'The original Tetris was a survival game': The man who prised Tetris out of the Soviet system recalls how different it once was

Today sees the publication of Henk Rogers' memoir, The Perfect Game—Tetris: From Russia With Love. Rogers has had a long and storied career in the games industry, but he will undoubtedly always be best-known for his association with Tetris, and in particular his leading role in extricating it from the Soviet bureaucracy and getting the game's creator, Alexey Pajitnov, the credit and money he deserved.

The book is a rollicking read, with the Soviet sections in the 1980s almost veering into John Le Carre territory at points, and I'll be writing up some thoughts on it soon. But the publication also gave PCG the chance to sit down with Rogers and discuss his career, the many gaming luminaries he's known and, of course, Tetris.

A surprising aspect of the book is that the game we know as Tetris was originally quite different. Almost all of the elements that define it are there, but a combination of Rogers and Nintendo made additions and changes that are pretty fundamental to the game we all know and love now. I told Rogers that Tetris for me will always be the Game Boy version, and asked him to speak a little to the differences between what we know as Tetris now versus what it was.

"So the original Tetris was a survival game," says Rogers. "It's like, how long can you survive? And so in the very first Elektronica 60 [version] it wasn't really about scoring points. It's like how long can you last before you top out? And you got bonus points for hard-dropping. You push a button and the piece falls down to the bottom. The higher you hard-drop, the more points you get. You have one point for each line that it drops."

The Elektronica 60 was a Soviet computer and kind of a bootleg PDP-11 that was widely used from the late 1970s into the '90s and even beyond. It's the hardware that Pajitnov originally programmed Tetris for but, because the machine couldn't do raster graphics, the blocks were formed out of letters.

"That was the original game," continues Rogers. "There was no scoring for line clear: that came later. I had the experience in Japan of arcade games like Pac-Man or Space Invaders, you play the game for a while and then there's a moment where they just tally the score. And what that does is it has everybody understand how the points are scored.

"The original versions of Tetris, again, when you're playing, you can't play and watch the score at the same time. You're playing. So people didn't have any idea how they were scoring points. So I wanted to make it clear."

So Rogers' first major contribution to Tetris was a scoring system, but he would get even more granular about how this should work in-sync with the nature of the game.

"Then I invented single [line clear], double, triple, and Tetris as a way to make more points, especially at the lower levels, at the slower levels I should say. Because people who got adept at it, they had to suffer through the slow levels to get a high score. And so I give them something to do, which is clear more than one line at a time.

"Players would then be able to understand where the score came from. So I did break it up in that way. And that's the way the Game Boy worked and that's the way the NES version worked. And that's different from the originals, which are basically endless, you know, and there's no break."

Obviously the concept of a survival game is its own genre these days, and Rogers certainly isn't comparing Tetris to Valheim. But it does feel like an accurate description of how the game originally worked and one that, were you to ignore the scoring system and other subsequent additions, still holds true: Tetris is at some level about seeing how long you can last before failing.

Alexey Pajitnov will always be the creator of Tetris. But Henk Rogers was much more important to the game as we now know it than a mere licensor.