The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers

27:35Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1988, and Hank is hooked on Tetris and trying to find out everything he can about it. Who owns it? Who created it? And it turns out the inventor is this Russian computer guy at the Academy of Sciences in what was then the Soviet Union. Yeah, so Alexey Pajetnov is his name, and he's a mathematician working mostly on voice recognition. And he needed to move to a new machine, and he was assigned to learn how to program on that new machine. And he decided to make the pentomino puzzle. You get a little rectangle, and you have to put the pieces into the rectangle, and the last piece never fits.

28:24That's the pentomino puzzle. And he realized that it was so slow that he started thinking about, like, how can I make this, you know, faster? And then one of the things that he made is the routine to make the piece rotate. And the rotation was so fast that it started making him think that he should make a real-time game. Huh. And, well, he just took one of the blocks off the pentomino puzzle and made them into tetraminos. And, you know, well, that's basically Tetris. You know, the falling blocks. And this game, I guess, kind of was like wildfire in the Soviet Union. Like, office workers across the Soviet Union were, like, copying this game, like, from floppy disk to floppy disk and playing it.

29:13Yes. Basically, they made the PC version. And that's what went viral. And it went viral to the point where they were losing productivity. I mean, it's like... Everybody in the offices was playing Tetris, right? Everywhere. Everywhere. And it's like, yeah, you could say this could have been an insidious thing done by the West to stop people working in the Soviet Union. Ah, it was like a Western conspiracy to get people to stop working and play Tetris. It could easily have been. Right. But, you know. And I guess even like already in the mid 80s, people from outside the Soviet Union, Westerners, somehow discovered this game.

29:52It spread behind the Iron Curtain. All right. So meanwhile, I guess you had learned that there were two different companies that sort of seemed to have the rights to Tetris. One was in England. It was called Mirosoft. And the other was in the U.S. called Spectrum Holovite. But I guess you thought that maybe you could get the license for Japan. Is that what you were thinking? Yeah, I was thinking, well, first of all, I said, well, I know Mirosoft because I've been to England also looking for games. So I knew them. Then I got in contact with Mirosoft and they said, you know, Gilman-Louis is coming to Japan.

30:30He's going to deal the rights to Tetris. So talk to him. Fine. I knew Gilman-Louis. So this guy was a representative from? He was running Spectrum Hullabite. Right. And they were a sister company with Mirosoft. So he was coming to Japan to peddle this offer to see who would be the highest bidder. Yes. Gotcha. And I basically made him an offer for personal computers, for console, and for arcade. Those are all the platforms I could think of in Japan. Yeah. For the rights to get Tetris. Yes. So, yeah, we had a deal. And two weeks later, he calls me and he says, I'm really sorry. but the deal that we did couldn't have been made because meanwhile, Mirosoft has given all those rights to Atari games.

31:17So I go, what? And it was ridiculous. It was like they didn't need the Japanese rights for anything because they didn't have any business in Japan. And boy, are you kidding me? I was livid. We had made a deal. You know, when you shake a deal, it's like this is a lawsuit. I didn't threaten him with a lawsuit. I said, we made a deal, Gilman. And he, you know, sheepishly came back. He says, okay, I'll see what I can do. And what he could do was he could get me the personal computer rights back. So I had personal computers. You'd only have the rights to make a game in Japan for personal computers.

32:01So floppy disk, basically. Yes. But you wouldn't have the console rights or the arcade game rights. Right. Okay, so that was a consolation prize. Were you happy with that? No. I wanted Nintendo. You wanted the rights to put this on Nintendo because at that point Nintendo was really kind of a dominant console. Yes. It was the way to make money. Right. It's, you know, like personal computers, you can copy that stuff. Right. So there's only so much you can sell. But cartridges, you can't copy them. Yeah. If somebody wants to play a Nintendo game, they have to buy a Nintendo game. But you did not have those rights.

