40 Years of Tetris | Henk Rogers
49:51 Share

Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Matthew, bringing you this episode with Hank Rogers, chairman of the board at the Tetris Company. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com slash talks at google.

The Tetris game has become one of the world's top-selling video game brands, with hundreds of millions of products sold, and that number is still growing today. In 1988, having published numerous computer games from around the world in the Japanese market, Hink discovered the Tetris game at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

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. Today, Hink is the chairman of the board of the Tetris company, the Blue Planets Alliance, which aims to end the use of carbon-based fuel.

Blue Startups, one of Hawaii's first venture accelerators, the International Moon Base Alliance, and Blue Planet Research, where he develops his dream projects. Here is Hank Rogers, celebrating 40 years of Tetris. Hank, please take a seat. It is a pleasure to welcome you here to New York, and I have a very hard-hitting first question to start with. I hope you're prepared. What's your favorite Tetris piece?

- I'm going with the T. - The T, oh interesting. See, I would have chosen the block in its simplicity, you know? But to each their own. So 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.

and also stealing my dad's W2 and asking him, "Am I not worth this many hours to you?" But regardless, I did get that NES, I did get Tetris, I did play it. It's a lot of fun. And there are a lot of Tetris Effect fans in the audience. So I just wanted to ask, you know, any sequels coming out? Anything we can look forward to with Tetris? There are always sequels coming out. It's a never-ending story.

So I don't know what the next one is. And I'm not the CEO of Tetris, but it's my daughter. - Oh, sorry, your daughter is the CEO. - My daughter's the CEO. - Yes, the founder. - She joined my company and kicked me out, which is a great thing 'cause now I can do what I wanna do. But your question is? - So let me actually start with this.

You've sort of made it right like Tetris is a huge hit. There's like an Apple TV movie about you My understanding is you're writing a book now about Tetris called playing It's called the perfect the perfect game. That's correct. That's correct So I have to start and and out of curiosity how many of you saw the Tetris movie anybody in the audience? So so let me start with how accurate is it? Oh, it's exactly the way I doubt it

You know, we went through the script. Alexi and I went through the script and we went, oh, come on. You know, there's so much Hollywood that they put in there. But all they would let us fix was the Soviet part. So they got the Soviet, the intrigue, you know, the way the Soviet work. They got that right. And they got the feeling right. So, I mean, there's lots of like, you know, car chase. Come on. Yeah.

Yeah, the car chase scene was fun. Not to give away any spoilers, but you're even coding in BASIC in it in real time. Do you still code at all? Okay, so 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.

So it was really hard to give it up. So speaking of coding, eating, sleeping, you're at the perfect place for that. We have places you can code, places you can eat, and then nap pods to sleep also. So we got it all taken care of in these four walls right here. How did Tetris become such a cultural phenomenon? How did you identify that this game was going to be so big? Because when you see it initially, it's not a multiplayer game.

It's not a social game. It doesn't have intense graphics. The first version was built in all ASCII, right? So what was it for you where you played it and you were like, oh my God, everyone is going to want this thing? Well, okay. 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. 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.

I still think the music in the background, like when it speeds up and you're on like level nine, that still like gets my heart racing even now. You know, like it makes me feel that nervousness being like, gotta get the piece in quickly. It depends on how good you are. You know, if you're really good, you can just cruise through that level. But if you're struggling, then you, then you, you know, the adrenaline goes up. I get it. The adrenaline went up. That's why I wasn't a surgeon. You know, I became a product manager instead. So, um,

So I want to do a quick speed round with you because you all-- Tetris is a game that even a product manager can play. Yeah, see, there you go. There you go. This is a phrase I often use that when our products are easy enough that even I can use them, that means they're good products. There you go. So let's do a quick speed round. You've lived all over the world. What's your favorite city? New York. That correct answer. Well done. All right. Favorite district in New York?

