S1 Ep15: Tetris, The KGB, and a $15 Million Gamble – The Untold True Story

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Can you tell us about the moment where you discovered Tetris?

I got to play and it's like, wow, what is this? It didn't look like any of the other games.

You must have had an unbelievable confidence in that game.

I knew Tetris was gonna be a hit. I had used all of my in-law's land as collateral. If somebody had fucked up, I would have lost all my in-law's land.

Oh wow. Hank Rogers, the true legend in gaming. He became the man that brought Tetris, one of the most successful games, to the the world. He talks about how the KGB were watching him as he goes into the Soviet Union to get hold of the gaming rights. The story was so incredible it was made into a biopic on Apple Film, and from someone that loves gaming, it was awesome. You didn't speak Russian and yet you negotiated with the Soviets. How did you make that work?

I was in a room with two KGB guys in the room. I thought I was breaking the law because if I went to North Korea today and spoke to somebody in a ministry, I would be spying, you know.

What was that like with the family, with your wife? Well, years later you sold a company, you had a heart attack.

I don't feel well. I go to the front desk, they call the ambulance, the guys come over and says, "Nothing really wrong with you, we'll take you in for observation, we won't even turn on the siren." Halfway to the hospital, the siren goes on.

How were you thinking at the time?

Oh my gosh.

Hank, welcome to the show.

Hi, thank you.

Thanks so much for coming on. So let's start from the beginning of your career. I like to go all the way back. I like to get a sense of how people became who they are. And so you majored in computer science, but you dropped out of university.

I majored in computer science. I minored in Dungeons Dragons. Right. And after 3 years, they called me in and they said, Mr. Rogers, you haven't taken any of your core requirements.

Yeah.

And I said, well, I've already been to high school. And so, and he said, well, if you don't take your core requirements, you're not going to graduate. And I said, there must be some mistake. I'm not here to graduate. I'm here to get an education. And I've already got it. Thanks. Cheers.

You had quite a strong opinion on education at that age?

Oh yeah. I was pissed off in high school. Yeah. You know, it felt like another junior high school. Read the book, answer the questions on the test. It's like, so irrelevant to whatever was gonna happen the rest of my life. You know, like study and then take a test, study and then take a test. That is not what happens in real life. We make things, we do things, you know? Give me a chance to do something. It just drove me nuts.

What did computer science look like back then? What did, you know, making things look like back then?

In high school, computers meant punch cards.

Right.

And you would put your punch cards in and get your result 2 days later. So that's what computers were back then. But it was still magical what they could do. To me, a computer's sort of like a mental bulldozer. Whereas we used to do things with shovels, add things in books and so on and so forth, all of a sudden we have a bulldozer that can move mountains of data all at the same time. It was a miracle, actually.

I saw that you chased a girl to Japan.

I did.

And that would've changed your life.

I did.

Can you tell us that story?

I worked my way through university One of my jobs that I had was English conversation with Japanese students. All I had to do is not speak Japanese, which I didn't, which is fine, and I got paid for it, so what? You know, what the hell? So anyway, fell in love with one of the girls in one of my classes. We became pen pals, and then eventually I chased her to Japan.

Amazing. And you started by writing games to begin with. That was the start.

Okay, so it's 1983. Personal computers have just come out in Japan. I mean, they were just at the point where you could actually buy a computer and, you know, buy a computer game. And so I said, "Hey, I can do that." So I got my hands on a computer and decided to write a computer game. And I went to the Akihabara, which is the place where all the electronics and that's where the computer games were sold at that time. It's part of Tokyo. And, you know, check what kind of games were selling. And I noticed there were no role-playing games. And I said, "Oh, well, Japan is like a couple years behind the rest of the world in terms of games." And, you know, role-playing games were already a thing in the US. And so I was like, "I'm gonna do this." What sort of games are we talking about? Back then? Ultima, Wizardry. They're, you know, I'm friends with the guy who, both those guys. Yeah, that was way back when. And I was determined to make a game that didn't copy anything from anywhere. The difference was in the US, people played Dungeons Dragons and then they moved on to games that played that way on computers. But in Japan, nobody played Dungeons Dragons. Yeah. I didn't know that. I didn't speak, read, or write Japanese when I wrote the first game. But I, you know, you could call it naive, whatever, but it was the number one game in Japan in 1984. There you go.

And what was the game exactly? Like, what would someone do if we were to log on now?

It's basically a role-playing game. It's called Black Onyx. And basically you go down into the dungeon, you get gold and experience by fighting with monsters and buy better equipment and go up levels. And then finally, at the end of the game, if your karma is perfect, and your karma goes down every time you attack a human or attack a monster that's trying to run away, 'If your karma is perfect, then you find the black onyx.' And the first 100 people that actually made it to the end of the game, I sent them a real black onyx.

Oh, amazing. So, and so I read that you went from obviously making your own games to thinking about it more as a, as a company. What was that transition like for you? You know, how were you thinking at the time?

It was really hard, you know, because developing programming was probably my favorite thing. To do in my whole life. Yeah. You know, you create something and once it's created, it kind of works perfectly forever. What a concept. You know, everything else in the world, you make something, it falls apart after. And relationships with people, you tell them to do something or you ask them and they may or may not do it in the way that you think. But computers, it's a 0 or a 1. Once you get it working, it's working. My dream was to be able to do this. To have that computer game and nothing was going to stop me. I wrote the first 2 games. I wrote 1 game and then I hired somebody to write the second game and about a month in they said they were out of memory and I said, "Oh no, what are you talking about? You're out of memory?" Back then, game, my first Black Onyx, 64K. Yeah, that's crazy. Can you imagine? 30 monsters, 50 heads, bodies, all graphics, 3D. All in 64K. And so the second game, it was out of memory. I said, "Okay, well, I'm gonna have to do this." So I rolled up my sleeves and I ended up writing the second game. And after that I said, "No, I can't do this because I can't run the company and do all the marketing and sales and all that while programming." Because programming is like, you know, you eat, sleep, program, eat, sleep, program. That's basically what it's like. So I made a decision. I'm going to walk away from that part of it. I have to choose. The third game never came out, by the way. I had a whole team of people working on it. Never came out. So what I did after that— so Japan had a tradition of bringing Western music or Western movies into Japan, and that was like where Japanese music or popular music world came from. So I said, well, games got to be the same way. So I decided I'm going to travel around the world looking for games to bring to Japan, and I would have an advantage because I'm not Japanese and because I'm the president of the company, I can make a decision pretty quickly. So I, you know, and I came to just at Earl's Court, there was a game show. I would come once a year. So yeah, I traveled around the world looking for games to bring to Japan, and that's sort of where the business went.

So what was the beginning of that business like? I mean, I interview a lot of entrepreneurs. I'm always so fascinated by that beginning part because obviously we've seen the film, you know, we have the book that's just come out. And so I want to get to grips with the real story today. You know, I want to get to grips.

You don't want to read the book first?

Well, I get you. It's even better.

You got me.

I want to get to the, you know, the, the foundations of, you know, you discovering Tetris, but before that, what were the notable things you remember about that company?

Oh my gosh, well, I, you know, I, we, it was the heyday. I licensed the two of the first four games that Electronic Arts ever published. I published Star Wars games, you know, I, I had deals with a company in England called Psygnosis, which is way back, Barbarian, And, uh, yeah, several companies in, in the UK also. Um, it was exciting and fun, you know. Back then, everybody in the industry, we knew that it was the beginning and we're all excited. Basically, you just had to put a game out there and it would sell. It wasn't like there was that much competition. There was a, a need for games. Yeah, there was the Atari debacle, which happened just before I started coming to the US. so everybody was allergic to cartridges for a while.

Can you tell us about that?

Yeah, um, in the day when everybody thought a game would sell no matter what, uh, I think they— Atari made like 6 million E.T. cartridges. 6 million. And the game was shite. It was horrible. And they hadn't figured out— I mean, it was something like, oh, we got to make this game in time for Christmas, so here, here, uh, get this done for me in 2 weeks or, or 2 months, whatever. Whatever it is, and they just turned that sucker out thinking that people are going to buy the game no matter what.

Oh wow.

Well, they didn't. The game was terrible, and so they couldn't give those cartridges away, and it basically— the entire market dropped because they had all this dead inventory everywhere. And it didn't just affect the E.T. game but every game. So the whole Atari, uh, business went down the tubes. And, uh, so when Nintendo came along, they decided they're going to control the market They weren't going to let any extra stock into the market. No speculation. So, for example, in Japan, if you wanted to release a Nintendo game, you'd have to pay them upfront for every cartridge that they manufacture. So it's all your risk, and if it doesn't sell through, you don't get your money back. So you take all the risk, and that made sure that nobody overproduced any games.

Amazing. Can you tell us about the moment where you discovered Tetris?

Yeah, you know, I, again, I was at Consumer Electronics Show. My job was to find games to bring to Japan, and there are hundreds and hundreds of monitors with hundreds and hundreds of games, people standing in line waiting to play. And so, um, I, I would stand in line waiting to play whatever games I might be interested in, and I ended up standing in the Tetris line, and, uh, I got to play and it's like, wow, what is this? You know, it didn't look like any of the other games. And, you know, I played and I was like, you know what it's like when you first play Tetris?

It's like, I am a gamer and I still, still love it.

Yeah. And so then I found myself standing in that line the fourth time. I'm only supposed to stand in line once for each game because I've got to decide out of the—

I'm going to put a hat on and disguise yourself.

And then I stood in line the fourth game, for the fourth time, I put the high score on the game. Yeah, I said, you know, this game is something different. And I've never been, I've never had a problem with simplicity. So my father used to be a Go player. Go is a Japanese board game. He was like a 6th-degree black belt in Go. I'm about a 3rd degree. So Go is black and white stones. And if you look at, if you just look at the board, it doesn't look like anything. Look, black and white stones on a board. There's no graphic sense to it. Chess at least has little characters like a king and a queen and a bishop and a knight and all these little characters in there. But Go has nothing like that. And yet it's much deeper than chess. And so when I saw Tetris, I said, you know, I don't care that it doesn't have little characters jumping around or fancy graphics or any of that. It's the gameplay. You could say it's the gameplay, stupid. You know, for the same reason that E.T. didn't sell, Tetris was going to sell. It's all about the gameplay. Uh, the company that was, uh, showing the game at Consumer Electronics Show came to Japan to find someone to publish it in Japan. They went to the biggest company in Japan first. That was their second stop. Uh, biggest company in Japan at the time was a company called ASCII. And what a dumb name for a company, the American Standard Code for Information. We were all grabbing acronyms. I had an acronym, but at least I had a name behind the acronym. My acronym was BPS, which is bits per second, which is still used today. But my company name was Bulletproof Software. So anyway, they came and they showed it to ASCII and ASCII said, "No, we pass." It's too retro.

I love it. Is that, is that before you playing at the—

no, no, no, no, this is after I've played. And so I was in communication with the company, and so you were trying to license it, and finally they said, well, we're coming to Japan and we'll be licensing it to somebody. So that, it took a while actually, it was like, oh, 5 months later before they finally showed up.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah, you know, I've been— at first, at the— I looked at the copyright notice and it goes from Ellorg to Andromeda to Mirrorsoft to Spectrum Holobyte. So I said, I knew Mirrorsoft, I know those guys. Started sending faxes to Mirrorsoft. Then Mirrorsoft finally said, uh, no, no, you should be talking to Spectrum Holobyte, they're, they're dealing with this. I said, okay, fine, sister companies. So Max will own part of Spectrum Holobyte as well.

Okay, and how did it go from there to actually getting the license?

Well, uh, that's another whole story and it's in the book. Um, so what happened was Gilman Louie, the president of Spectrum Holobyte, is in Japan and I said, look, I want everything. I want arcade, I want personal computer, I, I— well, and he said sure, and we basically made a a letter of intent for me to get all those different platforms. Great. And we started developing. The main platforms that I had at the time were personal computer, and at the time there were like 7 different personal computers, none of them compatible in Japan. And then there was Nintendo. So we started development, and a couple of weeks later I got a call from, uh, from Gilman and says, I'm really sorry, but You know, that letter of intent could never have happened because in the meantime, Mirrorsoft has licensed Tetris to Atari Games or Tengen in the US. I said, what are you talking about? Yeah, they traded Tetris for Blasteroids, which sounds to me like a disease. Yeah. It's the sequel to Asteroids. Right. Anyway, I said, I said, Gilman, we made a deal here. This is, this is a legal— like, you have to sign it. Oh yeah, we signed, you know, you have to do something about this. And, uh, so Gilman went back and, and convinced Mirosoft to at least give us the personal computer rights. So we got the personal computer rights, and I thought, I know somebody inside of, uh, Atari Games, I should be able to get the license from them. Atari Games at the time was owned 46% by Namco, Japanese company that made Space Invaders— no, not Space Invaders, Pac-Man.

Okay, yeah.

