Review of The Perfect Game: Tetris: from Russia with Love by Henk B. Rogers

The Tetris movie was an unexpected delight when I had three months free of Apple TV+. I had never heard of it before, and I was so skeptical going into it—yet it was a surprisingly solid movie. Part biopic, part historical drama, it somehow managed to sensationalize and lionize the bringing of Tetris from Russia to other markets. So when I heard Henk Rogers had decided to tell the story in his own words, of course I had to check it out. Thanks to Di Angelo Publications and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for a review.

This book is very much an autobiography and memoir. Though his discovery and scuffle over Tetris is a large part of it, Rogers takes us all the way back to his parents’ childhood and follows his life all the way to the present day. If you are thinking you can get out of hearing about his time in high school or his daddy issues, you are sorely mistaken. However, when you pay that price of admission, you receive a very detailed look at Rogers’ involvement in Tetris. As he himself notes, this book is not an attempt to discredit the movie (which his daughter helped produce) but rather tell the most accurate version—according to him—of the story.

It’s very clear Rogers wrote this book himself (as opposed to hiring a ghostwriter) because the prose is short and choppy and almost impressively unappealing. I mean this unironically as a compliment: it is endearing how little rhetorical flair Rogers possesses. If you come to The Perfect Game expecting perfect prose, then you will be disappointed. Rogers provides clinical descriptions and often repeats himself or overexplains something (the book could have been better edited). Yet it … works? Like I read this book over the span of two nights. I was into it.

You should also be prepared for a background level of machismo and racism of the entrepreneurial variety. To be fair to Rogers, he seems like a good guy (more on that later). He gives his wife a lot of credit for helping him run Bullet Proof Software. But he also clearly has some fixed ideas (informed, it seems by his bio-dad’s abandonment and his relationship with his adoptive father, an incorrigible entrepreneur himself) about what it means to be a man in the world of business. Similarly, despite—or likely because of—living in Japan for decades and marrying a Japanese woman, Rogers’s description of Japanese culture and work ethic is pretty flat and stereotypical. None of it is (from my fairly limited perspective as a white woman) super problematic or a red flag but rather more of a “OK, boomer” kind of energy.

I’m willing to give Rogers a pass on the above, quite honestly, because he clearly cares about a lot more than video games. After he moves his family to Hawai‘i, he talks about setting up the Blue Planet Foundation and how deeply he cares about fighting climate change. He describes the concrete change his foundation’s activism has led to in the state. That’s pretty cool. Granted, one must always take an author’s self-aggrandizement with a grain of salt—but I looked up his Wikipedia article (because this is about the extent of serious research I care to do at the moment), and I couldn’t find much that might gainsay his claims in this book.

So in this way, Rogers truly endeared himself to me over the three-hundred-some pages of The Perfect Game. I love that he and Alexei are still friends to this day. I love how he is simultaneously modest, downplaying some of his hard work and giving a lot of credit to others, while also giving himself credit when he chooses, like the ideas he contributed that became standard in most Tetris. Rogers clearly has a well-developed philosophy of life that he is happy to share here, and once again, all I can say, with no small amount of bemusement: it works.

The Perfect Game is, as I have noted, far from a perfect book. Yet is is well worth an afternoon or two of comfort nonfiction reading. It’s a great balance of informative, reflective, and just kind of fun. I love learning about video game history, especially because I feel like I grew up in this really fascinating liminal time (the nineties) when video games were neither old nor new. Tetris is only slightly older than me, yet I never understood its significance until recently. Thanks to Henk Rogers, I understand it a lot more now!