The Village. The Village, okay. Favorite place to eat? I have a sushi place on 46th Street and between 7th, it's, I don't remember the name of the place, but it's a sushi place. Okay, very, well, we can look that up. We have a few tools to help with that, but we'll go about and do that. All right, let's, I want to talk about Alexi for a second because it's really interesting to me. Like, it feels like you formed a real relationship with Alexi to the point that

When you did decide to start the Tetris company that you made him your, you know, you brought him on board with. 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.

So you had a personal, he had a personal trust for you and you had a personal trust for him. How did that relationship build? 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. 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. So by the way, earlier while we were in the green room together and chatting, you had mentioned your father. The thing that took you to Japan was another game, the game of God. So my, my father was an avid goal player. He's about amateur six Don and he,

He will give you many reasons why he moved to Japan, but I think it's to get more, you know, better Go players. And you said you're a Go player yourself. I'm a Go player. I didn't like it because my dad stared over me and, you know, like would grimace if I made a wrong move. I'm about a three degree black belt in Go. Got it. Are there any Go players in the audience here?

Seemed there are some. Oh, I'm surprised. That was a half-hearted hand raise there. Wow. Well, people are scared once you flex on your Go levels to say they're a Go player also. So I get it. It's okay, audience. Are you still a gamer? Oh, yeah, I'm a gamer. You know, I'll get into a new game, a new game, a new game. Sometimes board games, sometimes computer games. All right, so talk to me about your setup.

Oh, don't take me by, no, no. It's not. Computer games, Xbox, Switch, like where are you? Everywhere. I'm on my phone. On your phone? Yeah, sorry. All right. I'm not a. Don't say sorry. Well, that's where I am, yeah. All right. So which games, if you, I'm like looking at your phone right now. Where have you been spending your time? I'm taking notes right now.

I'm playing this Tetris block game. It is actually, you put not just Tetris block, but all kinds of blocks into a matrix and you try to clear vertical or horizontal lines. It's a, how can I say? It's a, there's a lot of similar games and they're not close enough to Tetris to say that's Tetris.

So we decided to make one of our own Got it. And so are you um, are you playing any like RPGs? Are you playing any like the last RPG I played was was Wow Wow, okay, and that was quite a that was in the beginning of Wow got it so Every I don't know 10 years or so I dive into a game and then I'll say okay. That's it because it takes I

It takes a lot out of you playing the game, you know. Got other things I got to do. Yeah, it's funny how life catches up to you. I do remember holding my like, my child is now 11, but I remember holding him when he was just born about a month old playing Modern Warfare on my PS3 and my mother-in-law judging me deeply for that. But, you know, you do find the time somewhere to do it.

Yeah, and as far as games for kids, you know, I had a rule. And my rule has always been that I would never work on a game that I didn't want my children to play. Ah, okay. I think that's a simple rule of thumb that everybody in the industry should follow. You know, like, if it's okay for your kids, then it's okay for other people's kids. So I have two kids. I have a 10-year-old and a 11-year-old and a 7-year-old. Sorry, his birthday was last week. So...

Should I think about gaming for them as a good thing for them, a bad thing for them? How do you think about gaming and your own children? Oh, gaming has got to be a good thing. You know, like if you look back in history, we had to prepare ourselves for a lifetime of physical labor. And so people played sports and you want your kids to go out and play sports, get healthy,

But now we have to prepare our children for a lifetime of mental stuff. And so learning how to navigate inside of a computer world early is preparing our kids for a future that they're going to live in, a virtual world, if you will. I like that.

Absolutely. I feel sorry for kids where the parents say, no, you can't play games. It's like, what are you thinking? You're making them grow up in the last century. I'm not going to show this talk to my children. Yes, you are. Well, let me ask you a question now about the games that exist today. Because I

you know if i if i think about games today a lot of them kind of fall in a few categories right you have your games that are extremely high graphic high intensity right like i think about um breath of the wild of zelda or like the new hogwarts games or things like that where there are these immersive worlds that you're creating where you can free roam walk around do all these cool things but then you have like the opposite end of the world which is like your roblox and your minecraft which

really confused me when my kids were really into it at first, 'cause I'm like, this is like 1980s graphics and you love it. But I think there's a social aspect to it also that they really enjoy. There's a building aspect to it that they really enjoy.