That company. Anyway, the guy who made Pac-Man is a friend from the business. We were all friends back then. I meet him at a computer game show and I asked him, so what do you think about Tetris? And he drew a blank. He didn't know about Tetris. And I said, if he doesn't know about Tetris, Namco doesn't know about Tetris because this guy knows everything. I mean, he's the god of Namco at the time. And so Namco had a policy, and may still have a policy, of only creating original games, never licensing. And so that's why they didn't even bother looking at any of the games that Atari Games or Tengen, uh, was, was selling in the U.S. So I started negotiating with Atari Games. Took me a couple of months because— and at the end they said no, we're not licensing it to you. And it's like, what the hell? I got on a plane, I told my guys keep working, and got on a plane and said I'm not coming back till I have the rights. So I spent 10 days in the Bay Area and finally Another deal on a napkin in a sushi bar with the president of—

Do you have the napkin?

No, but long story short, it turns out that they never had those rights and Mirrorsoft never had those rights. I mean, the console rights. Yeah. They may have had personal computer, but definitely they didn't have Nintendo rights. And so when I finally ended up in Moscow, and I showed him the game that I'd published in Japan. Mr. Belikov looks at the box and he said, "We never licensed Tetris for console to anyone." And it was at that moment I had used all of my in-laws' land as collateral to buy cartridges because you had to pay cash up front.

Yeah, to Nintendo?

To Nintendo. So I mean, that was the biggest biggest amount of money I'd ever— it was $2 million.

Oh, wow.

Because it was like $10 per cartridge, 200,000 cartridges, and they were in production. If during this manufacturing somebody had sent me a cease and desist, those 200,000 cartridges would have been garbage and I would have lost all my in-laws' land. So That was a sweating bullets moment.

From the very beginning, and I was obviously doing my research before the show, but from the very beginning, you must have had an unbelievable confidence in that game because it sounds like you, you know, you went pedal to the metal on it.

I've, I think I go pedal to the metal on everything I do. So, yes, Tetris was, you know, I knew Tetris was going to be a hit. I didn't know how big it was going to be of a hit because Spectrum Holobyte never recognized recognized that they released it as one of 40 games that year in '88, and it sort of like wasn't that big of a deal. But when we, when it came out on Nintendo, that became big. And then I went to the Soviet Union to get the Game Boy rights, then it became huge.

So can you tell us about going to the Soviet Union at the time? I mean, you didn't speak Russian.

Oh, no.

No. And I suppose you had no real, like, contacts or leverage. And so a lot of us would have seen that in the film, but can you tell us the real story?

Yeah, the real story is I'd hired Robert Stein. Yeah, who was Andromeda. So between Mirrorsoft and the Russians was Robert Stein and Andromeda, Hungarian company. And, um, I paid him $25,000 and he was supposed to be getting me the rights. Those were the fax days. I kept faxing once a week, once a week, fax, fax, fax. Yes, yes, yes, I'm going soon, so on and so forth. And so a couple of months have gone by and I'd gone to Nintendo, Mr. Arakawa, and I said, you know, I think I have the perfect game for Game Boy because Nintendo had the policy to release, whenever they released a new hardware, they would always include a new game. And I said, "You should include Tetris." And he said, "Why should I include Tetris? I have Mario." And I said, "If you want little boys to buy your Game Boy, include Mario. If you want everyone to buy your Game Boy, include Tetris." He called in his game experts and they all said, "Yeah, that's true." So he said, "Okay." We did a handshake deal. It was sort of $1 million up front with, you know, $1 per unit. That was the, you know, biggest handshake deal I'd ever done.

Wow.

And a couple of weeks later he called me up and, you know, Gilman Louie came by my office and said he could get me the Game Boy rights. And I'm going, what the hell? What makes him think that he can get— I had Stein. I was as close to Ellorg as you could get. So I thought, is Stein double dealing? Yeah. You know, and why is he holding me off? Why is he like delaying me? And finally, my last communication with Stein, he says, "Well, I'm going to go to this whatever book show in Germany for a week, and then I'm going to Moscow for a week, and then I want you to show up." That was just weird. I couldn't understand that at all. There was no real explanation as to why I shouldn't be there from the beginning. What's the deal? So I thought he was double-dealing. I thought there was another thing going on. So I timed out. I got myself a tourist visa and 2 days later I was on a plane to Moscow. I didn't know anybody. I thought if I found a Go player in the Soviet Union, I would have a friend. And so I searched the Russian Go Association, the Soviet Go Association, and I found out where they play Go. I went to this place. I actually played Go with the third strongest Go player in the Soviet Union. He didn't speak a word of English.

Oh my.

So it was kind of useless. But that morning I had already figured out another way. I'd hired an interpreter. She knew immediately where I wanted to go. It's funny because I went to the information— there's an information desk in the hotel. And I gave them the name Elektronorgtechnika, which is the, you know, wrote it down. And I thought, maybe it's the short form, Elorg, E-L-O-R-G. I said, come on, it's, you know, and then she passes me the books like a telephone book and I open it up. It's all freaking Cyrillic. I can't read anything. And it was like They were so like cold and unhelpful. And she didn't, of course, didn't speak any English. It's like, this is the Intourist Hotel, for Christ's sake. You gotta speak another language besides Russian. Nope. When I finally hired the interpreter, and the fact that she knew immediately where I wanted to go made me think she was KGB. And they'd already registered Guy with an attaché case wearing a suit coming in. He's not— obviously doesn't look like a tourist. He's not here to do tourist stuff. And then the questions that I was asking, information, you know, all of that information must have percolated somewhere to this woman waiting for me. That's what I thought. Yeah. And did you confirm that? No, of course not.

You know, I'm KGB.

No, you know, I did hire her and The next day we did go to— she helped me get to Ellorg. We had hired a driver. And I remember going up to the door and she said, "No, no, you can't go in there." I said, "What do you mean I can't go in?" She said, "You're on a tourist visa." So like, "I didn't tell you that either." "You're on a tourist visa. You can't go in there. You're supposed to have an official invitation." And I said, "You know what? I didn't come all this way to stand in front of a door, go back to Tokyo, "Get a visa and come back and go through this door." "I'm going through the door. Are you coming with me?" "No, I can't go in there with you." I said, "Okay." So I went in the door by myself. And you know, you walk into doors, there's a lobby of El Org, and there's a little window with a guy with a uniform, with a hat. I'm supposed to deliver my credentials over there. I don't have any credentials. So I just walked in, stood in the lobby, waiting for somebody to talk to me. I knew that guy wasn't because he wasn't going to speak English. And of course, anybody who doesn't speak English is going to be terrified to try to speak to me. Eventually, a woman walked up to me and said, "Can I help you?" And I said, "Yes, you can." And then I said, "My name's Hank Rogers. I'm a publisher in Japan. I would like to talk to somebody about Tetris." So she went away and came back, and down the stairs comes Mr. Belikov. And Mr. Belikov, that's when we had the exchange about, yeah, we never license this to anyone and so on. And I said to— I didn't know who he was. I had no idea. So I said, "I'd like to come back tomorrow and discuss this, the business." And he said, "Okay, come back tomorrow." That was my invitation.

