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

“Yeah, and oh my goodness, I had my sales guys call every distributor said, hang on to your inventory. This is not like other games. It is going to take off much more slowly than other games. But once it takes off, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be a hit. And some distributors actually listen to us. Well, by the end of January Tetris was sold out everywhere.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Come January, it wasn't moving. Tetras wasn't moving. And what happens when they have product in January, like after Christmas, the distributors start dumping their rest of their inventory.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At first, it was miserable because you can't look at the box and understand what Tetris is. The only way that you can know what Tetris is is by playing it. No amount of advertising helps Tetris. You have to just play it.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was his go buddy. Anyway, they called around and we got another 30,000. So it was like 70,000. It wasn't enough. Still wasn't enough. But anyway, we published that Christmas 70,000 copies of TetraZan Nintendo.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mr. Yamuchi, I don't know whether it's my sales or my marketing that sucks, but I think I may have one of the greatest computer games of all time, and my salespeople could only get 40,000 units. And then he calls in Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, and says, Miyamoto, is this a great game? And Miyamoto says, yes. And Yiyamoti says, how do you know? This is because your accountants, your secretaries, all of you people are playing this game at lunch and after work when they don't have to play games. So Yamauchi called in Imanishi, who's the number two at Nintendo's. Imanishi, I want you to pull distribution and make them order more. That's like wow, that's some serious action there. Wow.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the beginning, the orders weren't that big. The original order was forty thousand units, which is not enough. You need two hundred thousand units in order to get a second order. So at 40,000, that was another reason for me to meet Yamuchi, the head of Nintendo.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, it was like probably September-ish. It takes two months to create the cartridges. So, you know, I was trying to make it in time for Christmas.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For Nintendo. So it was very, very interesting. I think he mustn't needed money at this point. I think I made the deal for $300,000. It was a regular deal.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. Then I started communicating directly with Atari Games and said, look, I want a license Tetris for the Japanese market. And I said to my team in Japan, I look, I'm going to the States. I'm not coming back until I have the Tetris rights. And so I went to San Jose. I met with Nakajima, the president of Atari Games. And made my pitch why we should be the one to publish Tetris in Japan. And then it went radio silent. I was there for 10 days. And then I had my second meeting. I had dinner. We had sushi. And he agreed.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's only so much you can sell. But cartridges, you can't copy them. If somebody wants to play an Nintendo game, they have to buy a Nintendo game.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So, yeah, we had a deal. And two weeks later, he calls me and he says, I'm really sorry, but the deal that we did couldn't have been made because meanwhile, Mirosoft has given all those rights to Atari games. So I go, what? And, you know, it was ridiculous. It was like they didn't need the Japanese rights for anything because they didn't have any business in Japan. Boy, are you kidding me? I was livid. We had made a deal. You know, when you shake a deal, you know, it's like, this is a lawsuit I didn't threaten him with a lawsuit. I said, we made a deal, Gilman. And heepishly came back. He says, okay, I'll see what I can do. And what he could do was he could get me the personal computer rights back. So I had personal computers.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes I basically made him an offer for personal computers, for console, and for arcade. Those are all the platforms I could think of in Japan for the rights.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was thinking, well, first of all, I said, well, I know Mirosoft because I've been to England, also looking for games. So I knew them. Then I got in contact with Mirosoft and they said, you know, Gilman Louis coming to Japan. He's going to deal the rights to Tetris. So talk to him. Fine, I knew Gilman Louis.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everywhere, everywhere. And it's like, yeah, you could say it could have been an insidious thing done by the West to stop people working in the Soviet Union.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, basically, they made the PC version. And that's what went viral. And it went viral to the point where they were losing perfectivity. I mean, it's like”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Alexei Pajetnov is his name, and he is a mathematician working And he needed to move to a new machine, and he was assigned to learn how to program on that new machine. And he decided to make the Pentamino puzzle. You get a little rectangle and you have to put the pieces into the rectangle and the last piece never fits. That's the Pentamino puzzle. And he realized that it was so slow that he started thinking about how can I make this faster. And then one of the things that he made is the routine to make the piece rotate. And the rotation was so fast that it started making him think that he should make a real-time game. And, well, he just took one of the blocks off the Pentomino puzzle and made them into Tetrominos, and well, that's basically Tetris, the falling blocks.