And then when I look at Tetris, it didn't have either of these. It didn't have multiplayer, it didn't have the social, it didn't have those things. And yet there is this class of games that I haven't really thought about that are just singularly challenging to ourselves, right? So where do you place kind of Tetris in those pantheon of games and those categories? - You know, if you look at the world of board games. - Yes. - Okay, if you look at the world of board games, the most difficult, the deepest game of all games

Is go and it's black and white stones. That's fair. There's there's no graphics involved at all. Mm-hmm Chess is a little bit less so they've got little characters like you got a bishop and you've got a rook and you've got all these little characters that have different powers And then you get into you know games that have lots and lots of little pieces and the more complicated they get the less Popular they are in a way or the less interesting they are in a way the quicker they go out of style and

So I think that the simpler a game is, the more closer it's getting to being a real game. You know, a lot of what we call games are interactive entertainment, the way I look at it, is that you get to go into a world and spend time in the world, I don't know, adventuring or killing things or whatever it is. But that's not a game.

A game is where you pit your mind against something and outwit the other player or the computer or whatever it is, or yourself. And so I think mental rather than Twitch is getting closer to real games.

That's an interesting concept. And it's true, right? Like some of those really immersive world games I talked about, I played for like six months. I got to a certain point. I was done with it. I moved on. Well, even now today you hand me a Tetris game and I'll mess around with it as I found myself doing, reading up for this talk. I think we should limit the amount of time people play Tetris to like, I don't know, five, ten minutes per day. Yeah. No, it's a big productivity boost for all of us if we did that. Yeah.

All right, so talk to me about the jacket. Where'd you get it from? 'Cause I'm jealous. - You know, when I walk around in this jacket, I get more compliments than any other jacket that I own.

I mean, people say, wow, a nice blazer or a nice jacket or whatever. And yeah, it came to me. It was one of our merchandising company in Holland says we make these kind of suits. There's actually pants that come with this, but they look ridiculous if you wear the pants at the same time. Then you look like a clown. But wearing the jacket just by itself. And actually a guy came up to me at Burning Man just last week and

and said, I'm the reason this Tetris jacket exists. I said, what happened? So I says, well, my Playa name, it's a name they give you at Burning Man, it's Tetris, because I know how to pack a truck like anybody else, better than anybody else. So, and I saw this suit in them, and I contacted the company. And I said, can you please make a Tetris suit, you know?

And they did. They contacted us. This is a sample. I always get samples of everything. But he gave me one of his jackets. They gave him four jackets. He gave me one of his. So I wore it. This is not that one because the other one's all full of playa dust. So tell me about the two pins you got on there also. Oh, my gosh. I don't know. This is... Not your favorite Tetris piece. Well, okay, okay. So I...

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. So I wanted people to be able to play Tetris differently from just the I piece, the I piece, the I piece, because that's,

I had no idea about this little glitch in the game. I've got to go replay it now. Does that work on every version of Tetris? Oh, yeah. 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. By the way, out of curiosity, how many languages do you speak?

I just speak, well, if you include computer languages, they get more. But Dutch, English, Japanese. Just. You started with that. Because that's like two more than the average American, to be clear. But that's it. When you were in Japan, you know, Nintendo is a, first of all, Japan, especially at that time, is a notoriously closed business environment, right? Very hard to break into. Yeah.

In addition to that, Nintendo is a storied company in Japan at that time. And at the time, I believe Nintendo was pretty religious that they would produce all the games. They wanted full vertical integration on their console, right? 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.

Turned out that later on Square Enix would become the biggest publisher on Nintendo with role-playing games. You're welcome. So how did you end up getting into, but how did you end up getting that intro into Nintendo if they were not interested at all? Walk me through. 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.

