YouSaid · the spoken record

Henk Rogers

lines on the record: 90
first: 2023-07-31
most recent: 2023-07-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“My daughter runs it now, so she takes care of the whole thing. My daughter Maya, when she was 15, she asked me, so I asked her, what do you want to be when you grow up? And she said, I don't know, but I want to make more money than you. So she's on it.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, he does. You know, and if we're in the same jurisdiction, like if we're both in Seattle or both in New York, every other night bottle of wine guaranteed, we worked hard to keep Tetris alive. People ask me if I'm Mr. Tetris. I said, no, I'm Dr. Tetris. Alexia is Mr. Tetris. I'm Dr. Tetris. We're best friends forever. That's the way it is.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, he is as involved as I am, so whenever something comes up we both have to agree to a license. That's the way it is now. So we look at every deal. We still go to, like we were just in Vegas at the licensing show. So we're merchandising to all kinds of brands that want to use Tetrison. I don't know shoes, backpacks, cups, who knows. So there's that whole side of the business that we're still involved in.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh it's all because of hard work. I mean, this is not like I rolled a dice and something happened. I like to compare it to surfing. I used to surf. And basically someday a giant wave is going to come. And if you haven't surfed the small waves and worked and worked and paddled and paddled and learned all that stuff, then when that big wave comes up, you're just going to get killed. You need to know how to surf before you, you know, and you can't read about it in a book. You got to get out in the water and try stuff.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And number three is to make a backup of life by going to other planets and bringing life to other planets. Like it. And number four is to find out how the universe ends and do something about it. I think the reason that the last one exists is to make the other one seem reasonable when they could seem unreasonable. Okay, so in the scope of things, compared to the end of the universe, fixing climate change is just a blip. And I just like this blip to happen faster. To me, people ask me if I have hope. I say, no, I don't have hope. I have determination because we're going to fix this. There's no doubt in my mind that we're going to fix this. How much damage we do to this planet on the way to fixing it? That's up to us.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First mission is to end the use of carbon based fuel. Second one is to end war, which goes back to when I was a student in high school.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first one came to me in the back of the newspaper. It said, Oh, by the way, we're going to kill all the coral in the world by the end of the century. And what's causing that is ocean acidification, what's causing that, it's carbon dioxide. What's causing that? We are. So mission number one is to end the use of carbon-based fuel. And I started a foundation in Hawaii called the Blue Planet Foundation, and we worked to end the use of carbon-based fuel in Hawaii”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I kind of worked it back from the end of my life. I thought about what is it that's going to upset me if I didn't do something by the end of my real life the next time. And I found my bucket list. I searched for and found my missions in life.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The doctor said Don't change a thing. Don't change your exercise. Don't change your diet. You're fine. This is an anomaly. So, yeah, I mean, you could say that it was stress and all this kind of stuff, but I just generally don't take stress. Maybe I do, and I just don't realize it. I'm pretty relaxed about things”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm about to die. Are you going to take me out? The second thing I said, no, I'm not going, I still have stuff to do. And so, you know, in the recovery room, I started thinking about what did I mean by that?”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have two sins, but in that ambulance on the way to the hospital, the first thing I thought of was, you've got to be kidding me. I haven't spent any of the money yet”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was actually tennis. The ambulance driver said that he didn't think I was going to make it. When I got to the hospital, they rolled me straight into the OR. I was still conscious. I signed the paper saying, yes, you can operate, which is nice because if I couldn't sign, my wife would have had to sign. She didn't know where I was. So, I would have died. I have two stents.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and the company that I sold blew lava wireless, what I did was I gave that company a fifteen year license to Tetris from the Tetris Company. So we never lost ownership of Tetris.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so what I had to do is I had to collect the worldwide rights to Tetris mobile into Blue Lava Wireless. And in order to do that, I had to get rid of Bellikov. So I raised the money to buy out Belikov.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, exactly. And that's, I don't know, 50% profit. But at the end of three years, my license ran out. And during that three years, we were Bellikov and me were duking it out. We were in court. I'm on the way to proving that he has no rights at all in New York. And so we were on the way”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so during those three years, I had gotten a license to Tetris for mobile phones in the US. And I hid it out of the park in the US. I made a company called Blue Lava Wireless. And I basically published Tetris and other games.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that created a conflict. And in all of the deals up till then, the way it worked is I get one vote. Bellikov gets one vote. If it's yes, yes, then it's a deal. If it's yes, no, then it's no deal. So basically at that point, for the next three years, no deals went through because every deal that I brought to the table, he said no, and every deal that he brought to the table, I said no.