Hardware Podcasts

The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers

How I Built This · 31 Jul 2023 · 1h 07m

What this episode covers

Henk Rogers, founder of the Tetris Company, recounts how he discovered Tetris at CES in 1988 and navigated a complex web of rights holders to secure the handheld license for Nintendo's Game Boy. He describes traveling to Moscow to negotiate directly with the Soviet state agency Elorg and the game's inventor, Alexey Pajitnov, ultimately forming a partnership that allowed Tetris to become the Game Boy's killer app. Rogers details the subsequent legal battles to reclaim full ownership of the IP from Elorg and his eventual pivot to environmental activism after a near-fatal heart attack.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies and companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Nintendo, Elorg, Atari, Spectrum HoloByte, Mirrorsoft, Blue Lava Wireless, Blue Planet Foundation, Soft Bank
Products
Tetris, Game Boy, Black Onyx, Go
Also
Robert Stein, Alexey Pajitnov, Henk Rogers, Hiroshi Yamauchi, Minoru Arakawa, Shigeru Miyamoto, Vladimir Belikov, Gilman Louie

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