which has been the case. In World of Warcraft, for example, they're like, you know, the NPCs are really dumb. But I think that is going to change now. The people that you meet in computer games are going to become real.'
Henk Rogers: 'I had a near-death experience after I sold a company in 2005 and found my missions in life. As a result, first mission is to end the use of carbon-based fuel.'
Henk Rogers: 'and started a nonprofit in Hawaii, and we put Hawaii on track to 100% renewable energy. We were the first state to have a mandate of 100% renewable energy. So tell me a bit more about what-- because you have a-- your organization is called the Blue Planet Foundation. Blue Planet Foundation in Hawaii, and we put Hawaii on track, and now I've got the Blue Planet Alliance based in New York, and we're dealing with the rest of the world. So after we got the mandate passed for 100% renewable energy in Hawaii, 13 other states copied us. And now we're doing the same thing for island countries and we want the domino effect to go to all countries in the world.'
Henk Rogers: 'At the end of the day, we want everyone in the world to have a mandate to go 100% renewable energy by 2045, which is the 100th anniversary of the United Nations. We want to fix climate change by 2045.'
Henk Rogers: 'It started with, well, I moved to Hawaii when I was 18. Fell in love with the ocean because I was surfing and diving. And in the recovery room after my near-death experience, my heart attack, I I read an article that says, oh, by the way, we're going to kill all the coral in the world by the end of the century. And I'm like, you idiots. What are you talking about? What's causing that? Ocean acidification caused by carbon dioxide caused by us. That's why the first mission is to end the use of carbon-based fuel.'
Henk Rogers: 'And, you know, if we just selfishly go along thinking I can make a little bit more money now, what good is the money to our kids in the future if we trash their environment? It's no good at all. So it's all about leaving the world at least as good as when I got here. And that's going to be a heavy lift.'
Henk Rogers: 'Not necessarily. Tell me more. Not necessarily because you can now put wind and solar into the grid in, for example, Texas for less than $0.02 per kilowatt hour. They can't compete with that. I mean, fossil fuel cannot compete with $0.02 per kilowatt hour. The price of renewable energy is going down very fast.'
Henk Rogers: 'Last year, I think it was 70% of all energy infrastructure built was renewable energy. Oh, wow. And so we are moving in the right direction. The world is moving in the right direction. And so capitalism, in this case, works for us.'
Henk Rogers: 'You know, if you go back, like me 30 years ago, I played popular computer games and now I don't. you know well maybe wordle is a popular computer game but it's not really a computer game in the traditional sense um so you know as as i get older and less interested in playing popular games i i need somebody to run the company that is like in it that's that's in the game business that's like and and she does that in spades um i i worked for my dad when i was uh Gosh, right after high school, I guess. I worked for him for about six years in the gem business, gemstones. I hated it. I hated it. He never gave me credit for all the stuff that I was doing. He never paid me. It was a family business. A little detail there. And so... Hey, I tell my kids they get free room and board. Yeah, free room and board. Yeah, right. So anyway, I couldn't wait to get out. And so I told my kids, look, I'm not asking you to join my business anymore. You know, this is not that kind of a family business. I'm not forbidding it, but I'm not asking you to.'
Henk Rogers: 'I don't second guess her. She makes all the decisions. If she needs me for something, she'll contact me. Like, hey, you should go and meet these Google guys.'
Henk Rogers: 'So Alexi and I are still really good friends. So if we're in the same jurisdiction, like I lived in Seattle for sadly or during COVID, every other day, bottle of wine. And sometimes he comes to New York, he has an apartment in New York. Sometimes he comes to New York every other day, bottle of wine. So this is, and we don't talk about Tetris. We talk about all kinds of things.'
Henk Rogers: 'Yeah, of course. You know, like when I come up with a product, we put it through QA, we test the crap out of it. And we come to some understanding that the highest level ever reachable is going to be like level 30. And that's what Nintendo came up with. And then with tapping, the kids figured out how to push the buttons faster than was physically possible. And as a result, they're able to play faster and get past level 30, which the game wasn't designed to do. So they say that Blue Scooty beat Tetris, but Blue Scooty didn't beat Tetris, he beat the code.'
Henk Rogers: 'So on the trust part, the trust part is just be brutally honest Always. It makes it much easier because if you lie about something, you have to remember who did you say which lie to and so on and so forth. But if you just tell the truth all the time, then it's very easy. Especially now, I just turned 70 last year and I can't remember everything I've said. So by doing it algorithmically, I'm very safe 'cause I'm always doing that. And then as far as risk, no guts, no glory.'
Henk Rogers: 'So when I moved from New York to Hawaii, I started surfing. And every time you catch a wave, it's like you're taking a risk that you're gonna fall off your board. And you fall off your board many, many times. But the waves get bigger, the falls get bigger, but you're taking all those risks all the time. But if you don't take the risk, you're never gonna get that tube or that ride of your life. So yeah, I guess going to the Soviet Union was one of those things. I dropped into the Soviet Union And that way was so exciting. You have no idea. But that risk, obviously, it was well worth taking. I don't take stupid risks. You know, like I don't run across the street in the middle of the traffic, for example. That's a wasted risk. But yeah, I'll take calculated risks. That's part of the gamer in me, I guess.'
Henk Rogers: 'It was definitely scary. I mean, going through the door, there was a door, and I'm just about to go into Elektronik Technika, and my interpreter is saying, you can't go in there. And I said, what do you mean? She says, you're here on a tourist visa. You're supposed to be invited and you can't talk to anybody. And I said, you know, I didn't come all this way to stand in front of a door and go back to Tokyo to get a proper visa. I'm going in. Are you coming with me? In the movie, she comes in with me. In real life, she didn't. So I went through that door and that was the adventure. So that was... Yeah, I kind of knew I was breaking the law. I wasn't supposed to.'
Henk Rogers: 'So we have a policy. The policy is that the game has to contain Tetris. It can't be an offshoot where Tetris is no longer there. So the game has to contain Tetris. Having said that, if a licensee comes up with a new variety of a new variation of Tetris, we say go for it. And what we'll do is we'll test play with them just to make sure it's not junk. And but we give them that freedom.'
Henk Rogers: 'Well, I, you know, gaming is great, but I'd like to get gaming to actually have an effect, a positive effect on the real world, you know, because the real world is in danger of like collapse. And it's really up to our generation, not my generation, but your generation. And I hope, you know, whenever I speak, I hope to give people the confidence that we can fix this and we will fix this.'
Henk Rogers: 'So people ask me if I have hope and I say, no, I don't have hope. I have determination. And we all need determination to get us through to the point where the vision of my new NGO is that we have to create a world in which humanity and nature live in harmony. And I want to do that by 2045. Then we can be sustainable.'
Deep Dive
Henk Rogers, Chairman of the Tetris Company, shares his thoughts on Tetris, its sequels, and the accuracy of the Apple TV movie about the game's history. He also discusses his career transition from coding to company management and his passion for gaming.
- Henk Rogers' favorite Tetris piece is the T-piece.
- His daughter is the CEO of the Tetris Company.
- He wrote the first two role-playing games for his own company.
- He considers Tetris a cultural phenomenon due to its unique addictive quality.
- He believes gaming is beneficial for children's mental development.
Shownotes Transcript