32:40You only had the PC rights. Right. All right. All right. So I guess you decided to reach out to Atari because you've been told that they had the rights for Tetris on the console. And you want to buy those rights from presumably from them, right? I mean, to publish the game in Japan. Oh, yeah. Then I started communicating directly with Atari games and said, look, I want to license Tetris for the Japanese market. And I said to my team in Japan, look, I'm going to the States. I'm not coming back until I have the Tetris rights. And so I went to San Jose. I met with Nakajima, the president of Atari games, and made my pitch why we should be the one to publish Tetris in Japan.

33:27and then it went radio silent. I was there for 10 days and then I had my second meeting. I had dinner with, we had sushi and he agreed. He agreed to give you the rights to publish Tetris for consoles in Japan. For Nintendo. So it was very, very interesting. I think he must have needed money at this point. I think I made the deal for$300 ,000. It was a regular deal. And the deal enabled you to have the license to sell the cartridges for the Nintendo system. Okay. Yes. And that was in like 88. Yeah, well, it was like probably September-ish. It takes two months to create the cartridges. So, you know, I was trying to make it in time for Christmas.

34:16How did you finance making the cartridges? Because you had to pay Nintendo to manufacture them. In the beginning, the orders weren't that big. The original order was 40 ,000 units, which is not enough. You need 200 ,000 units in order to get a second order. That 40 ,000, that was another reason for me to meet Yamauchi, the head of Nintendo. So I miss Mr. Yamauchi. I don't know whether it's my sales or my marketing, that sucks. But I think I may have one of the greatest computer games of all time, and my salespeople could only get 40 ,000 units. And then he calls in Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, and says, Miyamoto, is this a great game?

34:59And Miyamoto says, yes. And Yamauchi says, how do you know? He says, because your accountants, your secretaries, all of your people are playing this game at lunch and after work when they don't have to play games. And so Yamauchi calls in Imanishi, who's the number two at Nintendo. And I said, Imanishi, I want you to pull distribution and make them order more. That's like, wow, that's some serious action there. Wow. And that was simply because of his trusted lieutenant approved the game, liked the game. Well, there's that. And he liked me, I guess. I mean, why would he do something like that? You were his go buddy.

35:39Yeah, I was his go buddy. Anyway, they called around and we got another 30 ,000. So it was like 70 ,000. It wasn't enough. Still wasn't enough. But anyway, we published that Christmas 70 ,000 copies of Tetris on Nintendo. All right, so how did it do? At first it was miserable because you can't look at the box and understand what Tetris is. The only way that you can know what Tetris is is by playing it. No amount of advertising helps Tetris. You have to just play it. And so come January, it wasn't moving. Tetris wasn't moving. And what happens when they have product in January, like after Christmas, the distributors start dumping the rest of their inventory.

36:28They have to get rid of it because if it's not selling, it's never going to sell. Which means cut price, cut rate price. Yeah. And, oh, my goodness. I had my sales guys call every distributor, to hang on to your inventory. This is not like other games. It is going to take off much more slowly than other games. But once it takes off, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be a hit. And some distributors actually listened to us. Well, by the end of January, Tetris was sold out everywhere. And based on what? How? Well, people started playing it. They just started to discover it. Yeah, it went viral.

37:13But at the end of January, the orders started coming from distribution. They wanted more. And this time they wanted 200 ,000 copies of Tetris. And it's like, wow, where am I going to get the money to? That was more money than we could muster. You went to finance printing or manufacturing 200 ,000 more cartridges. Yeah, that's$2 million. So I convinced my wife to convince her parents to put up all of their real estate as collateral for a loan. Seems like a pretty good gamble, given that you'd sold it out and people were kind of going crazy over it. Yeah, yeah. It seemed like a slam dunk, right?

37:54I mean, like the game had taken off. They were clamoring for it. So we just had to rush to get this stuff into production. and yeah, I saw no reason not to make that gamble, so to speak. All right. So Tetris is starting to take off on the Nintendo consoles in Japan. And by the way, were they available on consoles in the U.S.? That would be later. Okay. That would be later. So right now this is just licensed in Japan. It's on the console, Nintendo console. In the meantime, you catch wind of a new product that Nintendo is working on. And this was going to be a handheld game system, which we now know and love as the Game Boy.

