How to marry your creative self with your business sense across a long career | Henk Rogers interview

I feel like I’ve had a lot of practice interviewing Henk Rogers, the man who brought Tetris to the world by going inside the Soviet Union and securing the rights to publish it worldwide. And now, 40 years after the momentous launch of Tetris, we finally did an interview that felt just right.

I interviewed him in the early years of Tetris and even visited the company’s headquarters in Honolulu. I watched him hand try to top the magic of Tetris with Blue Lava Games, and I watched him win the full rights back in a legal battle and cut a lucrative deal with Electronic Arts for Tetris rights. I also saw him pull Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, out of the Soviet Union and give him half the rights to Tetris. That was an amazing act of generosity.