It's like, oh my God, that was so fast. And did you win the go game? And then nine months later, nine months later, we had the finished product. We had little ninjas jumping around, moving the ghost stones and it's wonderful product.

And Mr. Yamaguchi plays once, he's a sixth degree black belt in Go. So he fumbles with the joy pad, which tells me that he never played this, you know, his family computer before. He hands it over to his underling, he says, "I wanna go there, I wanna go there." And he plays one game, he beats the computer and he says, "It's too weak for Nintendo." After one game!

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." That's how I became a Nintendo publisher. - Nicely done, nicely done.

The hustle that you had there in that moment to have that even first negotiation. I'm curious, though, do you remember who won that first go game? No, no. So I didn't get to play go with you. Oh, you didn't get to play go. Till after, you know, maybe my third or fourth meeting, I said, pick a day. I told my assistant, pick a day when Mr. Amici is done and we can play go at the end of his day.

And then after that, every time that I had a meeting with him, we would have our meeting and then we would go for the rest of the afternoon. Like the prince and the pauper. Yeah.

I was the only guy in the industry that played Go. Oh, really? Yeah. Go is something more cultural. Go and games are not connected somehow. People don't think of it as a game. You don't even say, I play Go. You say in Japanese, I do Go. So they don't think of it as a game. They think of it as something higher.

Well, so I want to take us in a slightly different direction right now. Technologically speaking, we're at an interesting moment with generative AI, with these large language models, with the advents of platforms like Gemini and ChatGPT. How do you think these are going to impact gaming?

Do you think they are? Do you think they will? Do you think we're on the precipice of things changing? 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.

And it was always my dream to have a computer game that actually watched me as I played and absorbed me and that could represent me when I wasn't there. Then it would be up to my children to keep me alive after I died and so on and so forth.

They got to feed the algorithm. They got to, you know, you want to meet your dad. And then the question comes. So is when the computer captures me, am I frozen in time?

- Do you keep growing? - Or do I keep growing? Yeah, and if I keep growing, does that mean that my character comes to be like everybody else's character 'cause they kinda grow at the same time? Or how do I still maintain my individuality? Anyway, these are interesting questions. - These are very interesting questions. You just blew my mind right there for a second and I'm still thinking about it. Let's do a quick speed round while I get my mind in order there. Favorite Hawaiian island? - Big island. - All right, favorite thing to do in Hawaii?

I like to hike. You like to hike, okay. Recent video game other than Tetris that you've loved? Video game? I don't know if you count this as a video game. I play Wordle every day. Wordle, okay, nice. How many of you play Wordle?

Look at that, look at that. I'm not alone. - Have you done spelling bee? - No, but Wordle, and I play with, we have a little group now. - Oh, so you compare scores. - And then we add the score for a week. So from Sunday to Saturday, and whoever gets the lowest score gets to make a rule for the next week. - Like a rule like you can't use the letter E or something? - Like a rule, like my rule is you can't use the same letter in the first two words. That's a simple mistake that everybody makes. If you're a beginner,

you waste guesses trying to find out where that E is or whatever, you know, that's,

Anyway interesting. All right, so you're trying to beat that with an algorithm - all right. I love it All right. Um another pivot we're gonna take is on the environment. So you And your daughter my understanding are big environmentalists also now, so I'm done. I'm the environmentalist She is the businesswoman. Got it. Okay. All right so I so I 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.

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. 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.

And what interests you in, I mean, look, like you live on an island nation. They're the obvious things that might interest you about environmentalism and about the carbon problem we face. But is there something else that really drove you in this direction that made you change your course? 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. But, you know, there's so much other bad stuff happening because of carbon dioxide. It isn't just ocean acidification. It's all of climate change.

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.

That's something very close to my heart personally. We've had multiple teams here inside Google also working on trying to figure out how to go after a gigaton of carbon and sustainability. And our company itself has taken a net zero pledge where our goal is to be net zero by the year 2030 ourselves, which is a pretty hard thing to do. Yeah.

