The men who created Tetris reflect on their bromance
Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers have known each other a long time. The man who created Tetris and the man who (more or less) sold it to the world met 34 years ago in a government office in Moscow. Later, they founded a company together to manage the rights to Pajitnov’s timeless creation. Talking to me over Zoom to promote the new Tetris movie on Apple TV Plus — a film which concocts a watchable, frothy Cold War spy thriller out of the extraordinary true story of Rogers’ initial negotiations with the Soviet Union — the pair communicate with sideways glances and hands placed on shoulders, teasing and correcting each other like the old comrades they are.
They’re chalk and cheese, in some ways. Pajitnov, who still speaks with a strong Russian accent, is a thoughtful, kindly science-teacher type, while Rogers is every inch the slick salesman, leaning into the camera conspiratorially to spin his yarns. But they are both game designers, too, even if neither of them particularly planned to be. And it was thanks to this kinship that they formed an instantaneous bond in that meeting room in 1989.
“I came in on Thursday… I think it was Wednesday, maybe,” says Rogers, who has a habit of referring to long-distant events as if they happened last week. He was in Moscow, uninvited and unannounced, to try to secure the handheld rights to Tetris, for which he was (or believed he was) the licensed publisher in Japan. Nintendo had let him in on a little secret: It was preparing the Game Boy for release, and Rogers knew that Tetris would be the perfect game for it. But the rights were in a mess, and the Russian communist state held all the cards. (This part of the story is quite accurately told in the movie; although it indulges in wild
Read more on polygon.com
