Henk Rogers on how the Tetris film dramatizes his meeting with Nintendo

The Tetris movie is streaming on Apple TV+ right now, and as you most likely know, it’s a mixture of real-life events, dramatized situations, and completely made-up interactions. You can find these differences between real-life and the film all throughout the movie, and that includes when Henk Rogers meets up with Nintendo’s former president.

Henk Rogers was the man responsible for securing a partnership with Nintendo, which brought Tetris to the NES and the Game Boy. In the movie, we see Rogers sneaking into Nintendo’s headquarters to have a chat with former Nintendo president, Hiroshi Yamauchi. According to an interview with Polygon, Rogers say what happened in reality is quite different.

Rogers says that he and Yamauchi actually struck a friendship over their shared love of the Japanese board game, Go. This connection through the board game fostered the duo’s relationship, and the discussion of Tetris came later. That history between the two facilitated a rather speedy discussion about future plans for Tetris on Nintendo’s hardware.

“Yamauchi says to me, ‘I can’t give you any programmers.’ I said, ‘I don’t need programmers.’ I need’ — this meeting went so fast, I couldn’t believe it — ‘I need money.’ And he said, ‘How much?’ And I thought of the biggest number I could think of: $300,000. I just pulled a number out of the hat. And he reached across the table and shook my hand and said, ‘Deal.’”

[Henk Rogers]