Tetris: Building a Brand Beyond the Block

0:00Jason:Are you looking to diversify your business portfolio with high growth opportunity? Discover Mathnasium Learning Centers, the number one math-only education franchise. For more than 20 years, Mathnasium has triumphed in a booming multi-billion dollar tutoring industry with over 1 ,200 centers worldwide. Ranked on Entrepreneur's Franchise 500 list for 11 consecutive years, Mathnasium is low-cost, recession-resistant, and offers significant growth potential in an expanding market. The demand for math education is skyrocketing, driven by declining math scores and the growing need for STEM skills in today's workforce.

0:41Jason:What makes Mathnasium a smart investment? Here are four reasons. Number one, affordable entry point and quick build-out time. Number two, high-earning centers with seven-figure annual revenue. Number three, industry leading 30 % plus average profit margins. And number four, trusted brand with high customer satisfaction scores. And here's something extra. They're offering a 25 % discount on the franchise fee for former teachers and veterans. Whether you're expanding your franchise portfolio or making your first investment, Mathnasium gives you the systems and support you need to succeed. Get your free franchise information kit at mathnasiumfranchise.com or call 888-763-2604.

1:31Jason:That's mathnasiumfranchise.com or call 888-763-2604.

1:46time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. What is it that you can take with your product brand IP? At the core of it, what makes that special? And I think if you can refine it and really define that part of it, then you can start expanding it.

2:25Jason:Running a business means solving problems. I tell you how the smartest entrepreneurs do it. Hi, I'm Jason Pfeiffer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and this is Problem Solvers.

2:39Jason:You can make the argument, I'm going to make the argument that Tetris is the most popular, well-known, best video game in the world. And I'm not saying that just because today I'm talking to the president and CEO of Tetris. I'm saying that because is there truly a simpler game, a just more intuitively connective game? Tetris came out in 1984. I was born in 1980. I wasn't playing Tetris when it came out, but I was playing Tetris pretty shortly after. And I can remember standing on a stage at Nintendo World Championships, or at least the local version of it that I went to, and playing Tetris and then winning a Game Boy where I just played more Tetris.

3:22Jason:And now as an adult, I look back extremely fondly upon Tetris. And I thought, I will be honest, that is a moment in time. That is a video game that that changed video games. And then I learned that there is a person whose name is Maya Rogers, who is the president and CEO of Tetris, who is thinking bigger about what this brand could be. And I had to, I had to know, how do you think about something that is this classic, but that is also anchored to a very specific thing. When I think of Tetris, I think of playing a video game in the 80s and 90s and rethink it for a modern audience in a modern ecosystem.

4:06Jason:That is what we're talking about today on Problem Solvers. I have Maya Rogers with me. Maya Rogers, thank you so much for joining me and answering these very pressing Tetris questions. Thank you for having me, Jason. Okay, Maya, you are the CEO and president of Tetris. What does that mean? You know, for me, it's not just about the video game, but it's about the experience that people have endured around the video game. And really, my charge is to take the brand beyond. Right. So you kind of mentioned, you know, the game came. The game was created in 1984 by a guy named Alexey Pajitnov, who was a programmer out of Russia.

4:49And he's still involved with the business today. but it's about how do we make sure that this experience that really changed the video game world, how do we make sure that that is protected and sort of spread around the world? Because Alexa created the perfect game. And this is why the game is so relevant today. And we've done so many variations of it. But as CEO of Tetris, I feel that, you know, it's something that I grew up with also. And it brings me joy. And how can I spread that to the rest of the world? And that's what I do. That's what I get to do every day.

5:24Jason:Okay, I want to know your answers to these questions of how to spread this brand and this joy. But first, we should know where you're coming from and what experience and expertise you're bringing to this. So tell me a little bit about you and how you became CEO of Tetris. Many of you may have watched the Tetris movie on Apple TV Plus that came out three years ago now. It is a story about a guy named Hank Rogers, a Dutch-American entrepreneur who goes to the Soviet Union in the 1980s to try to get the handheld rights for Tetris. And Hank Rogers happens to be my father. So for me, same last name.

6:05So for me, I was, when you say like I grew up with, you grew up with Tetris, I literally grew up with Tetris. I remember when my father had brought it back home for the first time and we were playing it, you know. So my experience really is, yeah, I've lived and breathed the world of Tetris through a childhood. But now I've been running the company for the last 12 years. And yeah, my career started with Sony PlayStation. I worked on Gran Turismo and Hot Shots Golf. And I was in charge of localization, so games that came out of Japan. And so I should also mention that I also grew up in Japan. during this time.

6:48So really, I grew up in the era when Nintendo came out, Famicom came out, and it wasn't just that our family was playing it. It was everybody in my school, all my friends, you know? So I really grew up in the renaissance of the video game era through Famicom and Nintendo days.

7:05Jason:Right. And for those who don't know, certainly in the 80s and 90s, Japan was the origin point for video game culture. The most classic games were coming out of that country, that region, right? Although Tetris, interestingly, was an anomaly to that because Tetris came out of Russia. Yeah. So, you know, it was so the history of it is Alexei created it in a lab. And once he did, right, everybody in the lab started playing it and really spread like wildfire throughout Russia and Eastern Europe and eventually made its way to the UK. And from there, it was showcased at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show.

7:45That's where my father discovered it. He knew there was something special about the game. He kept coming back to it over and over. And he basically got a Tours visa and flew to the Soviet Union and tried to find a Ministry of Games. And this is how he got the rights to Tetris and brought it to Nintendo. And so, you know, Nintendo didn't create Tetris, but Hank was sort of the person that convinced Mr. Arakawa to bring Tetris to the Game Boy, and it was the perfect match. And that really, I think, changed the trajectory of the Nintendo business and the Game Boy business and what video games are today.

8:24Jason:Totally, and it certainly changed the trajectory of my childhood because I spent a lot of time playing Tetris on the Game Boy. So, okay, Maya, I'd love to hear you unpack how you see a brand like Tetris now Where are the opportunities? And as I ask that question, I just want to layer on top of it things that I'm observing, which is, okay, number one, Tetris doesn't have a character. There's no Mario to anchor it around. So there's no narrative necessarily to even anchor it around. And I suppose that creates some challenges, but also maybe a lot of freedom because Tetris can be so many things in so many different ways.

9:03Jason:So maybe start from the beginning as you just look at this brand and think, what can this be now? Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. You know, there's pros and cons of not having characters. And we've toyed with the idea many, many times. But the beauty of it is that Tetris is geometric and it is sort of a universal thing that people can relate to. So we can collaborate with different companies and different brands. Like last year, we did a collaboration with Minecraft. We did a collaboration with StumbleGuys. Right now we have a collab with Space Invaders on the mobile game, for example. But I think it's really the universal play.

9:41And there's something about the human want or need to want to create order out of chaos. And that mechanism, however it's played and however it's displayed, Tetris kind of gives it to you in the perfect way. And so I think for us, it's just making sure that that is sort of wherever games are played, we try to create some kind of variation of Tetris.

10:03Jason:Yeah, this makes me wonder if you have a specific North Star for what you ultimately want consumers to do. And here, I'm just going to guess, I haven't talked to the CEO of Lego about this, but as I think about the great job that Lego has done with their movies and their push into pop culture, it all funnels back to purchase Legos, right? And as a father of a 10-year-old and a seven-year-old boy, I can see it working. Those kids love, love putting together Lego sets. And those are really expensive Lego sets that we got to spend a lot of money on. So I can see how this works. You watch the Lego movie, you feel engaged in Lego.

10:44Jason:And they did an interesting thing where they did create characters inside of that world in a way that kind of didn't really exist before in Lego. And the ultimate point of it is to drive people towards the hero product. Do you think similarly, do you ultimately want people to be playing Tetris the game? Or do you want to think of Tetris as more of a, I don't even know, a multi-level experience, brand, lifestyle, whatever? Well, it's really both. But if you look at the Lego business, what made them sort of the global, you know, industry leader today is that they went back to the basics. They went back to the factory lines of how do you modify and make sure that that's the original game or the Tetris, not Tetris, sorry.

11:36The original Lego set is easy to purchase and all of that. They streamlined all of that first before they were really able to expand it into characters and movies and what it is today. And I think similarly with Tetris is it all comes back to the game. The core game has to have that thing that's going to make you come back. And so always game is number one. And so wherever games are played, you know, video games are going to be played for the rest of time. But it's just going to be in different platforms and different ways to play. So making sure that the same, what do you call it, the creating order out of chaos kind of mechanism, like that is what makes Tetris.

12:18And also what makes Tetris unique is that we were the first game to say that we were able to protect the gameplay. There was a lawsuit back many years ago that kind of proved that you can protect the brand with gameplay. And so it's always going to be the game. But now we've expanded it beyond video games. So today, if you ask my kids who are five and almost seven, you know, their play with Tetris is through the board game or through a Tetris tumble. It's through toys. It's, you know, they're almost too young to play video games, although they're starting to now. But we've expanded it to the point where you can play something that is not the original video game form factor and people still relate it to, oh, this is Tetris.

13:06Jason:I wasn't aware of the legal stuff, but just unpack that for a second because that sounds really interesting. In other words, because Tetris is geometric figures, a square or a line of squares is not protectable the way that the Super Mario character is. And so that, in a way, could make Tetris seem to be easily knocked off. but what you have managed to do was secure intellectual property protection for the gameplay structure so that even though you can't protect the individual pieces, you can protect the way in which they interact. Is that right? Absolutely. So nobody else can make a Tetris game.

13:51People think that it's, you know, so we do a lot in the sort of the IP enforcement side, but what you think of when you play Tetris, you know, without going into the details, if it plays like Tetris, if it feels like Tetris, then that is protected. Got it.

14:07Jason:That's so interesting. Okay. So how do you think, or rather, Maya, as I'm thinking about this, I'm realizing that there was a trap that you could have fallen into. And that trap was purely playing off of people's nostalgic relationship to Tetris and just trying to get it into the places where people my age in their 40s are hanging out in pop culture and just kind of ride that for a while? People are nostalgic. They might engage with Tetris. Maybe they want to buy a Tetris shirt. And you could have done that. But what you would have done is you would have essentially anchored the brand to the aging of the population.

14:49Jason:And then at some point, it wouldn't have gotten passed down or wouldn't have gotten picked up. So how do you think about playing Tetris to these different audiences? Sounds like you are thinking about how do you get it in front of and engage with an audience like me who thinks about it from their childhood, but then also how do you introduce it totally fresh and anew to my kids? How are you thinking about those two different approaches? So we became a licensing business, um, some time ago. So this is what we do now. We, you know, basically work with what I call subject matter experts, right? They know their audience in that field, so they're coming up with ideas.

15:30Obviously, we are also involved in that process. But, for example, in the video game side, right now there's a game called Tetris 99, which is a battle royale style that exists on a Nintendo Switch world. And that was a new iteration that brought Tetris into a whole new set of players, right? younger generation that is playing Nintendo Switch. We have a game called Tetris Effect or Tetris Effect Connected. And that was a game that initially launched on the PSVR. And it really brought Tetris into a whole new generation. And I mean, when I say whole new generation, like they made, you know, with our partners in hands, they made this game into a surreal, like amazing music and visuals kind of experience that you had never seen with a Tetris game before.

16:19And that is another perfect example of how we evolved the original Tetris game into something super modern, so out of the box that I think the audience wasn't expecting it, but it's been such an amazing game for us. And so it's really like, if you look at the movie business, right, initial movies, black and white, no sound, and look at the movies today. Like this is how the movies have evolved like we've evolved tetris so if you compared the original tetris game maybe on the electronica 60 that alexi had created to even the game boy tetris into all the different variations their core the core is the same you're getting the same entertainment value but the expression of it is so different and people are playing differently so we've evolved the game in that way through the years.

17:08Jason:I remember talking to Richard Dixon, who at the time was, I think, president, sorry, Richard, if I got that wrong, of Mattel. He then said that the way in which he thought about revitalizing that brand was to always make sure that the thing that made the product special in the beginning remained at the core of that brand. So it was about possibilities. It was about growth for girls. And he did quite well, and now he's running Gap. And I tell you that story because I'm curious, as you think about Tetris, and you've just listed off all of these reinventions in a way of the game and the gameplay, what do you see as the core?

17:55Jason:What is the fundamental thing that can't be changed about Tetris? And then maybe tell me how that manifests in some of the new different varieties that you're creating. At CLA, we're in your corner and on it. We coach tax strategies and Little League First Base. We help you adopt AI data tools and we adopt rescues named Buddy. We walk your factory floor and jog the local 5k, though sometimes we walk that too. Wherever you're coming from, we're right there with you. Wherever you're going, we'll get you there. CLA, CPAs, consultants, and advisors. Learn more at claconnect.com slash with you. It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot.

18:40Jason:Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179 like the Next Grill 3-Burner Gas Grill or get$50 off a select Weber Spirit Grill and bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay String Lights that bring it all together. Shop Spring Backyard Days for seven days at The Home Depot, now through May 6th. Exclusion Supplies to homedepot.com slash price match for details. Yeah, so I think what we've kept pure is that there's a mode called the Marathon Mode, which is what you remember as going from levels 0 to 15 and you can kind of finish the game that way. And different versions of the game have different sort of mechanisms, but we've adopted this marathon mode, which is available on every single platform.

19:30So you might be playing a battle royale style, but you can always find a marathon version of the game everywhere you go. So that's one way we've sort of made sure that that experience of the simple Tetris game that you remember is protected and preserved.

19:47Jason:Well, that's interesting. I'll be honest, I thought you were going to say something that you had said earlier in our conversation, which was that Tetris was a game of bringing order to chaos. And I thought maybe that is an interesting, satisfying experience that you would want to embed in every Tetris thing. But that's not where you're anchoring it. I'm curious if you feel like that's in some way restrictive. But I think that is part of – that is Tetris, right? So that's already embedded within every version of Tetris. You're getting that satisfactory feeling of putting pieces together and clearing lines.

20:27So in the video game world, without saying, that is absolutely the experience. But if you look at what we've done with toys, we have a game called Tetris Tumble, which is this giant balancing game that's available at Costco. and it's sort of like a Jenga meets Tetris. And we've also done a Jenga Tetris way back when, but it's taking that Tetris experience of, you know, pieces, blocks coming together or pulling pieces together. So it's not technically creating order out of chaos, but I think it's an extension of the Tetris brand. So we're doing a lot of things in the toy world that is a little bit different, right, than clearing lines that we've done in the video games.

21:12Jason:Have you done something that you felt didn't really work? And I'm curious what lesson you drew from it. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's always a gamble, right? Um, and I think the lesson that I've learned is always when you look at a product, I guess more in the merchandising toy world, right? If you look at a product, does it evoke that same feeling that you did that, that it did when you played the video game version of it. And if there's no sort of direct correlation to that, then often the product doesn't do so well. I think in the video game world, I mean, it's really also depending on the publisher, the licensee, the distribution, and all of those things that are sometimes external things that come in the way.

22:05But the core of the game has always been good. It's just always been sometimes execution and the distribution hasn't been the right form factor for games. But there's been things that I thought, I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is going to be, you know, we do a lot of like collabs and campaigns. I'm like, this is never going to work. And then it becomes like some, you know, we did a McDonald's collaboration in China. And it was a chicken McNugget shaped Tetris game that you could buy at a McDonald's. and it you know it it's a funky looking thing right it's like a giant chicken nugget that you can play tetris on the kid the thing launched it sold out in like a day or two and now it's like one of those cult items that people like buy on ebay you know and so you just never know like

22:52Jason:how the audience is going to take the execution i bet that there's just infinite infinite ideas and opportunities for collabs with something like Tetris. And I wonder how you start to filter those or how you generate them and what the North Star is for what makes a good collab. It has to make sense. Like it can't just be like, oh, let's make something like completely, I don't want to say anything because we've done things in the past that didn't get green lighted or green lit. But it just wasn't like, we shouldn't be in the frozen food aisle for, I'm not going to say what, but, you know, there's certain things that just didn't make sense that we're like, it has to make sense.

23:36It has to be like some kind of pop culture. It has to be a global brand, you know, whatever it is. It has to feel right for our brand and the other brand. And so I think our problem is that there's so many opportunities. And so, so filtering the right ones, you know, is really a full-time job. Um, we, you know, we, we have, um, agents that sub agents that cover us throughout the globe and they're always bringing in opportunities. And so for that kind of stuff, it's more of a volume business. Um, and it's just making sure that, okay, does it fit like our core kind of principles? And if it doesn't, then, you know, we're not going to be interested in doing something like that.

24:15Jason:In our last few minutes, I'd love for you to zoom out and take what you've learned and maybe turn it into some guidance or advice for anyone who's thinking about how to expand upon something beloved or that has worked in one arena and they're trying to figure out how to move it into another. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, you don't have to overcomplicate things, right? Tetris was a simple game. It's difficult, if not impossible to master, but that simplicity is what worked. And so, you know, similar with Legos, they went back to the factory lines and sort of streamlined that process. What is it that you can take with your product brand IP?

24:56And, you know, at the core of it, what makes that special? And I think if you can refine it and really define that part of it, then you can start expanding it. But don't try to do too many things at once. You know, like our merchandising program, we started maybe 15 years ago and it was a slow process. And now, you know, like we're very strong in the toy category, for example, but it wasn't right away a home run. And so I say, you know, simple doesn't mean that it's bad. I think, you know, it's got to be something that people can relate to. So, yeah, keep it simple, stupid.

25:36Jason:um my uh final final question which is of all the things that you have talked about or maybe something you haven't talked about yet if i modern consumer i'm going to check out one tetris thing right now to rekindle my love of tetris what should that thing be oh my gosh well obviously i would say check out our mobile games um tetris uh block party is one game that just came out in December. We're very excited about. The other, I would say, would be we just launched a partnership with Spin Master. There's a Tetris board game that you can purchase, which is a really fun way to really re-engage with Tetris in a new way.