But capitalism does work against you here, right? Like in the sense that-- 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.

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.

What happened in Hawaii is we changed the business model of the utility so they make more money by switching to renewables. Capitalism. Guess who's our best friend? It went from being our worst enemy to our best friend. You know, it's interesting. I read an article recently that China has created the fewest coal plants this year.

Its history so after years of increasing it suddenly decreased and they believe the decreases the growth of electric vehicles and the growth of renewable solar and wind in China absolutely if they make if they make a decision to do something they actually do it yes, there's no like Discussion, you know, it's not 50 states getting together and making sure the best outcome comes. Yeah So, uh, so

I want to make sure we have time for audience questions. So if folks have questions here, feel free to start lining up, either microphone on either side and I'll call on you. But there's a question from the audience that I wanted to get to, which is from April Pratham. And this is about you have shifted your role inside your company by handing it over to your daughter.

Your role must have changed over the years even before then. So can you talk through kind of how that role has changed, how you manage the change in your career, in your careers, how you think about this, any advice you have for us kind of in the early parts of our careers? 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. Under those conditions, she went and studied business and worked for Sony in the game business for a while and then finally joined my company and worked her way up. And then when I realized that she was perfectly capable of handling it, I said, okay, let's

It's all yours. And have you truly walked away? Is it one of those where you are truly out now? You were in and then you're out? 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. Well, next time we'll have her here. Okay, okay. So, yeah, she arranged the movie. I mean...

Went through all the negotiations. She does all the negotiations with everybody. Got it. So basically I come in. At the very end, Alexi and I, if there's a deal on the table, Alexi and I both have to approve. So that's it. Got it. And where is Alexi these days? He's in Seattle area. He's in Seattle area? Yeah. And he's enjoying life with his family? Yeah.

- He is, yeah. 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.

And it's funny because he used to like not be political at all. And then Putin came to power and then he changed. He said, oh my God, I should have been

you know, I should have been more vocal. I should have used whatever power I had to keep him from taking over. And he is so pissed off about the war in Ukraine. Oh my God. When Ukraine wins a battle, he goes, yeah, you know? So it's funny. So I'm not against Russians. I'm against Putin and what Putin's doing. Yeah. This is a hard pivot from that, but favorite bottle of wine?

Favorite bottle of wine. I like, I kind of like the Prisoner. Ah, it is a good wine. Yes. All right. The Prisoner. Nice. All right. We're going to Lexi. Lexi will insist on a European wine.

He thinks everything out of California is... Well, you know, you should do the whole cover it in aluminum foil and tell him it's from Europe and have him fooled, right? No, he's pretty good. Pretty good. He's pretty good. Got it. All right. Well, let's start on this end. If you can introduce yourself and what you do and then ask your question. Wow. Okay. Hi. First off, thank you so much for coming. This has been wonderful. I'm Suzette. I work on YouTube Music.

But my question is actually about the original iteration of Tetris. So only a few months ago in December, we had a player reach level 157 and actually beat the game effectively by hitting the kill screen. And he's only 13. Has that resurgence recently in the classic forms of the game in recent years with competition

like the classic Tetris World Championship and new controller techniques that players have innovatively come up with. Has any of that surprised you? 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. - Is that more impressive though? - That's different. Well, I mean, I think what he did was incredibly impressive.

The way the game was designed, you know, Alexei was like, "Oh, he didn't beat Tetris." Is because the game wasn't, you know, the game is designed so that it'd become endless. - Sure, sure. - So there's no such thing as beating Tetris. But yeah, what he did was incredible.

Amazing. Thank you so much. I mock my children a lot for watching videos of people playing Minecraft and Roblox on YouTube. And then here I was sitting there watching Blue Scootie sitting there beating Tetris, and my kids were looking at me like, why are you judging me? Why are you judging me? Exactly.

