All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture

by Harold Goldberg

  Pajitnov just shrugged his shoulders. “It would have been illegal to sell it anyway.” He had done something good, he thought. He had made thousands of people who had computers happy. It was almost enough.

  Word of the game’s brilliance began to spread around the world, again among those in the know. To understand the full story of Tetris’s decades-long success, you have to know one other player who was almost religiously enlightened when he saw the game: Henk Rogers. A young Dutch entrepreneur, and a game maker as well, Rogers had followed love from Hawaii to Japan. He was assertive and aggressive, but with his big smile that turned into easy laughter, he was eminently likeable all the same. In college in Hawaii, he and others had formed the ARRG, Alternative Realties Recreation Group, which was primarily devoted to playing lengthy games of Dungeons & Dragons, occasionally from Friday night right through Monday morning. With Black Onyx for the PC, Rogers made the first popular role playing game in Japan. Even though it was a mere 256 kilobytes in size, Black Onyx, named for a gem because Rogers’s father was in the gem business, was packed with variety. It offered players fifty different monster heads and thirty bodies from which to choose.

  Because Rogers had played Go with his father as a child, he had become something of an expert. Over the years, Rogers had become a Go fanatic, so much so that it extended to his game publishing venture. His company, Bullet-Proof Software, was the world’s largest producer of Go games. Rogers tried to convince Nintendo to license Go with him, but he at first reached a brick wall in the form of one Hiroshi Imanishi, a trusted colleague of Yamauchi who was schooled as a lawyer.

  Rogers shook his head and told his wife, Akemi, “It was the biggest blow-off ever.”

  “Wait. Hold on,” replied Akemi. She rummaged through some newspapers and came up with a local magazine. “I read in this that Mr. Yamauchi plays Go!”

  Indeed, Nintendo’s Yamauchi was obsessed by Go. Rogers felt a fresh hope course through his veins. He began plotting, scheming. He looked at his Commodore 64 version of the strategy game, figuring that it could be moved to the Nintendo system fairly easily. The only drawback was creating a new algorithm for the Nintendo console. But the mathematics could be dealt with. Rogers sent a fax to the Nintendo boss. Brashly, he offered to play Go against Yamauchi, who was a master. Go was not merely a game for Yamauchi. It was something real men played, for within playing Go, there was the same kind of strategizing that proved one’s acumen and mettle in the realm of business. On the next day, Rogers got a reply that read, “Mr. Yamauchi will see you tomorrow.” He was so excited that he felt like dancing all day long.

  Rogers quickly readied his pitch. He decided against bringing a translator, believing that much could be lost with other people attempting to decipher the language. Shortly after the meeting convened, the two made their moves in Go, and the tension in the room was high. Rogers was good, carefully thinking a step or two ahead. But he was not that good. Even though Yamauchi won, the standoffish Nintendo chief warmed to Rogers. Then they talked business. The hard-nosed businessman didn’t mince words with Rogers.

  “You want Go? I can’t give you any programmers,” said Yamauchi.

  “I don’t need programmers. I have them,” said Rogers. “I need money to make the game.”

  Yamauchi arched his eyebrows. He had never before given money to an outside company to make a game.

  “How much?”

  Rogers, who was wound up and ready, let loose. “Mr. Yamauchi. This is going to be big. It can’t fail. People love Go, especially in Japan.” It was his nature to become excited and talk too much. He didn’t want to do that with Yamauchi, who was an incredibly tough businessman with little time for bluster. Rogers had to think fast. Yamauchi was known not to give anyone a penny more than he believed a person deserved. So Rogers stopped talking.

  “How much?” Yamauchi demanded again.

  “Three hundred thousand dollars.” He knew that if he asked for too much money, he would be out of Nintendo on his ass.

  “What do we get?”

  “One dollar for every game we sell.”

  Yamauchi thought for a long moment, which seemed like ages to Rogers. But then he reached out over the Go table, proffered his hand, and said, “Deal.”

  In nine months, Rogers returned to show his new baby to Yamauchi. After setting things up, Rogers noticed that the big boss had an underling use the joystick. Yamauchi still didn’t know how to use the controls on the NES. But he knew what he didn’t like.

  “It’s not strong enough,” he said flatly.

  Rogers protested, insisting that the game was very strong, the strongest Go game his company had ever made. He couldn’t believe that Yamauchi couldn’t see the beauty in it. Yamauchi was intractable. He didn’t want the Nintendo name anywhere on Rogers’s game.

  Rogers was dejected, but undaunted. He went back to work to refine the game, polishing it so that Yamauchi could not reject it. Rogers, according to the terms of the deal, bought copies from Nintendo’s manufacturing arm. Kyuroban Igo, the Go game, went on the market in 1986, and Go nerds bought 150,000 games. But Go didn’t sell anywhere near the 300,000 Nintendo needed to make back its initial investment. To this day, Rogers owes the company $150,000. Despite the setback, Rogers remained on good terms with Nintendo.

  When he saw Tetris for the first time at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 1988, it was as though Rogers had reached a kind of gaming rapture. It was beyond Go, beyond Black Onyx, beyond any game he’d every produced at Bullet-Proof Software. Just as Pajitnov couldn’t stop thinking about making the game during its conception, Rogers couldn’t stop thinking about marketing it.

  But Tetris was already being distributed in Europe, a handful of companies throughout the world claiming they owned the licensing rights based on miscommunication with the Soviets and downright lies from sketchy middlemen seeking to make a buck. It was like B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, except in this case, the Soviet Union stood in for Mexico. Everyone, including the growing Microsoft, lusted after Tetris as though it were the south-of-the-border trove of gold and the game companies were the gringo prospectors. In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev set forth new policy decrees that thawed the Cold War with glasnost and perestroika. But doing business within the layers of Soviet culture remained fraught with suspicion and never-ending enigmas, and those shadows of lingering distrust hung over the Computing Centre and Tetris as well.

  Henk Rogers felt he could beat all the other companies with a trump card—Nintendo. He had honed his relationship with Nintendo to the point that his company was permitted to release a controller for the Nintendo system in the United States. The plastic piece of hardware had a rapid-fire turbo button and an ingenious slow-motion mode. It sold two million units.

  After seeing and playing Tetris, Rogers met with Nintendo of America president Mino Arakawa in Kyoto in December 1988. “Can you keep a big secret?” asked Arakawa with a gleam in his eye. “You can tell no one. We have the new game playing machine by Mr. Yokoi. It should be big.” Arakawa used the word “big” when other English words failed him. But he didn’t need a better descriptive. He had a prototype to show. Out came a plastic device that was about as large as a pocket calculator, but thicker. Rogers loved the look of the Game Boy. Arakawa continued, “Mr. Yokoi’s last product [the Game & Watch] was a big failure in the United States. But this Game Boy will be big, very big.”

  Rogers saw an opportunity to pitch Tetris. He fired various volleys about the game’s beauty, saying it would be one of the most significant games the industry had ever produced. It was as if he were a clone of a secret, more assertive side of Pajitnov, almost as though he were a partner in the very design of Tetris—even though he’d never met the game maker. Like Pajitnov, he lived Tetris. He looked Arakawa straight in the eye and said, “I think you should include Tetris inside the package of the Game Boy.”

  Arakawa did not hesitate. He shot back, “Why should we do that whe
n we have Mario? All the boys already love Mario.”

  “If you want boys to play, include Mario. If you want everyone to play—mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters—include Tetris.”

  Arakawa paused for a moment to reflect. He looked outside the window to Kyoto below. “Whenever I see something new, I find Rogers’s footprints. He finds new things faster than I can,” he mused. Arakawa also thought about potential Game Boy sales and about the nature of Nintendo quality, the idea that innovation was always the key to success. Tetris sure seemed like the next step in creativity. But most of all, he thought about widening the already-vast Nintendo audience. He knew that Yokoi’s Game & Watch had sold poorly stateside. He knew that he had to stay ahead of the other US game makers to please Yamauchi. He knew that Tetris was a gamble too: The lack of a Mario game bundled with the Game Boy could infuriate or befuddle young gamers. But the pros outweighed the cons. In his quiet but assertive way he told Rogers, “Go get Tetris. Go to Moscow and get it.” As Rogers readied to leave the Nintendo complex, Arakawa added, “You have ninety days to close. After that, we have no deal.”

  Rogers didn’t waste time. Without an appointment with Pajitnov or with anyone at the Computing Centre, Rogers packed a few things, kissed his wife, and boarded a plane to Moscow. What Rogers didn’t know as he traveled that February was that another Russian entity was about to become involved in the licensing discussions. Electronorgtechnica (Elorg), the Russian body of scientists and engineers that had the final say, had chided Pajitnov when it heard of the negotiations regarding Tetris. Pajitnov had been in contact with a handful of businesses in the West regarding licensing. He personally received no money, but his demeanor was such that greedy moneymen took his easygoing attitude as consent to market the game in Europe and beyond. But according to Soviet regulations, only Electronorgtechnica was allowed to deal with the import, export, and licensing of a game like Tetris.*

  On the plane, Rogers hatched a plan to speak with Pajitnov not as a potential client, not as a businessman, but as a fellow game designer. He also felt that the Russians might not be as savvy as Western movers and shakers when it came to the ins and outs of the licensing business. He didn’t want to take advantage of them. Rather, he wanted the Russians to understand what he had learned about the game business. But he didn’t quite know how he would gain their trust.

  Rogers walked into the enormous Computing Centre building and was awed by its vastness. It was nearly as cold inside as it was outside in the Russian winter. Rogers asked a receptionist for Pajitnov, who eventually came strolling down the stairs. Both Pajitnov and Rogers liked to take computer code apart to see how it worked and how it could be improved upon. On this, they bonded. The two couldn’t understand each other very well. But they had dinner and then headed to Pajitnov’s home to drink the Russian game maker’s favorite, cognac. The Russian also showed Rogers other games on which he was working. But none of them intrigued Rogers as much as Tetris. As the evening turned past midnight, the two grew closer because Rogers didn’t push too hard. He didn’t promise anything to Pajitnov. All he said was that he liked the game and really wanted it for the Game Boy. He also said he wanted to help Pajitnov out with his other game ideas—eventually.

  A number of frantic meetings with the Russians ensued in the days following. Rogers revealed that Nintendo had already made a version of Tetris for the NES in Japan, a version whose licensing rights he felt he had come by honestly. When the assembled powers at the Computing Centre saw the game cartridge, they nearly hit the snow-laden roof. They said that they had never authorized a deal for Tetris. There was yelling, even screaming. But Rogers calmed them down, saying he would find the perfect partner for the videogame console rights. A check was written by Rogers for the equivalent of nearly $41,000, a partial royalty payment for the 130,000 cartridges that Nintendo had sold in Japan.

  “I want to do right by you,” said Rogers to a group of still suspicious and confused Russians. He was doing everything he could to melt the ice that had threatened to freeze negotiations.

  “You have three weeks. No more,” to buy all the videogame console rights, said Nikolai Belikov, one of the Russian negotiators.

  By the end of February, Rogers had negotiated the best Tetris deal of anyone: worldwide handheld rights not just for the Game Boy, but for any other handheld device. And there was a better than even chance that Nintendo would get the rights for Tetris on all home systems. If all went well, Rogers might make more than $10 million from Tetris.

  Glowing, Rogers called Arakawa at Nintendo headquarters in the United States. Breathlessly, he said, “You’d better get over here to Moscow. You need to meet Alexey and the Russians in power need to meet you, too.”

  Arakawa brought Howard Lincoln, a strapping Seattle attorney who had become Nintendo’s general counsel after helping to win the King Kong lawsuit against Universal Pictures. (Lincoln was, incidentally, the inspiration for one of two kids sleeping in pup tents under the stars in a Norman Rockwell painting called The Scoutmaster, crafted when Lincoln was a twelve-year-old Boy Scout.) After a sleepless journey to Moscow, Arakawa decided to get some money. But he was ripped off royally at the airport by an unscrupulous money seller. “Welcome to Russia,” he thought to himself. After finding lodging, Arakawa and Lincoln walked the frozen streets to stock up on booze. They drank until they could drink no more, then went to bed to sleep the hard sleep of drunkenness.

  On the next morning, the two met Rogers and Pajitnov at Elorg, along with the passel of Russians. They knew of Nintendo and of Mario and of the company’s major successes. And they had outrageous demands before they signed off on Tetris. They hoped to manufacture all Nintendo cartridges, not just Tetris, in Moscow, and even to make Nintendo Entertainment Systems in Russia. Lincoln firmly said no to all these requests.

  Pajitnov was ever the nice guy, trying to warm up to the Nintendo businessmen with small talk, moving to appease his bosses and lighten the atmosphere with a joke or two. It wasn’t working. Pajitnov was discouraged. While he knew the Soviet Union owned the game, it was still his creation, his invention, his little baby. More, he was perplexed at the way the foreigners acted. They weren’t as affable as Rogers; that was certain. He didn’t realize that the mystified silence from Arakawa and the brusque commands from the bulldog Lincoln were simply their preferred business stances. It wasn’t good cop, bad cop exactly. It was more talkative cop, quiet cop.

  Pajitnov warmed up to Lincoln and Arakawa later that night at dinner. By the time they were at Pajitnov’s apartment on Gersten Street, Arakawa was drinking cognac and opening up. Everyone was drinking, except for Pajitnov’s young son, who was happily mind-melding with Tetris on the Game Boy prototype. It was an effervescent night full of laughter. These expensive-suited guys were A-OK with Pajitnov. He could even be friends with them someday, he hoped. It was like a scene out of The Waltons, Russian-style. That night, everyone was like family.

  In the days and months that followed, all the bullshit drama and posturing was over and the contracts were signed. Tetris became the game to play for the Game Boy; it sold 33 million copies, and the game-playing device eventually sold nearly 120 million, and much of that had to do with Tetris. Both game heads and the mildly curious became aficionados. Even creaky President George Bush, diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat, played Tetris in his hospital room in early May 1991. A friendship between Pajitnov and Rogers remained vibrant throughout the years because they believed in Tetris with all their souls. After Rogers became richer than he had ever been, through licensing the game of falling blocks, he set Pajitnov up with money to develop more games in Russia. As Pajitnov headed to work each day via the cavernous Moscow subway, he seemed to stand taller than his sizable frame. He hired some of his friends and created an aquarium simulation that mimicked real-life DNA and made gods of those who clicked and tapped on their PC keyboards. Pajitnov wasn’t rolling in dough, but he was well off. Occasionally, he would pinch himself, happy doing what he wanted
to do. Forget the money. Pajitnov was simply satisfied that the game had affected so many millions of people in a positive way.

  For the first time since Pong and Pac-Man, just as many women played the game as did men, perhaps because the game was more about organization than destruction. You’d see Tetris on TV, too, on everything from Muppet Babies to The Simpsons. There was even a Monty Python version called Drop Dead in which bodies blackened by the plague were substituted for the falling blocks. Later, Pajitnov himself was probably the inspiration for a character in Thomas Pynchon’s 2006 novel, Against the Day. In that fiction, Captain Igor Padzhitnoff arranges bricks in a certain pattern before dropping them on his targets.

  Pajitnov watched with fascination as scientists tested people who played Tetris. Research showed that it changed the brain for the better, that play made your real life choices quicker and more efficient. All along, Pajitnov believed that playing Tetris was like singing a song inside, kind of a visual earworm. Yet the finding that Tetris helped the brain was proof to Pajitnov that it was more than just a game. It didn’t hype you up with adrenaline and make your heart beat hard. It didn’t require you to hold your breath, grit your teeth, and aim and shoot like a marksman just to win. It calmed you, just as it stimulated your brain cells to match the shapes and clear the rows. Tetris proved that nonviolent games could sell as well as the early shooters, like Space Invaders. Playing Tetris was the most peaceful experience of the bestselling games, even more so than Pac-Man. Tetris presaged the casual game revolution by almost two decades. But back then, it demonstrated early in the industry’s evolution that women would flock to gaming, stay with a game for long periods of time, and even get the same frozen fingers and knackered knuckles from indulging for far too long.

  Even more than Miyamoto needed Yamauchi, Pajitnov needed Rogers. Because of Nintendo’s stringent privacy policies, no one could hornswaggle the company for long. But Pajitnov was ensconced in a Soviet Union where everyone outside of the country seemed like an angry wolf trying to rip him off—except for Rogers. As a close pal who was both a calculating businessman and a fellow game designer, Rogers empathized with Pajitnov’s situation and stopped the stealing completely. Later, when the time was right, Rogers sold his cell phone game business for tens of millions and used that money as a partial payment to purchase all the rights from the Russians, partly in an effort to bring Tetris online for multiplayer contests. Pajitnov, who by then had emigrated to the United States, was brought on as a partner. He had finally become rich from Tetris.