38:45But how did you find out about that product? You know, we are in the business. Everybody in the business knew that Nintendo was going to come out with this new machine. It wasn't like a big secret. Everybody in Japan knew about it. so when it was like going to come out and I saw the specs I said oh my god this first of all the screen is tiny second of all it's black and white and it doesn't have many dots on the screen so most games that are on console are colorful and have a lot of detail all that detail would be lost on this tiny screen but Tetris would work just perfectly yeah So the first thing I imagine is you go to Nintendo to pitch them on this idea.

39:33Yeah, I did go to Redmond and pitch it to Arakawa. President of Nintendo America. Yes. Why did you have to go to Nintendo U.S., right? Why not pitch it to Nintendo in Japan? Because Nintendo U.S. has a policy to include a game with every new hardware platform that they sell. I see. So you thought, wait, if we can get this included with every Game Boy, slam dunk. It's like when U2 released that record on every iPod, right? Everybody would have Tetris. Yeah, it would be an explosion. And it kind of was. So I went to Redmond and talked to Arakawa. And I said, Mr. Arakawa, you should include Tetris with the Game Boy.

40:18And he said, why should I include Tetris? I have Mario. The greatest, probably, brand that they had at that point. Yeah, and I said, if you want little boys to buy your Game Boy, then include Mario. But if you want everyone to buy your Game Boy, include Tetris. And then he calls in his experts, and they all came and said, yep, you know, Tetris is being played by everybody. It's completely genderless. You know, it's the first game that was being played by women. Yeah. Just by that alone, it could, you know, double the sales. And then I said, you know, and then you can still sell Mario afterwards because every kid's going to want to have Mario.

40:58And that convinced him. And that convinced him. So they agree to sell this with every Game Boy. But then you still had more work to do, right? Well, of course, I didn't have the rights for handheld. And did they know that? And Nintendo, did they say, well, or did you have to say to them, look, I don't have the rights, but I'm going to get them. So let's just, you know. Yeah, I mean, you know, part of my business strategy is I never lie to anybody. I never say I have something that I don't have. You know, I would say I can get you the rights. And by that time, by the way, I had already hired Robert Stein to get me the handheld rights.

41:38And I guess I even mentioned him. Robert Stein is kind of a key player in the story because he was this guy who early on negotiated with the Soviets to get the license for Tetris for other companies overseas. And so I guess presumably he knew the right people in Russia. He knew where to go. Right. Okay. So you had hired him to be your agent in Moscow to get you the handheld rights to the game. That's right. That's right. Okay. I got you. So you were fairly confident this is going to be a pretty straightforward transaction. Yeah. Yeah. And I've been faxing him. This is still the days of fax. I've been faxing him, you know, every week, like, what's going on?

42:25When are you going to give me the rights? And so on and so forth. And he just like, yeah, I'm going to do it soon. I'm going to do it soon. I'm going to do it soon. And so that's kind of the situation I was in when it became February of 1989. So what happened was Arakawa made me a deal. I made him an offer and he shook my hand. It was like a million dollar up front, which was like, yeah, right on. Great deal. He would pay you a million dollars up front? A million dollars up front. It was a dollar a unit for a million units. That was his minimum guarantee. Right. We shook hands on that. And then I'm back in Japan and I'm like, now I'm really on Stein.

43:09Come on, we got to get this deal done. Let's go, let's go. It turns out that Stein had to clear up the original contracts that he had because they were crap. They were really bad, badly written contracts. And, you know, it was like taking candy from a baby kind of stuff. The Soviets just didn't have any experience with intellectual property. And here they were, you know, they were getting a percentage of a percentage of a percentage. The Russians weren't getting anything. They weren't getting anything. But you were not getting enough communication or feedback from him. It was making you nervous.

43:52And so you decided to take drastic action, I guess. Yeah, I took drastic action. I got a tourist visa and went to Moscow myself. In February of 89, you fly to Moscow. This is like at the height of Glasnost, right? Yeah, well, Perestroika and Glasnost were just starting to happen. So it wasn't like going to North Korea today. It was already people were already feeling a little bit of freedom. Right. The Berlin Wall would come down several months later, but still it was a time of liberalization. Yes. But you decided that you had to go there to figure out what was going on because you had no insight.