Wow.

When he says, "Come back tomorrow," now I've been officially invited into this place. Like, yeah. And the reason I said the next day is because I didn't know if the right people were going to be in the building.

Yeah.

You know, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't just talking to some underling. And so the next day I was in a room with 7 people across the table and—

Wow, they move fast.

And it was a 3rd degree. They asked me everything. I thought, wow, either I'm going to make a deal or I'm going to be in a gulag, you know. I had no idea. And so definitely the 2 KGB guys in the room, because they didn't have anything, they were just like watching. And then, you know, the ELORG guys and Alexei Pajitnov. He was the only guy there that knew anything about games at all.

He obviously knows everything about the game. Everyone else there is protecting the interests of the company? Trying to prevent you getting the rights?

Everybody else there is trying— first of all, they're trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Because they don't know what they have.

They don't know what they have. They don't know what intellectual— they don't have any intellectual property rights in all of the Soviet Union.

Right.

Yeah, so basically if it was the Soviet Union, Alexey would have created the game and everybody got to play for free, which is in fact what happened behind the Iron Curtain. That's what happened. Everybody just started getting copies of Tetris and playing it. That's just the way it worked behind the Iron Curtain back then. So they were just trying to figure out, you know, is this actually going to make money? They had done a deal with Stein, like a year and a half before, a year and a half before, and they'd never received any money yet. And it's because they were getting a percentage of a percentage of a percentage. Each time Stein licensed it to Mirrorsoft, that's one quarter. Mirrorsoft licensed to Spectrum Holobyte, it's another quarter. So each time it goes from one hand to another hand, it's another quarter, and it's a percentage of a percentage. So it goes down to zero very quickly. And they never bothered figuring that out, of course, because they'd never dealt with intellectual property before.

Right.

So, I mean, Stein might have had the intent— intention of giving them a percentage of the money he made, but he didn't get money till many quarters later. Yeah. So, uh, it was— I mean, for them it was like— and then later I got to see the contract. Oh, That was—

you got to see his contract.

His contract, it was— they were— it was like stealing candy from a baby kind of a contract. It was— yeah, they had no idea what they were doing.

In the movie, you have this sequence of events where you're being moved from room to room, you know, you're being left completely in the dark, you're not told anything. Then you come back in and you're kind of presenting the truth, as it were. You're being authentic about the situation. But— and it was that characterized well in the film?

Um, I don't know exactly. Um, I do know that Kevin and I would come in on, on different times of day, not necessarily that we're in the same building and he's running back and forth. Yeah, yeah, that's what, you know, but it was like that, you know. Wednesday, so I, I'm— my, my first meeting, my first real meeting was Thursday, then Friday They said, you know, by Friday, make us a proposal. That was the week before the back and forth. And so I created a proposal. I mean, I used as many tough words as I could. And with it, if this proposal is only good for one week, after that it's null and void.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I did use all these legalese words because when they were interrogating me, it was really, it was an interrogation. And then they would argue with each other. So I mean, like, they were all like, felt like everybody's angry at everybody or something like that. And so I thought, well, I got to fight fire with fire. So I had to be tough. So I made this really tough thing. And then so I came in on Monday, negotiated. On Monday night, the way it worked back then is to make a phone call outside the Soviet Union. Takes 8 hours. So you apply, you call, you say, I want to make this phone call, this is the number. And then you wait for 8 hours and then your call comes through. Yeah. Don't ask me why. I don't know. KGB guys have to get ready to be able to listen in on the call or whatever. I said, I'm calling my— I want to call my lawyer in Tokyo. And so on Tuesday morning, the call comes through. You know, all night, 8 hours. And I said, I need a contract. It's got to be no more than 20 pages because— and it can't use any big words because I have to explain every single word in this contract. And it has to be fair because we have no time to negotiate. Yeah, everything in that— it's got to have stuff in it for me, it's got to have stuff in it for them. 'And it's got to satisfy Nintendo that we actually have these rights. No more than 20 pages, and you have 24 hours.' What happened is, in the meantime, I'd met a friend, a Japanese woman, and she was working for a Japanese company, and they had a fax machine. The hotel, they had a telex, right? There's no way you could communicate a contract with a telex. So she was kind enough to let me use their fax machine. So the contract came in and I presented it to Ellorg. We went through the whole contract. And on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Belikov asked me, "So, Mr. Rogers, why should we choose you over Kevin Maxwell?" And I go— and it's like, that's the first time I heard that Kevin Maxwell was there.

As in, you didn't know it was a two-horse?

I did not. It was actually three-horse because Stein was there also. I never met Stein. Okay. I was there. Stein thought I was going to come maybe the next week.

Because he'd said come—

Come the week after. So I knew he was going to be there.

Oh, wow.

I just had no idea Kevin Maxwell was going to be there. So I think the Kevin Maxwell story is that, or the Gilman-Lewis story is that Kevin Maxwell on his own, or Mirrorsoft on their own, said we should get the Game Boy rights. When it started to look like it was becoming interesting. And so that's where that story came. I don't think it came from Stein.

Wow.

But I didn't know that. Anyway, on Wednesday, and I said to them, look, I don't have the kind of money that Kevin Maxwell has, but I will give you an honest share of the money that we make. And, you know, up till now you've been getting a percentage of a percentage of a percentage. And I said, I will guarantee you will make a certain amount of money no matter how many licenses in between. You will get $0.25 per unit of Tetris sold on Game Boy. Wow. How many, how many do you think? And I said, 20, 30 million. And I think they saw the numbers. And even though Kevin put a huge amount of pressure on, or Or Robert Maxwell put a huge amount of pressure on them saying, "You've got to make this deal with Kevin or you're going to be in big trouble." And Mr. Belikov ended up being in big trouble. There was a period of time when no one would talk to him inside of Ilorg because he was like—

Post doing the deal with you.

Post doing the deal with me. The Maxwells expected the Politburo to come down on on Belikov and make him cancel the contract. Blimey. But it was perestroika and glasnost at the time, and basically Gorbachev had given their ministries the ability to actually do business on their own. And so Belikov listened to Gorbachev instead of the rest of Maxwell's henchmen, whatever.

So you went to Russia solo, you managed to somehow get yourself into the right room, and then basically competitively talk your way into the right contract all on your own. That is quite the story.

Pretty much.

And that contract, what did that cover? How long did that cover? For what did that cover?

It covered Game Boy and, uh, um I, I don't remember exactly how long, but I do know when I came for the second time, which is a month later, to get the, uh, the console rights, that in order to— and the way the console rights were going to work is they, they were going to license it directly to Nintendo, and Nintendo was going to fight against Atari and stop them from publishing Tetris in the US because Atari at the time They, um, they wanted to make cartridges without buying them from Nintendo.

Okay.

Which, that would have been a big— I'm gonna say issue for Nintendo. And so Nintendo was in the process of fighting Atari because Atari had, had quote unquote reverse engineered. In the U.S., uh, you cannot prevent somebody from selling something, but in Japan you can. So in Japan, Nintendo just told distribution, if you buy cartridges from anybody else, we won't sell any to you. So they control distribution that way, but you can't do that in the US. Um, and so basically what they did was they made a, a protection system, a lockout system in each cartridge. So it had a patented thing where First of all, there's a patent on being able to lock out somebody else from making cartridges. The second thing, it had the word Nintendo, and there was a device that actually physically would read the word Nintendo on the cartridge. That's trademark. And the third thing is they had a little piece of code in there, which is a piece of a song, copyrighted song, and all of the data going in and coming out of the cartridge would be filtered through that copyrighted song. So you'd have to break patent, copyright, and trademark to be able to make cartridges for the Nintendo machine. Well, Tengen or Atari Games had done that, um, and they'd done it in a very underhanded way, right? They had gone to the patent office and said, you know, Nintendo's going to sue us, so you have to give us the, the, uh the code that they're using to protect the copyright, and that's how they reverse engineered it. They didn't actually reverse engineer anything. They just got it from the patent office, which is of course wrong. But anyway, that legal case was taking too long, and the way Nintendo could stop them is they— their first game was going to be Tetris. If they could stop them from publishing Tetris, then the other games would then take more time and the other cases would get through. And so I brought Nintendo Arakawa, the president and the vice president, to Moscow on a secret trip. All of Nintendo USA thought they were in Japan. And they came to Moscow. We came to Moscow. Well, I went to Moscow first and asked Bell, "Do you need them here?" I said, "Yes, we need them here because we need the big guns." And so they came. And yeah, that was certainly exciting. So again, it's all in the book.

It's so good to hear these early stories because in so many parts of what you've said so far, it could have not worked out.

Yes, absolutely.

It's actually so much jeopardy in the story.

Absolutely. You know, I, I mean, from the moment that I got to the, to the airport and She takes my visa, looks at my visa, and says— she looks down at me because it's like you're down there and the immigration person's up here— and says, it says you are Danish. And I say, I'm not Danish, I'm Dutch. It says you're Danish. And I said, I'm sorry, I don't read Cyrillic. Yeah, yeah.

And so from that point onwards, you've You've got the right, you go back to Japan. Can you talk us through the sequence of events after that where the game gains popularity? I read that your first launch didn't go as planned.

My first launch, yeah, so I, by that time I was friends with Mr. Yamauchi, the president of Nintendo. In fact, whenever I would have a meeting with him, I would make it at the end of his day so that we could play Go afterwards. And so it was kind of the prince and the pauper. If I'm having a meeting with Mr. Yamouchi, he's always got underlings there, so they do what he ever decides. But when he plays Go, there's nobody there. It's just the two of us. So that one-on-one time that I had with you, Mr. Yamouchi, that's— nobody else had that relationship with Yamouchi in the business where they could just hang out for an afternoon. Um, so when I sent my guys out to get the initial order for Tetris, they came back and said, we got 40,000. I said, 40,000? What are you talking about? In order for a game to become a hit, the first order has to be like 200,000. Okay. Otherwise you're not going to get a second order. So I had a meeting with Yamauchi. Mr. Yamauchi, um, "I think I have one of the greatest games for Nintendo of all time. And I don't know whether it's my marketing or my sales suck. I don't know what it is, but I've only got 40,000 units. You know, can you give me some advice?" And he calls in Miyamoto, the guy who made Mario. And he said, "Miyamoto, is this a great game?" Miyamoto says, "Yes." "How do you know?" "It's because your secretaries and your accountants are playing during lunch and after work." That's never happened before. So, okay, calling Mr. Imanishi, number 2 in Nintendo, the managing director. Imanishi, I want you to put Nintendo's seal of good housekeeping, kind of Nintendo seal of approval on the game. I was like, whoa. And I want you to call every distributor and make them order more. It's like, whoa, that's some serious movement there. "Thank you very much," and so on. Next day, Mr. Imanishi calls me, "Please, please, please don't make me put the Nintendo seal of approval on the game because every company is going to want that seal. I'm going to have to set up a whole department of people to decide whether a seal should be given or not. So please don't make me do that. Mr. Yamaguchi will forget." I said, "Okay, just call distribution." I thought, "Call distribution, get me more orders." And I said, "Oh, great." Well, long story short, after him calling all distribution, I got an extra $30,000, so I was up to $70,000. Still not a hit. And then the product got released at Christmas, so it wasn't a hit at Christmas because we only had $70,000. And come January, people didn't know. I mean, you can't look at an ad for Tetris and say, I want to buy that game. You have to play it, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, you've got to experience.

You've got experience. That's the only way.

So I quite like the COVID of the book because you won't be able to see this on the camera, but as you move the book, you are seeing the Tetris blocks fall.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you.

Um, but yeah, I agree.

I'm a marketer at heart. Yeah. So, so that was all— it's all me. I said that's what I asked for and I got it. Anyway, come January, the game isn't selling through. And so what happens then is that the remaining inventory that distributors have, they dump it. They try to get rid of their inventory. So we, you know, if the game goes into dumping, that's it. It definitely isn't going to go anywhere. So I had my sales guy call every distributor. You know, this game is different from other games. You have to play it to understand how good it is. So hold on to your inventory. Some actually did. And end of January, it was like no inventory anywhere. Everybody's going crazy. They want it. They wanted more. So that's when I hawked my in-laws' Property. We got 200,000— 200 orders for 200,000 copies. That was our second order.

Oh my. And yeah, what was that like with the family, with your wife, saying, you know, we are going all in, more than we're already in?

Well, she, she, she knew she was in with me on the business, right? So she, she and I worked, started the company, and she was watching the money. So I didn't have to convince anybody. That was her convincing her parents. She was on the money, said watching the money. So yeah, I mean, I was frankly very surprised. I mean, this is— they had a little business making food as a, like a food factory, right? And basically all the money that they made in their entire lives was in the real estate. And so that's what was on the line.

Oh my.

So they gambled everything. It's like, ah.

But at that point, you know, you've got the conviction.

I've got the conviction, but I didn't know that the people who I had licensed the game from, Atari Games, didn't actually have the console rights. I said that I was pretty sure that they had those rights. I didn't find that out until I was in Moscow. Wow.

And so from that point onwards, from that order, how quickly did the game's popularity then grow?

Well, okay, so then, you know, it takes 2 months to create— to, uh, um, from time that you order to the time that you deliver, it takes 2 months. We end up selling 2 million cartridges. And Nintendo ended up selling 30 million Game Boys, Game Boy Tetris.

