By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
There are a lot of action thrillers licensed in our industry … but not many action thrillers about licensing.
That’s about to change, as Apple Original Film will debut the film Tetris on March 31, telling the story how a US entrepreneur won the rights from the Soviet Union.
Tagged by the film’s publicists as “The game you couldn’t put down, the story you couldn’t make up,” Tetris tells the story of entrepreneur Henk Rogers and programmer Alexey Pajitnov.
The bizarre story of cross-cultural licensing intrigue involves secret negotiations, Russian spies and a mysterious KGB agent, with Rogers being portrayed by Hollywood A-lister and Golden Globe winner Taron Egerton.
The problem for Rogers, a visionary entrepreneur who is now (believe it or not) working on building a base on the moon, was that the rights to Tetris were in a tangled mess. The game was developed by the Russian programmer Pajitnov, but as it was developed in Cold War Russia, the rights had never been properly established in the West.
A PC version of the game had been smuggled to Hungary and various Western companies began producing unauthorized versions. Fortunately, this all occurred just as the Perestroika movement in the Soviet Union began, so Pajitnov was able to create a licensing deal with the Soviet government.
“Perestroika had started, so I granted my rights to the government for 10 years,” Pajitnov told The Guardian newspaper years later. “It was among the first pieces of software exported by the Soviet Union.
“I didn’t make much money at first, but I was happy, because my main priority was to see people enjoying my game,” Pajitnov adds. Tetris came along early and had a very important role in breaking down ordinary people’s inhibitions in front of computers, which were scary objects to non-professionals used to pen and paper. But the fact that something so simple and beautiful could appear on screen destroyed that barrier.”
But the licensing rights in the West remained a tangled mess until Rogers stepped in.
“My job in the 80s was acquiring games for the Japanese market,” Rogers said. “When I first came across Tetris in January 1988, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I was hooked instantly, which was unusual. I licensed every version on every system I could through Spectrum HoloByte. But it turned out their parent company, Mirrorsoft [owned by Robert Maxwell], had already given some of the Japanese rights I thought I owned to Atari.
“It was a total mess, so when it came to securing the Game Boy rights, I went straight to Moscow to speak to Elorg, the bureau handling the export of software. I didn’t know anyone in the capital, or where the ministry was. The Muscovites were completely unfriendly: nobody spoke English, and they weren’t allowed to talk to me anyway.”
Rogers’ trip was so rapidly planned that he hadn’t even brought any winter clothing, and didn’t have anyone to help interpret from English to Russian.
“I’d planned to get a fur coat when I arrived, but I found it impossible to buy anything, so I was freezing my ass off,” Rogers recalled. “Finally, I hired an interpreter from a booth in the lobby of my hotel. They were all KGB, but she was beautiful and very perky, when everybody else was doom and gloom.”
Rogers convinced the agent-slash-translator to bring him to Elorg, but then hit another roadblock, as he’d arrived without a business visa.
“She took me to Elorg, but she wouldn’t take me in because I hadn’t been officially invited,” he explained. “I was breaking a cardinal rule – trying to do business on a tourist visa – but I told her I hadn’t come all this way for nothing. It was like standing on a rock 50ft above water. You just have to jump and trust it’s not going to be as bad as you think.”
But, it was pretty bad. “The director of Elorg, a Mr Belikov, told me they had never given rights to anybody,” Rogers said. “I was in deep kimchi, because I had 200,000 game cartridges at $10 apiece being manufactured in Japan, and I’d put up all of my in-laws’ property up as collateral!”
And the Russians weren’t making life easy for the desperate entrepreneur.
The group met the next day, but this time Rogers encountered a group of 10 people, which included not only business people and lawyers, but also KGB agents who grilled him for two hours straight. Rogers also discovered the group was negotiating with another Kevin Maxwell, son of the powerful publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, which could have ruined him and cost his investors everything. Shockingly, the KGB also sent agents to his office in Tokyo, completely freaking out the staff.
“Because I’d had no contact with my staff, they thought: “Oh my God, what’s happened to Henk?,” he said.
But Rogers persevered, and eventually he was able to cobble together a very handsome licensing contract for the Soviets, which Elorg later used as a template for all their other licensing deals.
“I gave them the best contract I’ve ever seen in the industry – clear, concise, no bullshit – partly because there wasn’t time for any renegotiations,” Rogers would later tell The Guardian. “Elorg used it as the template for all their other deals. The Maxwells were furious, and tried to lobby (Soviet leader Mikhail) Gorbachev, whose autobiography they’d published.”
But the deal was done. Rogers now owned the sole rights to Tetris, and was later able to license directly to Nintendo for its explosively popular Game Boy platform. Within months of its issue, Tetris was arguably the most popular mobile game in the world, and more than three decades later it remains a powerhouse both in the video game industry and in licensing.
The full story will premiere worldwide at the SXSW event in March and will air on Apple TV+ on March 31.