44:31Well, I needed to get there before Stein licensed it to Mirrorsoft or somebody else. Right. Because then you would lose the opportunity to have Tetris on every Game Boy. I would, yeah, I would be losing out on the million dollar deal. Come on. Right, right. Right. So you get to Moscow in February of 1989. And of course, that's where Tetris was invented by Alexei, by Alexei Pajetnov. Right. And he was like a software guy who worked for the government. Like he didn't have the rights to the game, right? But there was this one Soviet organization that I guess you could maybe talk to about the rights.

45:17And it was called like Elorg or Elorg. Yes. Electronorg Technica. Okay. And it was the Soviet organization that oversaw software and hardware exports, I guess. Yeah. Export, imports. I don't exactly know what, but they were definitely the ones that had the power to speak to people outside. So what happened when you went to Moscow and showed up there at Elor? You walk into the lobby and you say, what? Well, it's before this, okay? I'm outside the door, and my interpreter says, you can't go in there. I said, what do you mean I can't go in there? I said, you have a tourist visa. You can't go in there.

46:01I said, look, I didn't come all this way to stand in front of a door and go back to Japan, get a visa, and then come back. No, that's not how it works. I'm going in. Are you coming with me? No, I can't. I was like, okay, fine, I'm going in. And I went in and it's a lobby of, you know, office building kind of place. And there's the window off to the side. You could see that's the window where you're supposed to present your credentials. Yeah. Well, obviously I didn't have any credentials, so I didn't go to that window. I just stood there in the lobby and waited for somebody to speak to me. Yeah.

46:38So it took a while, but, you know, maybe like, I don't know, 10 minutes. Finally, somebody came and talked to me, and she said, what are you looking for? In English, she asked you. In English, yes, in English. And so I showed her. I'm the publisher of this game, Tetris, and I'm looking for someone to talk to me about the Game Boy Rides. And she said, okay, wait here. And she disappeared, and a little while later comes down the stairs, comes this old man, and that was Mr. Belly Cough. And who is Mr. Belikoff? Well, I didn't know who he was at the time. I had no idea who anybody was. But Mr. Belikoff would be the one that I would negotiate this whole deal with.

47:24So he comes down. Was he mad? Was he puzzled? Was he warm? No, he was puzzled. You know, hello. And, you know, who are you? What do you want? And I said, I'm the publisher of this game in Japan. And he took the Tetris cartridge box into his hand and he looked at it and looked at it. And he looked at me and he said, we never licensed console rights to anyone. You showed him a Nintendo cartridge of Tetris and he said, you don't have the rights to this. Nobody has the rights to this. Did he even know what it was? Did he know what a Nintendo system was? Kind of. I think he figured it out pretty quickly.

48:06I don't know if I described it to him. He knew it wasn't for a PC. That's right. And so did he say, come into my office? No, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no. I did not know who he was, and I did not want to just talk to an underling. I wanted to talk to somebody who could make a decision. And so I said, I will come back tomorrow. I would like to meet someone to talk about the Game Boy rights. But you missed the point just now. I'm standing there and he's just told me that I don't have the right to publish the 200 ,000 cartridges. And by the way, to be clear, you thought you already had those rights.

48:51They were for the console, which you would like leverage the$2 million for. Yes. So I'm in the middle of that. They're already in manufacture. I'm not going to get my money back. if somebody else swoops in and gets those rights, I am totally screwed. Yeah. And so I... You have to destroy those games. Yeah, exactly. And so I decided I'm going to focus on the Game Boy deal. Let me do that one thing which is absolutely clear. And he says, I'll come back tomorrow. So he said, yes, come back tomorrow at 1 o 'clock, whatever. And the reason I wanted it to be the next day is because I wanted him to have the right people in the room.