Oh my. My second console was Nintendo 64, and when you bought the Nintendo 64, you got like GoldenEye and Mario, I think.

Probably.

I don't remember.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's what it was. It became a game that was included in the—

In the Game Boy.

Wow. That is ultimate distribution.

That was ultimate distribution. Bang, right there. I mean, it was— Doesn't get any better than that, you know.

That's it, that's your entry game.

Yeah, and, and in order to, um, make sure that they had the rights, Nintendo wanted documentation going all the way back to the author, which is Alexey Pajitnov. So Elorg, which is supposed to be just a sales or an agent for the game, for the computer center where Alexey worked, They were— they had gotten intended to register copyright and trademark in 60 countries, but the actual IP was owned by Alexey or by the computer center. And so they needed that paperwork, so they created paperwork all the way back to the author, and that paperwork said that he gave his rights to Tetris to the computer center for a period of 10 years. And that was ended in 1995. So all the contracts that Ellorg had with anybody ended at the end of 1995. And during that time before '95, Alexei came to me and said, "You need to help me because come the end of 1995, they're going to say I never had any rights. They're going to just try to straight up rip me off." And I said, okay. So we shook hands actually in 1993. Yeah. And that handshake is still alive today. Wow. We're still partners.

And so did you first meet him in that meeting we were talking about earlier?

In that, the second day. Yeah. The first day lobby with Belikov. Second day, 8 people, third degree. Alexei was one of them.

And what, did you just get along quite quickly?

Alexei, when he first saw me, or when everybody first saw me, thought I was just some shyster businessman trying to make a buck. Yeah, um, but pretty quickly he figured out that I was actually a game designer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was a game designer before I became a publisher. And so when he found out that I was a game designer, that's when he melted. I mean, that's when we became friends right there, because I was the first game designer you ever met. From outside the Soviet Union. And there were no game designers in the Soviet Union, not really. Yeah, they were toying around with it, but not really.

And so, but he— so he made it in his spare time, and it ended up, it ended up being owned by the company he worked for?

Well, okay, so, um, no, there, there is no intellectual property, so there's no such thing as a person owning anything, anything. I mean, intellectual property-wise. Yeah. So that was never— that was— that would never have been a question. And he worked for the, the computer center, so it was natural for the computer center to be the owner of the intellectual property. But it wasn't work for hire. Didn't ask him to do it. Uh, basically, um, he did it in between— he was working on, on AI voice recognition. That's what his job was. Crazy.

Uh, and there is an amazing sequence in the film about how you interacted with him and shaped the game itself. Can you talk to that at all? Is that, is that real?

I've been working on Tetris for almost a year, uh, before I met Alexey. Yeah, because we published it on 7 personal computers and on Nintendo. So, um, I worked on the design. So the original game, it was all about survival. A piece would fall in and you'd clear lines, and then more pieces would fall in. You would get points for how many pieces you could get into the screen, not for clearing the lines. Yeah. And so I switched it around. I said, uh, let's make it so that a player can earn more money more points by clearing more than one line at a time. So I invented single, double, triple Tetris, uh, because people, when at the lower levels, at the slower levels, at the slower levels, the adept player is kind of boring to play. Yeah, you know, because pieces are moving very slowly and so on and so forth. And so I, by, by creating single, double, triple Tetris, made the game a little bit more exciting. And so I've, I've been, you know, as a game designer and you recognize this as well, that I changed the game and he understood.

Incredible.

Yeah.

And I suppose to, to, to go back to the film, how does a film about your life come about? Like, how does, how does someone decide to make a film about you?

It all, it actually started with a BBC documentary. Okay. Documentary was called Tetris: From Russia with Love, which is the subtitle of my book, by the way, From Russia with Love. And they interviewed Belikov, they interviewed Stein, they interviewed me, they interviewed a bunch of characters. I don't know if they interviewed Kevin, but it's possible. And it really was an interesting cast of characters. And somebody saw that and said, wow, this is an intriguing story because it happens. This story of me going to the Soviet Union is right before the end of the Soviet Union. You know, it's during that period when the Soviet Union is changing and people are starting to become free. Somebody thought it was a great story, so then they approached me. It's a long time ago already. They must have approached the Tetris Company, which my daughter runs. Optioned the movie. They asked me if I wanted to. I said, sure, it sounded interesting. You know, that sounds interesting.

It's cool.

I remember being in a room, um, and, uh, they were there, the room with the people that were going to make the movie. And the director that was in the room was Ron Howard. He didn't actually end up doing it. He went up to Star Wars. But Ron Howard. And they were asking me, who do you want to play you?

What did you say?

And I said, Johnny Depp. And they said, too old. And I said, then I said, how about Keanu Reeves? Too old. It's like, what? Are you kidding me? So that I don't know anybody, you know, it's looking for people that kind of resemble me. Yeah, there are actors, you know. So then, then what happened is that whole group imploded. That whole group disappeared. The film group, the, you know, the production company. That was the MeToo movement. Turned out that the, the head guy had been involved, been involved. He got a bunch of actresses to do a bunch of things. He had a room in the back of the office which was obviously— wow, uh, nasty, nasty things happened in there.

So that production company went under, disappeared.

Disappeared, and we thought that was the end of that whole movie. And then one day, lo and behold, somebody found the script. It was destined for a rubbish heap. Yeah. And, and said, wow, this is interesting. And they resurrected the whole conversation.

Wow. The movie itself is full of action and jeopardy, and there's a car chase, and, you know, it's there's a lot of intimidation.

Can you—

what's your reaction to the film? Like, how close is that to the reality? Okay, so were you in a car chase?

I was not in a car chase. You know, we wouldn't have made it to the airport in time. You know, they would have caught me. It wasn't— it wasn't like that. But the tension was there the entire time. You know, I didn't know who I was dealing with. I didn't know if I was breaking the law. I thought I was breaking the law because I'm speaking to Soviet citizens now. If I went to North Korea today and spoke to somebody in a ministry, I would be imprisoned because I would be spying, you know, I'd be doing something outside. And so would that person in the ministry. They would be in deep trouble. So yeah, Alexei likes to put it this way, Hank, you thought you were breaking the law, but I knew I was breaking the law. Blimey. So they had to take a year and a half of my life and squeeze it into 2 hours. So all that intrigue that happened over I don't know, 10 days that I was there for my first trip. They had to squeeze that into—

10 minutes.