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You understand it exactly. And I said, look, before we split the money, I'm going to need the money to brand manage this game. And so I want a percentage off the top to do all of the licensing and to do all of the brand management. The problem was that up till then... Everybody who licensed Tetris from a Lorg basically had no guide about how to build Tetris. And so the versions of Tetris that came out of different publishers were very different. Give you an example. A Game Boy player in Japan could not play the arcade because it's like the breaks and the gas pedal were reversed So it was my job to standardize Tetris across all platforms. And we've done that. But seven years into it, Bellikov team got greedy and they said, well, we don't actually want you to do brand management. We just want to find somebody to license Tetris.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So basically, I start hammering out the deal with Bellikov, and we end up making the Tetris company, and it's 50-50. They had the copyright and trademark in 60 countries, and that was just too much for me to try to cite.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very far apart. And I remember being in a room. And it was all Nintendo lawyers. And then there is Mr. Bellikoff and his lawyer. And I said, well, I'm not a lawyer, but I kind of feel that at some point there's going to be a jury of Americans that are going to decide who owns the rights to Tetris, whether it's the former Soviet Ministry of Import and Export of Software or the creator of the game.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm not resting. I want you to make sure that I get my rights back. But anyway, during 95, Lorg came, we had the meeting in Redmond, and I was ready to, I mean, I was representing Alexia, I was ready to give them 20%, and they were ready to give me 20%. We were very far apart. You were far away.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is why Alexei asked me to help him in his ninety three and he said look I'm going to make you an offer you're going to represent me you're going to take care of me and you and me are going to be partners and basically made me offer and we shook ends in 93, that handshake is still alive today.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, exactly. So all the people who ended up, like, how did Belikov go from being an administrator of a government organization to owning it? How did that happen? I remember there was a very interesting moment in time when it was just the transition when it became a private company. And it was Mr. Bellikov called me up in a panic and said, you know, the money that you cabled me, can you like get it back and then send it to this new bank account?”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Next Friday we signed a deal, we broke Gorbachev' rule, which has no alcohol in the office, and we broke out a bottle of vodka and all had a shot. They posted people by the doors in the windows to make sure nobody was watching. And so after I sign the contract, lockdown handheld, Mr. Bellikov asks me, Mr. Rogers, how would you like to license the console rights? And like, wow, that sounds, yes, of course.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I presented to him the next day, and I gave them a week, and we managed to hammer out an agreement within that week. And the offer that I'd made them was I would pay them 25 cents for every Game Boy Tetris that was sold. And we'd sort of like on the back of the envelope how many units will Nintendo sell that include Tetris? And that number was something like 30 million. So 30 million times 25 cents is a big number.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. First of all, they asked me so, Mr. Rogers, when do you plan to come back to Moscow? And I said, what do you mean, come back to Moscow? They said, well, you know, we have to think about this and make our decision. And I said, that's not how it works. When I leave here, I either leave here with the Game Boy rights or I leave here without the Game Boy rights. But I'm not coming back. I started realizing that I have to be forceful with them because they're forceful with each other. You know what I'm saying? Like, there's not a warm and fuzzy, nice conversation. No, it's all kind of adversarial. They were that way with each other. So the nice started reeling, I have to be that way too. And so they said, well, make us an offer. I said, okay. I went back to my hotel and I made a little one-page legalese document.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For those that didn't speak English, yeah, they would stop everyone once in a while and go into Russian whatever discussion. And it's funny because when they get into a discussion, sometimes it sounds like they're fighting. And it's like, are they talking to decide which gulag they're going to send me to? Is that what they're, it was kind of creepy, you know, because they're arguing with each other and then they would come back and start speaking English to me again”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, okay, so I had to explain to them how the whole business works. I basically taught them everything they needed to know about what the computer game, what's the difference between console and personal computer and arcade and how each of these things made money and how the, I basically explained everything to them.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. I'm in love with your game. You've created something amazing. And it's very interesting because Alexei, you know, and I talked to him about the game. And Alexi, that was the thing that flipped him because he'd never met a game designer before. I was the first. Game designer that he met. He'd met other people like Robert Stein, wheeler dealers than trying to license, but they weren't a game designer. I was a game designer.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had to be in the room because he's the only one in the room who knew anything about computer games besides me. Those guys, the lot of them had no clue. All they understood was money, license, you know, that kind of stuff. They didn't understand what a game was.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And so I decided I'm going to focus on the Game Boy deal. Let me do that one thing which is absolutely clear. And it says, I'll come back tomorrow. So he said, yes, come back tomorrow at 1 o'clock, whatever. And the reason I wanted it to be the next day is because I wanted him to have the right people in the room. And the next day in the room, eight people and me, I was being interrogated. Who are you? What are you doing? And I'm a Dutchman who sounds like an American who has a publishing company in Japan publishing game that he claims to have licensed from.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so I'm in the middle of that. They're already in manufacture. I'm not going to get my money back if somebody else swoops in and gets those rights. I am totally screwed. And so I”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no, no, no. No, I did not know who he was. And I did not want to just talk to an underling. I wanted to talk to somebody who could make a decision. And so I said, I will come back tomorrow. I would like to meet someone to talk about the Game Boy rides. But you missed the point just now. I'm standing there and he's just told me that I don't have the right to publish the 200,000 cartridges.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, he was warm. He was puzzled. Hello. And, you know, who are you? What do you want? And I said, I'm the publisher of this game in Japan. And he took the Tetris cartridge box into his hand. And he looked at it and looked at it. And he looked at me and he said, we never licensed consul rights to anyone.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I didn't know who he was at the time. I had no idea who anybody was, but Mr Bellikov, who'd be the one that I would negotiate this whole deal with.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In English, yes. In English. And so I showed her I'm the publisher of this game. I'm Tetris and I'm looking for someone to talk to me about the Game Boy rights. And she said, okay, wait here. And she disappeared, and a little while later comes down the stairs come this old man. And that was Mr. Bellikoff.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it took a while, but maybe like, I don't know, 10 minutes, finally somebody came and talked to me and she said, What are you looking for?”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's before this, okay? I'm outside the door, and my interpreter says, you can't go in there. I said, what do you mean I can't go in there? So you have a tourist visa. You can't go in there. I said, look, I didn't come all this way to stand in front of a door and go back to Japan, get a visa and then come back. No, that's not how it works. I'm going in. Are you coming with me? No, I can't. It's like, okay, fine, I'm going in. And I went in. And it's a lobby of office building kind of place. And there's the window off to the side. You could see that's the window where you're supposed to present your credentials. Well, obviously, I didn't have any credentials, so I didn't go to that window. I just stood there in the lobby and waited for somebody to speak to me.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, export imports. I don't exactly know what, but they were definitely the ones that had the power to speak to people outside.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, Perestroika and Glasnos were just starting to happen. So it wasn't the going to North Korea today. You know, it was already people were already feeling a little bit of freedom.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It turns out that Stein had to clear up the original contracts that he had because they were craft. They were really bad, badly written contracts. And, you know, it was like taking candy from a baby kind of stuff. The Soviets just didn't have any experience with intellectual property. And here they were, you know, they were getting a percentage of a percentage of a percentage.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Million dollars up front is a dollar a unit for a million units. That was his minimum guarantee. We shook hands on that. And then I'm back in Japan and I'm like, now I'm really on Stein. Come on. We got to get the deal done. Let's go. Let's go.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. And I'd been faxing him. Still the days of fax. I've been faxing him, you know, every week. Like, what's going on? When are you going to get me the rights and so on and so forth? And he just like, yeah, I'm going to do it soon. I'm going to do it soon. I'm going to do it soon. And so that's kind of the situation I was in when it became February of 1989. So what happened was Arakaba made me a deal. I made him an offer. And he shook my hand. It was like a million dollar up front, which is like, yeah, right on. Great deal.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you know, part of my business strategy is that I never lie to anybody. I never say I have something that I don't have. I would say I can get you the rights By that time, by the way, I had already hired Robert Stein to get me the handheld rights.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I said, if you want little boys to buy your Game Boy, then include Mario. But if you want everyone to buy your Game Boy, include Tetris. And then he calls in his experts, and they all came and said, yep, you know, Tetris is being played by everybody. It's completely genderless. It's the first game that was being played by women. Just by that alone, it could double the sales. And then I said, you know, and then you can still sell Mario afterwards because every kid's going to want to have Mario.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, it would be an explosion. And it kind of was. So I went to Redmond and talked to Arakawa, and I said, Mr. Arakawa, you should include Tetris with the Game Boy. And he said, why should I include Tetris? I have Mario.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we are in the business, so everybody in the business knew that Nintendo was going to come out with this new machine. It wasn't like a big secret. Everybody in Japan knew about it. So when it was going to come out, and I saw the specs, I said, oh my God, this, first of all, the screen is tiny. Second of all, it's black and white, and it doesn't have many dots on the screen. Most games that are on console are colorful and have a lot of detail. All that detail would be lost on the tiny screen. But Tetris would work just perfectly. Yeah.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, it seemed like a slam dunk, right? I mean, like the game had taken off. They were clamoring for it. So we just had to rush to get this stuff into production. And yeah, I saw no reason not to make that gamble, so to speak.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's $2 million. So I convinced my wife to convince her parents to put up all of their real estate as collateral for a loan”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ed, it went viral. But at the end of January, the orders started coming from distribution. They wanted more, and this time they wanted two hundred thousand copies of Tetris. And it's like. Wow, where am I going to get the money to? That was more money than we could muster.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT