We sit down with the iconic game designer and managing director of The Tetris Company about the puzzle game’s continued impact, success, and future. Behind every great game is a great person. In the case of Tetris, however, there’s almost certainly two. It was in 1988, at CES in Las Vegas to be exact, where Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov and businessman Henk Rogers first met, forever setting off a chain of events that would forever change gaming by bringing a modest, block-based puzzle game to the masses. Rogers’ deal to publish Tetris alongside the Game Boy has since become legend, even forming the basis for its own Hollywood adaptation, which debuted in 2023. Now the man behind the deal is ready to tell his own version of these events (and so much more) in his new book. The Perfect Game – Tetris: From Russia with Love not only explores the titular puzzler’s long-lasting success, but also Henk’s work creating Japan’s first RPG, his negotiations with Nintendo , and his life beyond video games. To learn more about his experience writing the book, what Henk thinks makes Tetris so special, and his thoughts on being played on the big screen by Taron Egerton , we sat down with the man himself. It was a very interesting experience. First of all, Taron doesn't look anything like me, so I don't have a problem with people walking up to me in the street saying, ‘you're in that movie’, because they won't recognize me. But it was very interesting take on my life and it was a very exciting time. I'm flattered by the whole thing, although it was also kind of scary. When I read the script, it was hard to tell what the movie was going to be like. There were a lot of embellishments; all these things that they put in that never happened. But the movie is so much better than the script in terms of what's actually going on. I'm really happy with the way it turned out. How can a game that looks this simple be this compelling? Normally, people at that time would look at a game that looks too simple and think ‘this can't be anything interesting’ because it's too simple. But I play a Japanese board game called Go and the pieces are simple… black and white stones. It doesn't have any of the characters that you see in other games. Even Chess has little characters – it has like a Bishop and a King and a Queen and a Knight. But Go doesn't any of that, and yet it's a much deeper game than Chess. So that part of it didn't scare me. In fact, that part made the game more attractive to me. He's a puzzle gamer. He comes at the game industry from the side of being a mathematician, [whereas] I come at the game industry from the site of being a storyteller. My first game, The Black Onyx, was the first role playing game in Japan, and it basically told us a whole story about a little person being in another world. So, yeah, we're very different, but we're still both game designers. Well, I don't know much about Nintendo now. They're a big company now. But I think in character Nintendo's pretty much the same. [Hiroshi] Yamauchi set the tone, if you will, of how that company would be run. And I think it still runs that way. I admired him for being… people would say ruthless, but I would say focused. He did the Nintendo business the way he played Go. When you play Go, you never give something to the other player. You fight for everything, and so that he respected. This is a ‘which is my favourite child’ kind of a question. Tetris Effect is of course an amazing one. It's probably the most well-developed game of Tetris ever. Then there is an arcade game in Japan called Tetris Grandmaster, and when you watch the players play on Tetris Grandmaster, you see real skill. There is no doubt about in my mind, that the top level in Tetris Grand Master is probably the top-level in any Tetris game. Well, the movie came out, and it's a great movie, but there's a lot of Hollywood in the movie. I didn't want people to think that that's the last word on Henk Rogers, because there's a lot more to me than what happens in the movie. I want people know what I'm doing now, which is I've moved past computer games and I'm doing something really important, which is fighting climate change. I think we all need to think about what are we going to do after we've made our money? I don't want people just to sit back and do nothing or play golf. I think by reading the book, you’ll find out that my real claim to fame is creating the first role-playing game in Japan, The Black Onyx. That was a Herculean effort, and it's the most difficult thing I ever did in my life. You could say that the experience prepared me for doing other difficult things that weren't nearly as difficult as creating that first role-playing game. I didn't speak, read, or write Japanese. I didn't know that people in Japan didn't play Dungeons and Dragons . I was expecting to build this game, but I only had 64K [of memory], so figuring out which parts to leave out from the from the original idea was hard, but it's also very rewarding so you know what's your minimum viable product. Everybody likes to add, but if you have a minimum viable product, that's what is actually going to sell and make you money. I think there's a balance. I think to be a good businessman, you have to be a good storyteller. You're telling the story about your product or your business or whatever it is, so I don't think there is a problem. Tetris is a constructive game. Most games out there are destructive. You're blowing something up or you're killing something and there's nothing like that in Tetris. You're basically creating lines of blocks. If we made the world the way that those violent games are like, [it’d be different] but we're not. We're living in a world where we build things. It's a very good feeling to build something. I think that side of it also appeals to women. Tetris was the first game that was actually played in large numbers by women, and women are now half the business as a result. There’s no looking back. The Perfect Game – Tetris: From Russia with Love is available to purchase now.