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you would think. But no, that's not how my mind works, obviously. I got hooked on the game and I said, well, this is a great game. And then I took it back to Japan, samples, and sure enough, everybody else in the company got hooked on it too. So I wasn't just me.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just geometric shapes. And that was very interesting to me. If you look at Go, it's just black and white stones. It's the simplest looking game, and yet it's the deepest, most interesting game. So the fact that this game was like little squares Didn't turn me off. I was just interested in, I just got hooked on it right there on the spot.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I mean, there it was. And it seemed out of place. You know, every other game was like graphics with little characters running around in bullets, and God knows what. And here was a game that was just totally puzzle”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go back and forth. Yeah. So the nice thing about me and publishing is that I got to make the decision. So I could go to a consumer electronic show, look at a game. I really like this game. Okay, let's make a deal. I didn't have to send it back to Japan and have a bunch of managers sign off. Yes, I agree. Yes, I agree. Yes, I agree. I could make a decision. So I was always faster than everybody else.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Successful, no, it was successful enough. I was publishing Star Wars. I published electronic arts two of their first four games. I was licensing games from all over the planet and publishing them in Japan.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. And then whenever I met him after that, I always set up the meeting on a day when I'm the last meeting, his last meeting, and then we would play go for the rest of the day. I had all this one-on-one time with Yamauchi, which nobody had.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a miracle that this thing can play go at all. And I'm fumbling for words. I said, Mr. Yamuchi, it's an 8-bit computer. There's never going to be a stronger co-algorithm than this. He said, it's too weak for Nintendo. Which part didn't you understand? So again, I had to think fast. I said, okay, Mr. Yamuchi, maybe it's not strong enough for Nintendo, but it's strong enough for my company. Let me publish it. And he goes, what about my money? $300,000. I said, okay, I'll pay you a dollar per unit until you get your money back. Deal. And so that's how I became a Nintendo publisher.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the deal. I contacted the programmer in England, made a deal with him, convinced him to come to Japan. We spent nine months creating all the graphics. We had little ninjas jumping around. The stones were floating. And when the stone landed, it would fall down on its shadow so that you could, oh, it was just a great graphically. It was a great game. So nine months later, I'm back in the room with Yamauchi. And he wants to play. And so he's got the machine set up and he's fumbling with the controller. I realize this guy's never played any of the games machine. He's just run the company. He hasn't played any of those games. So, okay, fine. And he hands the controller over to the guy sitting next to him, and he points to where he wants to play. I want to go there. I want to go there. I want to go there. After one game,”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, I don't need programmers. I just need money. And he says, how much? And I said, gosh, I mean, I'm thinking of what's the biggest number I can think of right now. And I said, $300,000. And he said, he reaches across the table and said, deal, that was it. It's like... Holy smokes, that was so fast”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's the ayatollah of the computer game business. I mean, this guy is iron fist. Nobody gets to see him. And I get to see him in two days. It's like, wow, that's amazing. So I come into the office and he's sitting across for me. And Yamuchi says, I can't give you any programmers”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The head of Nintendo, so I sent him a fax mister Yamochi, my name is Hank Rogers. I can make a goal game for your Nintendo machine. I'm leaving on Saturday. I would like to see you before I leave. I didn't tell him the part about I live in Japan. That was going to be back next week. On Tuesday, I sent the facts. Wednesday, his assistant sends me a fax. Mr. Yamochi will meet you tomorrow”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had to make a decision at the end of year two whether I was going to make another game or whether I was going to focus on running the company. And, you know, my wife had been a computer widow for two years, meaning I was on the computer day and night for two years, pretty much. And I said, you know, this isn't something that I can do for the rest of my life. So I started traveling around the world looking for games to bring to Japan. Because at the time, movies were coming from other countries and music was coming from other countries. So I could see that all this culture was being imported from a lot of from the US and games shouldn't be any different.