Henk Rogers
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Engadget Podcast: 'Tetris' creator chats about the 'Tetris' movie
We chat with Tetris's creator, Alexey Pajitnov, and Henk Rogers, the man who helped bring it out of the Soviet Union.
Tetris Company's Rogers clears lines, the air
Henk Rogers is a rich man these days, after having secured the license for a certain Russian computer game back in the '80s. It was Rogers who licensed Tetris out to Nintendo for use in the Game Boy and NES, and it's Rogers who started The Tetris Company to manage future Tetris licensing. That money is now going into the Blue Planet Foundation, a nonprofit Rogers has set up to research global warming. The foundation hosted a summit in Rogers' hometown of Honolulu in order to gather experts, in the interest of reducing fossil fuel dependency.It's just one of Rogers' four "missions," which are about as ambitious as anything can be -- so much so that he doesn't expect them to be fulfilled within his lifetime: eliminating the need for fossil fuel, ending war, and, uh, understanding the universe. The other goal? "We need to make a back-up of life on Earth. We need to take each species on Earth and make a backup and populate other planets." Sounds vaguely crazy, but sensible at the same time!
Tetris licensee sets out to save the Earth
We're thinking it's not a coincidence that VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi chose Earth Day to publish an interview with Henk Rogers about his efforts to save the environment. You may remember Rogers as the visionary who first noticed an unassuming game called Tetris at a trade show and went on a crusade to get the game licensed outside of Russia. If you're not familiar with his story, we must insist you track down a copy of David Sheff's excellent book Game Over and read all about it. Go ahead ... we'll wait.Done reading? Well, then you might be interested to know that Rogers is now using the money he made selling the Tetris license to do nothing less than getting the world completely off of carbon-based energy. After accomplishing that modest goal, Rogers says he hopes to realize the vision of his company's upcoming Blue Mars MMO by actually terraforming part of the red planet. Say what you will, you have to admit, the guy's ambitious.