49:34Right. And the next day, in the room, eight people and me, I was being interrogated. Who are you? What are you doing? And, you know, I'm a Dutchman who sounds like an American who has a publishing company in Japan publishing, you know, a game that he claims to have licensed from. And did they seem hostile? So like, hey, like, like sort of looking at you like you were a thief, like you had stolen this, the rights to this? Yeah, it was very strange. Yeah, they were very suspicious. Yeah. I mean, who the hell am I? When we come back in just a moment, a secret shot of vodka to celebrate a deal. And Hank starts a new company with the one guy who hasn't made a dime of Tetris, its inventor.

50:30Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

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53:02Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. So it's early 1989, and Hank Rogers is in Moscow, hoping to get the rights to publish Tetris on the Game Boy. And he's sitting in the one Soviet office where he might be able to negotiate that, Elorg, which oversees the export of computer software. Trouble is, the meeting feels more like an interrogation. And then Hank learns that one of the people in the room is Alexei Pashatnov, the inventor of Tetris. He had to be in the room because he's the only one in the room who knew anything about computer games besides me. Those guys, a lot of them had no clue. All they understood was money, license, you know, that kind of stuff.

53:50They didn't understand what a game was. So when you met Alexei, were you like, it's such an honor to meet you. I love your game. Do you remember what you said to him? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. I'm in love with your game. You've created something amazing. And, you know, it's very interesting because Alexei, I talked to him about the game. And Alexei, that was the thing that flipped him because he'd never met a game designer before. I was the first game designer that he met. He'd met other people like Robert Stein who were wheeler dealers and trying to license, but they weren't game designers.

54:35I was a game designer. So you had to untangle. So this conversation really, you had to begin by untangling the facts, figuring out what happened, because as far as you were concerned, You had the legitimate rights to this, but they probably wanted to understand what happened. And you had to start to say, well, there's this guy Stein and they probably knew Stein. And so this must have been a very complicated conversation. Well, okay. So I had to explain to them how the whole business works. I basically taught them everything they needed to know about what the computer game, What's the difference between console and personal computer and arcade and how each of these things made money?

55:20I basically explained everything to them. And there was somebody in the room translating everything you were saying? For those that didn't speak English, yeah, they would stop every once in a while and go into Russian whatever discussion. And it's funny because when they get into a discussion, sometimes it sounds like they're fighting. Right. It's like, are they talking, like trying to decide which gulag they're going to send me to? Is that what they're – it was kind of creepy, you know, because they're arguing with each other. And then they would come back and start speaking English to me again.

55:57So you start to explain all this to them. And at the end of the – it was a couple hours, presumably. At the end of it, were they like, oh, okay, we get it now. Thank you so much for explaining this. Well, they visibly relaxed, and they said, okay, make us an offer. For what? Yeah. First of all, they asked me, so, Mr. Rogers, when do you plan to come back to Moscow? And I said, what do you mean, come back to Moscow? They said, well, you know, we have to think about this and make our decision. And I said, that's not how it works. When I leave here, I either leave here with the Game Boy rights or I leave here without the Game Boy rights.

56:42But I'm not coming back. I started realizing that I have to be forceful with them because they're forceful with each other. You know what I'm saying? There's not a warm and fuzzy, nice conversation. No, it's all kind of adversarial. They were that way with each other. So then I started realizing I have to be that way too. And so they said, well, make us an offer. I said, okay. I went back to my hotel, and I made a little one-page legalese document, and I presented it to them the next day. And I gave them a week, and we managed to hammer out an agreement within that week. And the offer that I made them was I would pay them 25 cents for every Game Boy Tetris that was sold.

57:31and I'd, you know, we'd sort of like, on the back of the envelope, how many units will Nintendo sell that include Tetris? And that number was something like 30 million. So 30 million times 25 cents is a big number. So if you sold 10 million units, they'd get$2.5 million, basically. Exactly. Okay. And I mean, in today's terms, it doesn't sound like a lot of money, but that was a lot of money back then? That was an impossibly huge amount of money for them. Right. I got you. Okay. So you were taking a gamble, but you knew that this game was already taking off in Japan. And that you already had the agreement from Nintendo USA to put it with every Game Boy sold as a bundled game that was included.