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And every single magazine that we visited had grave reviews like a month later, and then Softbank came back and we had for April we had 10,000 units. And May 10,000 units. So we were like killing it. We were number one game in Japan in 1984.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let me backtrack because this is an interesting part of the story. So I went, SoftBank had said they would buy 3,000 copies for Christmas. And when it came close to Christmas, they realized that nobody understood what a role-playing game was. And the little advertising that I did was just completely ineffective. So they rolled back their initial order to 600. And I thought, oh, we're dead in the water. Come January, I call my guys together. By this time I had some testers and some office people, like, how do people in Japan find out about computer games as well? They read about them in the magazine. So what I did was I got one of my guys to call all the magazines and make appointments, and we actually went to visit them. And I would show them how to play Black Onyx and leave them with the game.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was there a mouse? Use the 10 key. There was no mice yet before mice. No, you used the ten key to forward, turn left, turn right, move forward. One square at a time”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the Black Onyx was the first role-playing game in Japan. And this is in the days when one person could write a game all by themselves, do all the graphics, do everything.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, sounds so simple, but of course it wasn't so simple. And I didn't speak read or write Japanese at the time. So, yeah, that was pretty interesting experience starting a company without knowing anything.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Japanese version of a PC, yes. Now, I didn't have a publishing company, and I didn't know how to publish or how to do any of that or how to do business in Japan. I never studied business. And so I went to SoftBank. That was SoftBank is this huge multi billion dollar company today. But at that time, all they were was a little company doing distribution for computer software to computer shops. That's it. Anyway, I said, can you introduce me to a publisher? And they said, you know what, you really don't need a publisher. Just get your wife to answer the phone and you can publish yourself. We'll introduce you to a company they can actually do the duplication of the cassettes and the discs, whatever, and you can pay them after we pay you. I said, wow, that sounds great.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, like he went from ranks the richest so many times yeah he was good at it but he never did business properly in other words he never had an accountant he never paid taxes it was all just in his head he would always just hand out money when he had money and not when he didn't He always did things by the seat of his pants, so he didn't understand how to have a, you know, how can I say, a company with people that actually do the things that you need to get done without you. Okay, it's a first difference between my father and myself. I've got companies running all over the place. Even my first business, I had other people doing stuff so that the business would run even though I wasn't there at that moment.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For six years I was mostly on the, I wasn't so much on the sales or any of that. I was on the figuring out new techniques for cutting new kinds of gem material. I'm on the technical and mechanical side of that business.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the computer didn't have any graphics. So the information that I would give to the dungeon master is just reams of paper And basically I took all the computer classes I could take. And at the end of my third year, they called me in and said, Mr. Rogers, what's going on? I said, what do you mean? He says, well, you haven't taken any of your core requirements. And I said, well, I've already been to high school. This is my New York attitude coming through. And they said, well, if you're not going to 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 think I already got it. Thank you.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always say that I majored in computer science and I minored in Dungeons and Dragons. We had a gaming club and so what I did on the computer when I wasn't doing homework assignments is make little routines that would be like aids to the dungeon master so we didn't have to roll all those dice all the time. Because rolling dice is something a computer is really good at. And I'd had to store my programs on paper tape.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And my goodness. I had my sales guys call every distributor said, hang on to your inventory. This is not like other games. It is going to take off much more slowly than other games. But once it takes off, it's going to be a hit.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“January, it wasn't moving. Tetris wasn't moving. And what happens when they have product in January, like after Christmas, the distributors start dumping their rest of their inventory. They have to get rid of it because if it's not selling, it's never going to sell.”
2023-07-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT