"Tetris"... From a Simple Device to the Most Successful Video Game in History
- A man mortgaged his assets to his wife’s family to secure the key to the success of the Game Boy
- Tetris was not just an add-on game, but the deal that built an empire
- From a Soviet computer project to a global phenomenon, selling over 35 million copies
Some “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunities do not begin inside a major corporation, but with a single man standing before a small device at a trade show, deciding to risk everything he owns for a deal he feels will change the course of his life.
This is exactly what happened with Hideo Rogers, Nintendo, and the game Tetris, in one of the most famous deals in gaming history.
According to the official biography published on the Tetris website, Hideo Rogers, president of the Japanese company Bullet-Proof Software, had already published dozens of computer games from around the world in the Japanese market, until he discovered Tetris at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in 1988.
In an interview with GameSutra, Rogers stated that he had already licensed the game for home computers and the Nintendo platform in Japan that same year, before realizing it was the perfect game for a new handheld device Nintendo was preparing: the Game Boy. However, securing the rights for the handheld was not easy.
According to a report by Time Extension, Rogers had indeed reached a preliminary agreement with officials at Nintendo of America, only to discover that the complexities of the licensing chain required him to obtain direct approval from the Soviet entity that held the original rights. At that time, he had already committed to preparing $2 million worth of goods for manufacturing and had even mortgaged his assets to his wife’s family to cover his financial obligations, making backing out of the project or its failure an extremely costly option for him.
The roots of this complexity lie in the fact that Tetris was invented in 1984 by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov while he was working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
Under the Soviet system at the time, Pajitnov did not have the right to exploit the game commercially independently, as the game’s rights were held by the government agency where he worked. The state agency Elorg, specializing in foreign trade, was responsible for licensing the software outside the Soviet Union.
As Tetris entered Western markets, a series of licensing and re-licensing deals began among various companies, some of which did not hold the rights they believed they possessed, leading to widespread legal complexities regarding computer, home console, and handheld game rights.
Amidst this chaos, Hideo Rogers was forced to travel to Moscow in 1989 to negotiate directly with Elorg to obtain the rights for the handheld version, before the negotiations later expanded to include home console rights, in one of the most complex game licensing operations in industry history.
According to the Tetris Wiki, Rogers was not the only party seeking the rights; there were competitors, including Robert Stein from Andromeda and Kevin Maxwell, son of media mogul Robert Maxwell, from Mirrorsoft. Both were attempting to negotiate with the Russian rights holder, known as Elorg, at roughly the same time. According to the same source, Rogers arrived in Moscow without an official appointment and faced difficulty even locating the relevant office, until he succeeded, with the help of a translator, in arranging an informal meeting on February 21, 1989, with Elorg official Nikolai Belikov, who informed him that handheld game rights had not yet been granted to any party, except for personal computer rights only.
Here, Rogers, according to the same encyclopedia, leveraged his relationship with Nintendo, which then controlled approximately 70% of the global game console market, to convince the Soviet side of the seriousness of his offer compared to his competitors.
According to the official Tetris website, Rogers succeeded in 1989 in securing the rights to the game for the Game Boy specifically, and subsequently licensed it to Nintendo in a deal later described as one of the most important in the industry’s history.
However, the legal complexities did not end there. The History vs. Hollywood website noted that Nintendo of America was later forced to send a legal cease-and-desist letter to Atari Games regarding the sale of its own version of Tetris for the NES under the Tengen brand, leading to a mutual lawsuit between the two parties over who actually owned the rights to the home version of the game.
According to Newegg, when the Game Boy was launched in Japan on April 21, 1989, at a price of 12,500 yen, the initial batch of 300,000 units sold out immediately upon release. When the device arrived in the US market on July 31 of the same year, bundled with Tetris as a free gift, it sold more than one million units within a few weeks, according to the US radio network NPR.
According to the Game Boy Museum, a site specializing in the history of the device, Tetris was not merely an additional game, but “the deal that built an empire.” It transformed the handheld from a mere children’s toy into a daily habit practiced by everyone, from bus riders to office workers, selling over 35 million copies on its own and accounting for a significant portion of the device’s overall success.
According to Today, the NBC News affiliate, Nintendo ultimately sold more than 150 million units of the Game Boy family worldwide, thereby becoming, in Nintendo’s own description, “the best-selling video game console in history.”
In this story, Nintendo was not a struggling company, but it was betting on a handheld device with modest technology compared to competitors like Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear, which offered color screens, while Nintendo settled for a gray screen with only four shades.
The real opportunity lay not in the device itself, but in a bold decision made by a single entrepreneur, who wagered his personal assets on a simple game he discovered in a corner of a trade show.
As history proves, sometimes the opportunity of a lifetime does not require a giant corporation to take off; it only requires one person who sees what others do not and is willing to take a risk for it.
