Henk Rogers
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| Henk Rogers | |
| Occupation | Computer Gaming Specialist |
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| Website [1] |
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Henk Rogers is a video game designer and entrepreneur, best known for winning a license for the handheld and console versions of the computer game Tetris from the Soviet Government organisation ELORG, beating Robert Maxwell's empire in the process.
Rogers was born in the Netherlands and lived in New York City from the age of eleven. He attended Stuyvesant High School where he got his first taste of computer programming. He then studied Computer Science and Role Playing Games at the University of Hawaii.
During the late 1970s, he moved to Japan. In 1983 he designed and developed the first Role Playing Game in Japan. He also established his own publishing company Bullet-Proof Software to bring The Black Onyx to market. In 1986, Rogers published his first Nintendo game kyuroban Igo on the Japanese 8-bit Famicom, called the Nintendo Entertainment System in the US. His second Nintendo game was Super Black Onyx for which he commissioned world famous graphic artist Roger Dean to do the cover art. It would be the first of many joint projects for Henk Rogers and Roger Dean.
Rogers discovered Tetris during a game show in Las Vegas in 1988. At the time, the game was being distributed in several countries under the color of a master license agreement which the original licensee had not honored. Rogers went to Moscow (without an invitation) to see if he could obtain rights to distribute the game. Two other companies were simultaneously bidding for the same rights. Rogers brought Nintendo on board and secured the exclusive rights to market Tetris on video game consoles. Nintendo successfully used this grant to squeeze its rival Atari out of the market, as Atari had sought to market Tetris based on the original (invalid) license.
During the negotiations in Moscow, Rogers also became friends with the game's Russian author Alexey Pajitnov. In 1990, he helped Pajitnov move to the United States and set up a new company, AnimaTek, to develop new computer graphic technologies.
In 1996, the rights for Tetris reverted to Pajitnov. Rogers moved from Japan to Hawaii, where he founded Blue Planet Software to manage the intellectual property rights to Tetris and The Tetris Company, a Delaware company that exclusively licenses Tetris.
Rogers founded Blue Lava Wireless in 2002 to develop mobile gaming software. The company was sold to Jamdat in 2005, along with a license to the mobile game rights to Tetris.
