Deals, drama and danger: the incredible true story behind Tetris
W hen he looks back on it now – gambling his house, battling Robert Maxwell, turning up in the Soviet Union on a wing and a prayer – Henk Rogers still insists that he never considered giving up. “People ask me how much naivety was involved?” he recalls. “I would say 20% naivety/stupidity and 80% determination.”
That may be the key to success in many aspects of life. In Rogers’s case, he was a video game publisher who knew he had discovered the next big thing: Tetris, a strangely addictive puzzle in which players must arrange falling bricks of differing shapes to form a solid wall.
Rogers travelled to the Soviet Union in 1988 to meet Tetris’s designer, Alexey Pajitnov, hoping to secure worldwide distribution rights to the game. But he had plenty of rivals, including the businessman Robert Stein, British newspaper proprietor Maxwell and his son Kevin, and Russian officials and KGB officers on the make.
The somewhat convoluted story of how the irrepressibly charming Rogers outfoxed them all, and formed a lifelong friendship with Pajitnov in the process, is told in director Jon S Baird’s film Tetris starring Taron Egerton and Nikita Efremov, with memorable cameos by Roger Allam as Maxwell and Matthew Marsh as President Mikhail Gorbachev.
Rogers and Pajitnov worked closely on the script to ensure authenticity. But in a joint Zoom interview from New York, Pajitnov, wearing a black shirt dotted with colourful Tetris bricks, acknowledges that a fair bit of artistic licence was used to make “a thriller on steroids”.
The pair also advised on the look and atmosphere of the Soviet Union, which was largely recreated in Aberdeen and Glasgow. Pajitnov, 67, a US citizen who still speaks with a strong Russian accent, recalls of his Moscow
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