Henk Rogers is an entrepreneur who knows how to hustle. You can thank him as the man who introduced Tetris to the Western hemisphere.
The son of a traveling jewelry executive, he was born in Amsterdam, moved to New York, and learned computer science at the University of Hawaii. In 1988, he saw a video game called “Tetris” at a Las Vegas trade show. He discovered it was being distributed under a master license which wasn’t being honored. Convinced it was a hit, he made an uninvited trip to Moscow to obtain a license for the game from the Soviet Union government organization ELORG. He convinced Nintendo’s CEO, Hiroshi Yamauchi, to license the game for its console. His success in securing the rights to Tetris helped Nintendo beat Atari in the console wars. At the same time, Rogers helped the game’s Russian inventor, Alexey Pajitnov, move to the United States. 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 for Tetris. He also founded Blue Lava Wireless in 2002 to develop mobile gaming software. In 2005, he scored big as he sold Blue Lava and the Tetris rights to Jamdat for $137 million. (Jamdat has since been acquired by Electronic Arts.)
He used that money to help set up some new startups, such as Avatar Reality, which is making an online game called “Blue Mars.” But Rogers isn’t all about business. In 2007, he set up the Honolulu-based Blue Planet Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at addressing global warming. In April, the foundation hosted the Blue Planet Summit with high-level energy experts to brainstorm ideas on changing energy consumption. I caught up with him in a Honolulu high-rise office with a view of the ocean and a mini-museum of Tetris in the foyer. Here is an edited transcript of our talk.
VB: Tell me about the foundation.
Rogers: Our mission is to get the planet off carbon-based fuel. Nothing less than that. We’re going to start with fossil fuel. That’s the obvious one that is killing us now anyway. We start with Hawaii because we are in Hawaii.
The first thing we had to do was get people who know about it. That was what we did at the summit. We had scientists, engineers, politicians, business people, and this category of wise men, people from indigenous cultures who wind up being the victims of what we do. They also have lessons that we have forgotten. We lost the connection to our elders who said, ‘You shouldn’t do this or you will destroy the earth.’ The sustainability lessons are what we left behind in deference to shareholder value.
If you’re destroying the environment, you’re paying for it. Your children are paying for it. In Hawaiian culture, you have to be responsible for seven generations down the line. You’re living in the benefits of what seven generations back did for you. A hundred years from now, are they going to say we were idiots because our fossil fuels raised the sea level by 40 feet. It caused us to move two billion people by 100 miles. It cost untold money and untold wars. What happens when we have to move all the people in Bangladesh? Read the rest of this entry »