58:23Yeah. So they agreed, and you were there, and it took you about a week to make this deal? Yeah. Next Friday, we signed a deal. We broke Gorbachev rule, which has no alcohol in the office, and we broke out a bottle of vodka and all had a shot. They posted people by the doors and the windows to make sure nobody was watching. And so after I signed the contract, lockdown handheld, Mr. Belikoff asks me, Mr. Rogers, how would you like to license the console rights? And like, wow, that sounds, yes, of course. And of course, he could offer you that because as he already told you, nobody owned the console rights at the time, right?

59:12Not you or Atari or Nintendo, no one. Nobody. Okay. And at this point, this all gets a little complicated and sort of tied up in legal red tape. But I guess eventually when all was said and done, you made out pretty well. You secured the rights for Nintendo in Japan. And then you also had the rights, the worldwide rights to Tetris on the Game Boy, right? Yeah, absolutely. And what happened when Tetris was shipped off with the Game Boys? Oh, and they end up doing 30 million. 30 million. 30 million packed in and another 5 million just sold as a box product. Wow. And meanwhile, I mean, in the early 1990s, the Soviet Union dissolves, right?

1:00:02That's right. And so a lot of these kind of government organizations get privatized and ALORG becomes a private company. And Alexei, the inventor of the game, he actually had to make a deal with them, I guess, that in 1995, he would finally get the rights. Well, the rights would revert back to him, right? Yes. Because he had not made a dime off Tetris at this point. The guy, right? He had not made a cent. Not a cent. All the money was going to the Soviet agency. And who knows who was skimming off the top, right? Right. Exactly. So all the people who ended up like, how did Belikov go from being an administrator of a government organization to owning it?

1:00:51Right. How did that happen? Yeah. I remember there was a very interesting moment in time when it was just the transition when it became a private company. and it was Mr. Belikov called me up in a panic and said, you know, the money that you cabled me, can you like get it back and then send it to this new bank account? Yes, to the attention of M. Belikov. Yeah. So Alexei had anticipated this all and they were going to put up a fight because there's some real money to be made. And how did you manage to prevent that from happening? Which is why Alexei asked me to help him. And it's 93, and he said, look, I'm going to make you an offer.

1:01:38You're going to represent me. You're going to take care of me. And you and me are going to be partners. And basically made me an offer, and we shook hands in 93. That handshake is still alive today. Okay. He said, you get a cut, I'll get a cut, But I want you to be in charge of resting the rights away from these. Well, not resting the right. I want you to make sure that I get my rights back. Right. But anyway, during 95, the Lorg came. We had the meeting in Redmond and I was ready to, I mean, I was representing Alexei. I was ready to give them 20 percent and they were ready to give me 20 percent.

1:02:24So we were very far apart. You were far away. Very far apart. And I remember being in a room, and it's all Nintendo lawyers, and then there's Mr. Belikoff and his lawyer. And I said, well, I'm not a lawyer, but I kind of feel that at some point there's going to be a jury of Americans that are going to decide who owns the rights to Tetris, whether it's the former Soviet Ministry of Import and Export of Software or the creator of the game. So what happened? So basically, I start hammering out the deal with Belikov. And we end up making the Tetris company. And it's 50-50. That's because they had the copyright and trademark in 60 countries.

1:03:14And that was just too much for me to try to fight. So they would own half of the rights and you and Alexi would own the other half, essentially. That was the agreement you made. That's how we divide the money. So basically, we just decided to, I don't know, call it truce. Yeah. So now you have an incentive to expand the brand because you own 50 % of it. Like if you were just a licensee, you have no incentive to make it better because you're essentially they own the IP. And so you're like, well, why are we going to make it better? You understand it exactly. And I said, look, before we split the money, I'm going to need the money to brand manage this game.

1:03:53And so I want a percentage off the top to do all of the licensing and to do all of the brand management. The problem was that up till then, everybody who licensed Tetris from Elorg basically had no guide about how to build Tetris. And so the versions of Tetris that came out of different publishers were very different. Give you an example. A Game Boy player in Japan could not play the arcade because it's like the brakes and the gas pedal were reversed. Yeah. So it was my job to standardize Tetris across all platforms. And we've done that. But seven years into it, Belikov team got greedy. and they said, well, we don't actually want you to do brand management.

1:04:44We just want to find somebody to license Tetris because we don't want to pay you to doing brand management. Without understanding that brand management is really, really important. Yeah. They wanted to stop paying you the fee to manage it and that presumably created another conflict. Yeah, that created a conflict. And in all of the deals up till then, the way it worked is I get one vote, Belikov gets one vote. If it's yes, yes, then it's a deal. If it's yes, no, then it's no deal. So basically at that point for the next three years, no deals went through because every deal that I brought to the table, he said no.

1:05:23And every deal that he brought to the table, I said no. Which was impossible and untenable. So you had to figure out either to buy them out or for them to buy you out. And they were probably not going to buy you out. Yeah. So during those three years, I had gotten a license to Tetris for mobile phones in the U.S., and I hid it out of the park in the U.S. I made a company called Blue Lava Wireless, and I basically published Tetris and other games. And I read that you guys were doing like more than$20 million in sales. Right, exactly, and that's, I don't know, 50 % profit. But at the end of three years, my license ran out.

1:06:11And during that three years, Belikov and me, we were duking it out. We were in court. I'm on the way to proving that he has no rights at all in New York. And so we were on the way. And meanwhile, there's this company Jamdat that comes along and offers to buy Blue Lava Wireless and obtain a license to Tetris. But what was their incentive to buy it if your license for mobile was about to expire? Yeah. So what I had to do is I had to collect the worldwide rights to Tetris on mobile into Blue Lava Wireless. And in order to do that, I had to get rid of Belikov. So I raised the money to buy out Belikov.

1:06:59You raised the money to buy out the former Elorg guys. They were still called Elorg, I think, but that was a private company. Yep. I ended up buying them. I own Elorg now. So now with them out of the picture, with the Elorg guys out of the picture, you and Alexei owned 100 % of this company. Yes. And the company that I sold, Blue Lava Wireless, What I did was I gave that company a 15-year license to Tetris from the Tetris company. So we never lost ownership of Tetris. And they bought you guys out for like$130 million. They paid a lot of money. Yeah, they paid a lot of money. It's good. So, all right, so this happens.

1:07:392005, you're free and clear. You sell Blue Lava. Finally, you own, you know, you guys own Tetris. And like a month later, you get a massive heart attack. You're playing golf and you like near death, like you were just on the edge of death. Yeah, it was actually tennis. The ambulance driver said that he didn't think I was going to make it. Wow. When I got to the hospital, they rolled me straight into the OR. I was still conscious. I signed the paper saying, yes, you can operate, which is nice because if I couldn't sign, my wife would have had to sign. She didn't know where I was. Yeah. So I would have died.

1:08:22Wow. I have two stents. I have two stents. But in that ambulance on the way to the hospital, the first thing I thought was, you've got to be kidding me. I haven't spent any of the money yet. I made all this money and now I'm about to die. Are you going to take me out? The second thing I said, no, I'm not going. I still have stuff to do. And so, you know, in the recovery room, I started thinking about what did I mean by that. Before you tell me about that, were you, I mean, And I mean, I've talked to you, I've seen you. You seem like a pretty healthy guy. I mean, was it just the stress and the lifestyle of just grinding for all those years that led you to that point?

1:08:58Were you not living a healthy life or were you just genetically predisposed to it or what? The doctor said, don't change a thing. Don't change your exercise. Don't change your diet. You're fine. This is an anomaly. so yeah i mean you could say that it was stress and all this kind of stuff but i i just generally don't take stress maybe i do and i just don't realize it but uh i'm pretty relaxed about things wow um all right so this happens and you've achieved success financial success and yet like you were in your death you must have had some big thoughts i would imagine hank yeah Yeah, well, I kind of worked it back from the end of my life.