Yeah, 10 minutes. And they did a great job. I mean, the feeling came through even though they squeezed it. And they took bits of different parts of different trips that I told the writer about. And they screened, you know, like the whole music thing. Actually, what really happened is I ended up— and this is sort of an underground thing— we went to this Russian folk singer's apartment, I guess. Very strange apartment. You know, it had 14-foot ceilings, but the room was about not much bigger than this. And he played, and I think it must have been like a place where they kept a horse in the old days somewhere, because the walls are really thick. Anyway, so he was playing Russian folk music, and there was a bunch of Russians there, and I asked him to play the Tetris songs and he did and everybody sang and the, how can I say, the patriotism behind them singing these songs was just so powerful. There were tears in some people's eyes when they were singing these songs. So yeah, they switched it over to, it's the final countdown.

Well, yeah, I mean, I agree. I think I actually think the movie was incredible. I mean, you know, it's like you say, it's like a dramatized version of your life. It's a huge part of your life condensed into 2 hours. But it is. And I remember long before obviously you were coming on the show, I watched the film and remember thinking, God, that's one of the best films I've seen in ages. I just think it's such an amazing story.

Tyrone is such a good actor. They did such a good job. I mean, the production, oh my gosh, I I can't say anything bad about that movie. But you know, when I was working on the script with Alexei, Alexei and I both went through the script and said, "No, this couldn't have happened." We were there. And so it made me start writing this book to, you know, I was going to quickly write what actually happened and give it to them. So now this is what happened. You know, you could make a movie and this is, you know, be interesting. And but I wasn't there. I wasn't ready in time. And then somebody read what I had written, which is probably about half the book, is that whole Tetris story, and said, you know, this would be a good book if it was a little bit bigger. So can you write the before and after? I said, sure. So that's, that's how the book came about.

The movie obviously did so well. What's the impact that's had on your life?

It's strange in different places, you know, like I went to two different game festivals, one in Chile, one in Italy, FestiGames and Lucca Comic and Game Festival, and people stood in line waiting for me to sign posters and take their pictures with me.

So, yeah, rightly so.

Yeah, it's like, wow. I remember arriving in Austin Airport. There was a thing called the Summit at Sea, and then there was another thing called the Eclipse. So the Summit at Sea was in Miami, and I flew from Miami to Austin to go to see the Eclipse. There were a couple of people at the airport waiting by baggage claim with stuff for me to sign. I said, "How did you guys even know that I was going to be here?" And they said, "Well, we found out that you were speaking at the Summit at Sea and you're speaking at the eclipse event. So there were only 2 planes from Miami.

They tracked you down.

And so we, we are here for both flights just in case. And so, wow. So I signed a bunch of things from them. That's— I guess people do that. I don't know. Yes.

Well, you do it now.

Yeah.

So years later, you sold a company, you had a heart attack, and then you decided to try and fix climate change.

I'm, I'm, I'm I'm playing tennis in the morning. I don't feel well. I go to the front desk. Doctor says, give him aspirin, give him oxygen. And I'm lying there and the guy says, you know, I'm not a specialist. It looks like you might be having a heat stroke. And I've never had a heat stroke. I have no idea what that even feels like. And he says, would you like us to call an ambulance? I just sold my company. It's like, why am I— I'm not going to dick around with this. And he goes, 'Call an ambulance.' Okay, they call the ambulance, the guys come over and says, 'Nothing really wrong with you, we'll take you in for observation, we won't even turn on the siren.' Halfway to the hospital, the siren goes on. So I knew something hit the fan. And I'm lying there and I said, 'You got to be kidding me, I haven't spent any of the money yet.' You've worked for so long. I've worked for so long, you're going to take me out now? And I said, the second thing. I said, no, I'm not going. I still have stuff to do. So, okay, fine. I obviously survived. I have two stents, no big deal. That's 20 years ago. I'm fine. No problem. Then in the recovery room, I'm thinking, so what did I mean by stuff? You know, I already made enough money, so my wife doesn't need me anymore. My kids have already graduated from university and they're done with their education, so they don't need me anymore. You know, what did I mean by stuff? And so then I said, "Okay, what are my missions in life? What is it that's gonna piss me off if I didn't do something about it by the end of my life?" And so I decided to find my missions in life, and the first mission came to me in the back of the newspaper. Now, I came to Hawaii when I was 18, and I was in the water from New York City to the beach in Hawaii. So I was surfing and diving every day. And The article said, oh, by the way, we're going to kill all the coral in the world by the end of the century. I'm going, you idiots. No, we're not. And what's causing that? It's ocean acidification caused by carbon dioxide caused by us. So I said, okay, mission number one, end the use of carbon-based fuel. And that's the mission I'm on today.

To throw it back. So you sold your company. Are you allowed to talk about the amount that you got? Does that leave you in a position where you can now do anything you want. Can you give us a bit of background?

Um, there are a lot of other people with, with, uh, you, you can look it up. Uh, I got, uh, six— the company that bought me was the first company to go public in my space, and they had raised $67 million, and I got $67 million, and I got, uh, $4 million of their stock at $16 a share, and a year later they were bought by Electronic Arts and their shares became cash at $27 a share. Wow. So you can add it up.

So you're in this position where you have unlimited funds. And so how do you start to think about these missions that you have now?

So what do you— what keeps you busy? Yeah, so I just— I was living in Hawaii at the time. I have no idea how I'm going to go about doing this. I mean, how am I going to end the use of carbon-based fuel in the world? So let me do it in Hawaii first because I figure I'm going to have to— before I ask other people to clean their room, I'm going to have to clean my room. My room is Hawaii. So I said, I'm going to end the use of carbon-based fuel in Hawaii. So I started the Blue Planet Foundation. It's my first nonprofit. And with that goal in mind, did a little bit of homework. Hawaii at the time imported $5 billion a year of oil and $1 billion of coal. Okay, 100% of the coal is electricity. Of the oil, 30% is jet fuel, 30% is ground transportation, gasoline, diesel. 40%, $2 billion, plus a billion dollars is making electricity. So $3 billion of money going out of Hawaii to burn fuel for making electricity. So that's the biggest one, so we decided to go after that one first. We tried everything, I mean everything, and things that worked we did more and things that didn't work we stopped doing. I put a million dollars a year into this organization. And then our big claim to fame is in 2015 we passed a law in Hawaii saying that Hawaii has to go 100% renewable energy for electricity by 2045. 100% by 2045. And since then, 15 other states have copied our legislation, starting with California. So we flipped Hawaii and 2 years later we flipped California and New York and Illinois. So we have over 50% of the people in the US that now have a mandate. They're going to go 100% renewable energy by— some is 2035, '40, '45, '50. But anyway, what it means is that when you have a law like that in place, no one's going to build a new fossil fuel power plant in that jurisdiction, in that state. We followed up in Hawaii by changing the business model of the utility so they actually make more money by switching to renewables.

Wow.

They went from being our biggest enemy saying, "We can't do this," to, "Of course we're doing this." Because they make more money. Because they make more money. Yeah. And so now the people of Hawaii, the politicians and the utility, everybody believes that we're going to go 100% renewable energy and we're at 36% renewable energy today. So it's working. And then I started thinking bigger. So the US, if we're completely successful, problem is that we're only 4.3% of the people in the world. Can you imagine? We use 25% of the energy but 4.3% of the people. So if we're going to fix climate change, we have to do the rest of the world. So what we've been doing since then, and I started a new organization to do just that, is the Blue Planet Alliance. What we do is we bring islands to Hawaii to show them what we did.

Okay.

And get the same domino effect happening outside the US that happened in the US. When we say we bring an island, we bring from each island, we bring someone from the government, someone from the utility, someone from the regulatory agency, and someone from the community. So 4 people, we keep them for a week, we show them what we did in Hawaii, we We basically answer any questions that they have by bringing in all the experts, all the people that were part of the transition in Hawaii, including people from the utility, the governor, politicians, lom, legal people, environmentalists, renewable energy providers, everybody. So they get to be exposed and understand that actually it didn't cost Hawaii any money to go to 36%. They just put out RFPs and people came in and said, we will sell you electricity at this price. Now, the utility, when they buy oil, it's 25 cents their cost, 25 cents per kilowatt-hour. Wind and solar, when somebody comes in and they sell wind and solar for 8 cents per kilowatt-hour, if you add batteries to make it 24/7, it's up to 12 cents. That's half the cost. And their old business model of utility was they make 10% on the price of oil which is 2.5 cents, we can give you 3 cents and you make more money and the people pay less money and we are helping the environment. So it's win-win-win.

It's a real case of aligning the economic outcome with the behavior that you want to see, which I thought when I was reading about this before is the only way you're going to solve problems like that is make it work for people.

Yeah. And bring in the people. You know, if you think somebody is like the utility, rather than vilify the utility saying, "You guys are evil." No, you work with the utility and make them your friend and figure out what their issue is so that, you know, and even people who are in the oil business, whatever, they have to think of themselves as being in the energy business. And instead of selling oil, they should sell hydrogen. Now they can make hydrogen using wind and solar and geothermal in other places and drag it around the world. They could be in that business. They just have to think that's the future. And it's not a future that is going to make more money. It's a future that we actually have to achieve in order for us to have a planet that our children and our children's children can actually live on.

And I read that you've now started to build an app.

And the way the app works, it's a role-playing game, except that it's a role-playing game where you do things in the real world. So in the beginning you do small things like you pick up a piece of rubbish, put in the rubbish can, that's one point. You turn off a light in a room where there's no people, it's another point. You connect, collect enough points, you go up a level, we give you bigger things to do. And each time you go up a level, we give you bigger and bigger, bigger things. There's two ways you can make points. One is by taking actions or doing them. The other one is by creating an action. If you create an action, and you put it into the system. If somebody else does it, you get points. Then it becomes, you know, it's not just post and see how many likes you can get, it's post and see how many actions you can get. And then it becomes a competition to see who can create the most actionable actions, and that, you know, that help the environment. And if your action seems to be working well, you can go and find an influencer you know, somebody who has a podcast and say, sponsor, become a sponsor of my— of this particular action. Then when somebody does action, the sponsor also gets. So I want Messi and Ronaldo to compete to see who can get their city to be cleaner. Yeah.

For example, it's quite an incredible mission you're on. How do you— how do you spend your time now? I mean, you, you look incredible. I mean, you seem like you must have an incredibly healthy life. Like, how do you balance your time now?

I spend way too much time on planes.

Yeah.

Um, I walk a lot. I live in New York City mostly. I, I walk. If I'm in Hawaii, which is another part, I'll, I'll be playing pickleball. Uh, in New York, what I do for cardio is I play table tennis. So I I do get exercise. I'm turning 72 this year. I have 4 children and 9 grandchildren. Wow. So I don't eat meat. I don't own a car in New York. The cars in Hawaii are electric vehicles, and I charge them only at home. But both my ranch and my home in Honolulu are off-grid. So they're powered— my cars are solar-powered. So I, you know, wherever I can, I try to walk the walk.

And if you were giving advice to young entrepreneurs or new entrepreneurs now, I mean, you've been an unbelievable risk-taker. You've had an exceptional life. Very few people have movies made about them. So what is the advice you would give to young people at the moment about starting businesses?

First of all, if you find yourself outside the box, Do not get back in the box. All the people who have their own businesses somehow ended up outside the box. And it takes guts to get outside the box because it's real comfortable to get a monthly salary and, you know, to be able to pay the rent and so on and so forth. But you won't really be doing something amazing. Maybe you could, but But if you want to do a thing that you want to do, choose something that you're passionate about. Don't do something because you think it's going to make money. Do something because you think that this is something that you really wanted to do. When I made my first game, I just wanted to prove that I can make a game. I wanted to make the best game in the world. That's— that was just what I felt. I didn't think about that it was going to be a hit or that it was going to make money. I didn't even think about my customers because I didn't know them. I didn't speak, read, or write Japanese. So, uh, follow your passion.

And how did the book come about then? How did you go from that conversation about the creating of the film— you mentioned that you were feeding them information continuously—

yeah, so it was during COVID it was during COVID when, uh, when Alexei and I were working on the script And so I just decided that I was going to, yeah, set the record straight. Yeah. Somebody actually— Burning Man story. I went to Burning Man and there was an editor from some magazine in Hawaii and I asked him, you know, you can stay at my camp. I said, teach me something about writing. Fine. And basically what he told me is, just start writing, just start writing. Don't like think about what you're just— write, write, write, write, write. And so I started writing, and then I started writing like little short stories about my life. And it, you know, it's that thick, and it's quite the lot. It's a garbage collection of stories. And somebody looked at it and said, yeah, but there's no story here, you know. There's no beginning and there's no end. It's just you jumping around like, uh, Slaughterhouse-Five. This is jumping around in my life, uh, which— yeah, no. And, uh, so when we started working on the script, I decided, okay, let's focus. I'm going to focus on writing first the whole story of what actually happened during the movie but then everything connected to my computer game career, basically. It goes a little bit before my computer game career, a little bit about where I came from, from, you know, sort of a rags to riches story.

Yeah. And so where can everyone keep up to date with you? Where can people keep up to date with your work?

So I'm on Instagram. It's @henkrogers, H-E-N-K. I'm originally from the Netherlands. I have a website, hankrogers.com. So I'm just learning social media now. Yeah. So it's, you'll be able to find out. I'm going to be posting. I'm in London today.

Amazing. Well, look, thanks so much for coming on the show. From all of us gamers, thank you for contributing an unbelievable game.

You're very welcome.