Founder & Publisher · Bullet-Proof Software · 1983–present
The publisher who flew to Moscow without an appointment, talked his way into a Soviet state software agency, and came back with the handheld rights to Tetris.
Henk Rogers had already built a career in Japan before Tetris found him. He founded Bullet-Proof Software there and made his name with The Black Onyx in 1984, a role-playing game widely credited with helping establish the genre with Japanese players at a point when the domestic market had shown little interest in it. That gave him something most Western businessmen dealing with Japanese publishers did not have: a track record inside the Japanese industry and the relationships that came with it. He saw Tetris at a trade show in Las Vegas in 1988, recognised immediately what it was, and acquired Japanese rights through the licensing chain that ran back from Spectrum HoloByte and Andromeda Software to Moscow, publishing it on the Famicom in December 1988. The problem was that the chain did not hold. Rights had been sub-licensed, re-sub-licensed and assumed rather than granted, and the further anyone looked into who actually controlled what, the less any of it survived inspection — in particular, nobody could establish that console rights had ever been licensed at all. In early 1989 Rogers flew to Moscow and went to Elorg, the Soviet state agency that held the rights, without an appointment, which is not a thing one did in the Soviet Union. He got in, spent days in negotiation with Elorg's Nikolai Belikov, and became friends with Alexey Pajitnov in the process. What he left with was the handheld licence — which he took to Nintendo, and which put Tetris in the box with every Game Boy. The consequences ran in both directions: Tetris sold the Game Boy to an audience that had never bought a games machine, and the Game Boy made Tetris one of the most widely played games ever written. Rogers and Pajitnov went on to co-found The Tetris Company in 1996, which finally gave the designer a financial stake in his own creation.