There's a question over here. Hi, Hank. My name is May. I'm a software engineer on Google Cloud. So first of all, very cool jacket. And so, you know, fashionable is like a word that's associated with you right now. But also two other themes. I think when I watched the movie and also just sitting in this talk today that I keep

thinking about when I hear your story is trust and risk taking. So kind of like this is a two part question. One is, you know, there's a lot of themes around how do you like build trust, like not only with Alexi, but also with your daughter passing it on. I feel like you have such a strong relationship that's very like embedded in a deep trust with one another. You are able to gain their trust, but also you're able to trust them and take their lead. So any tips on like how to build

and foster trust in personal and professional relationships. And then the second part is just like, what's your approach on risk-taking? 'Cause obviously you've taken many risks, not only with Tetris, but even the Blue Planet Initiative, I think, just pushing the boundaries and doing things out of the box are challenging. Yeah, if you could kind of talk about those two. - 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.

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.

Now, you did say the movie did dramatize the experience in Russia, but like, was it scary? 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. If you were to go to North Korea today and walk into some building and start talking to an official. Please don't take Hank's advice. That is a bad, bad, bad idea. And what was going on in the Soviet Union at that time, they were just starting to open up with perestroika and glasnost. So I got away with it.

I'm going to take one more question from the Dory before we go over there. So Jordan has a question. Apologies if I didn't pronounce your name correctly.

Awesome. I recently played Tetris Effect and couldn't believe how there are still more interesting ways to play a game that has been around for so long. What approach does your company take when making new ways to play Tetris while still focusing on the core Tetris gameplay? 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. And in the case of Tetris Effect, that was Mizuguchi. He's a good friend. I took him to Burning Man.

And we discussed Tetris a lot before he ever made Tetris Effect. - So I'm guessing that Burning Man is your version of Go, right? So if someone wants to get into the Tetris world, they gotta meet you at Burning Man. - There's no meetings at Burning Man, sorry. - Said from someone who's never been, obviously. - No meetings at Burning Man. - So quick follow-up question to that. What is your favorite version of Tetris and do you still play it?

My favorite version of Tetris? I would say Tetris Effect. And I bought a PlayStation just so I could play it. But I somehow don't find time to play. I was really hoping you were going to say the ASCII version, you know, with...

The ASCII character version. Exactly. All right, we got a question over here. My name is Pickles. I work on a UX team on the internal tools here in CorpEng. The Burning Man story you told is a great example of the cultural impact Tetris has made far outside of video games being a common metaphor for organizing things together. Just when did...

Was it very gradual where that cultural impact happened or was there a moment where you've noticed people started making? I don't know when it happened all of a sudden somebody pointed out that are all these YouTube videos of people taking aerial photos of their fire truck with everything laid out that they have inside and they and that was Tetris It's like I don't know packing somehow packing we did do a commercial with a car company and

where Tetris is involved in packing the stuff into the back of the car.

I was once on an airplane, I was in first class and this guy was trying to slam the overhead luggage things shut and his bag was a little bit too big so it wasn't closing. And I got up, tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Let me give it a go." And I opened it up, I pulled the smaller one out from next and slid his over and put the smaller one in just on, you know? And then everybody in the first class

went, "Tetris!" And they were clapping. I was like, "You guys have no idea." Wait, wait, wait. Did they? Were you wearing the jacket? No. All right, just making sure. No, no, no, no. All right. I wanted to ask you about kind of where you see-- you know, you're doing these talks about Tetris. You're going around. You're talking to folks like us about it. What do you hope to get out of a conversation like this with a group at Google?

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.

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. And will you be here in New York for Climate Week? Oh, yeah. We do a bunch of events in Climate Week. We have an event at the Hard Rock Hotel at the end of Climate Week. That's our culminate. That's probably our biggest event of the year. Got it. Very cool. Very cool. Well, look, I want to thank Hank Rogers for coming here today. Thank you.

Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for helping bring Tetris out of Russia so we could all enjoy it. And remember what he said, everybody, only a few minutes today. We have a lot of work to do. All right. All right. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thanks for listening. You can watch this episode and tons of other great content at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Talk soon.