1:09:46You know, I thought about what is it that's going to upset me if I didn't do something by the end of my real life the next time. And I found my bucket list. I searched for and found my missions in life. Tell me what you started to think. Well, the first one came to me in the back of the newspaper. It said, oh, by the way, we're going to kill all the coral in the world by the end of the century. And what's causing that is ocean acidification. What's causing that? It's carbon dioxide. What's causing that? We are. So mission number one is to end the use of carbon-based fuel. And I started a foundation in Hawaii called the Blue Planet Foundation, and we worked to end the use of carbon-based fuel in Hawaii.

1:10:27So you decide that you're going to devote your life to environmental causes, that you were moving away from video game. I mean, you still own the license of Tetris, but you were going to shift your focus on climate change causes, issues? Well, it's not just climate change. I have four missions, but yeah. Please tell me what they are. First mission is to end the use of carbon-based fuel. Second one is to end war, which goes back to when I was a student in high school. It's ambitious, but okay, I like it. And number three is to make a backup of life by going to other planets and bringing life to other planets.

1:11:02I like it. And number four is to find out how the universe ends and do something about it. Hmm. I think the reason that the last one exists is to make the other ones seem reasonable when they could seem unreasonable. Yeah. Okay, so in the scope of things, compared to the end of the universe, you know, fixing climate change is just a blip. Yeah. And I just like this blip to happen faster. And to me, people ask me if I have hope. I say, no, I don't have hope. I have determination because we're going to fix this. There's no doubt in my mind that we're going to fix this. How much damage we do to this planet on the way to fixing it, that's up to us.

1:11:44So, Hank, I mean, when you think about, you know, the journey you took, I mean, you know, from sort of kind of jewelry guy with your dad and, you know, kind of building this game company and then coming across Tetris and really making a gamble, right? Putting a lot of emotional energy and time into this game and risking a lot and, you know, believing in it to where you are now. I mean, obviously, you know, you made a lot of money off of this and now you can deploy that money for some of the causes you are committed to. How much of where you are now do you think is because of how hard you worked and your intelligence and how much do you attribute to luck?

1:12:34oh it's it's all because of hard work i mean this is not like i rolled a dice and something happened i like to compare it to surfing i used to i used to surf um and basically you know someday a giant wave is going to come and if you haven't surfed the small waves and worked and worked and paddled and paddled and learned all that stuff, then when that big wave comes up, you're just going to get killed. You need to know how to surf before you, you know, and you can't read about it in a book. You've got to get out in the water and try stuff. Yeah. By the way, is Alexei still involved with the company?

1:13:18Is he just kind of a passive owner in a sense? Well, he is as involved as I am. So whenever something comes up, we both have to agree to a license. That's the way it is now. So we look at every deal. We still go to, like we were just in Vegas at the licensing show. So we're merchandising to all kinds of brands that want to use Tetris on, I don't know, shoes, backpacks, cups, who knows. So there's that whole side of the business that we're still involved in. And Alexei lives in the United States now, right? Yes, he does. You know, and if we're in the same jurisdiction, like if we're both in Seattle or both in New York, every other night, bottle of wine, guaranteed.

1:14:06We worked hard to keep Tetris alive. People ask me if I'm Mr. Tetris. I said, no, I'm Dr. Tetris. Alexei is Mr. Tetris. I'm Dr. Tetris. We're best friends forever. That's the way it is. That's Hank Rogers, co-founder of the Tetris Company. And by the way, even though he and Alexi are no longer running it, it is still pretty much in the family. My daughter runs it now. So she takes care of the whole thing. My daughter, Maya, when she was 15, she asked me, so I asked her, what do you want to be when you grow up? And she said, I don't know, but I want to make more money than you. So she's on it. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week.

1:14:52Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show, and it's totally free. This episode was produced by Sam Paulson with music composed by Ramteen Arablui and Sam Paulson. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Catherine Seifer. Our audio engineer was Gilly Moon. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Casey Herman, Alex Chung, Carrie Thompson, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, Chris Messini, and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

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