Henk Rogers on telling the real story of Tetris

When Henk Rogers read the text program for the first time Treis Film, shock. “There was a lot of Hollywood in the movie,” he says freedom. “He just paid me nuts.” The film is largely followed by a pivotal period in Rogers’s life, when he traveled to the Soviet Union to move on complex rights cases Treis To bring it to platforms like Game Boy. There, in contact with the Game Alexey Pajitnov creator, with whom he eventually formed a lifetime friendship, and transformed Treis In a global phenomenon.

The film turned this experience into something similar to stimulating high-risk-spying-while Rogers ended with the love of the final product, inspired by the initial experience of the story of what actually happened. “While reading the text program, I said,” I must set the record straight. “

This story is now in the form of the book The perfect game. While Rogers originally sat to write about the events that occurred in the film, he soon realized that the story was much larger. “I started writing it, and one of them looked at him and said:” This might be a book, it is not great enough, “he explained. So it ended with my career. “

The perfect game It begins to explore Rogers’s early life, as it rose from the Netherlands to New York City to Hawai Black ONEX. Even before the book reaches Treis Part of the story, it is full of great insight in the first days of the development of the game. Rogers speaks through many complications and nuances in dealing with publishers and financing, as well as launching and marketing a game in Japan despite the lack of Japanese.

But things already started in CES in 1988, when he traveled to Las Vegas in search of a new game for publication and stumbled in a puzzle game around the fallen blocks. As he says to her, he knew immediately that he had found something special. “I left the consumer electronics show with a feeling of goal,” Rogers wrote in his book. “I was determined to publish Treis In Japan. “This has proven difficult, and this is largely due to the network of copyright laws in the Soviet Union at that time.

The Rogers account is a detailed account, and it says it has written the book entirely from the memory. However, he has been achieved with his friend Pajitnov on some details, which led to one of the most charming book features. At different points, Pajitnov ideas are inserted into the book, as it often does not approve Rogers on small details, such as how much he admires the version Treis Or the quality of the elevator in the building of his apartment.

“Alexei read my manuscript and was writing in the margins where his memory differs, so I decided to keep it and put it in the book,” explains Rogers. “There are times when my memory is a little shaded, but it was an exciting time I remember greatly.”

Even if the excitement in Hollywood is lost the scenario that inspired Rogers to write in the first place, The perfect game It is a great reading, especially if you are interested in game development tales. And because the story covers the overall Rogers profession so far, which includes the creation of Tetris and the game brought to each imagined platform, there are many stories about the central points in the center, from the launch of Game Boy to the growing mobile games.

The story is especially noticeable Treis It continues to prosper. In addition to the film and the book, Rogers was also shown prominently in the operating documentary in the digital Eclipse Tetris foreverand The game is still emerging frequently in places like the new music application in Nintendo. Rogers has been largely away from work, which is now run by his daughter Maya. So far when he sees the game appears suddenly, it raises a different kind of feeling. He says, “It seems like success,” he says. “every time Treis It emanates somewhere, or a new deal that comes down to comfort, it is like, “Wow, it kills it.”

For this film, Rogers changed his opinion when he already saw it, describing the film as “emotionally correct”, even if he did not get all the facts correctly. He says: “The first time I saw her crying about things that did not actually happen.”