Game Designer Pivoted From Tetris to Space, Climate After Heart Attack

• Henk Rogers is a video game designer who helped make Tetris a global gaming phenomenon.
• After experiencing a near-fatal heart attack, he stopped “chasing the almighty dollar.”
• Now, Rogers’ big concerns are the climate crisis and building human settlements on the moon.

Henk Rogers may be the man behind Tetris, but gaming is no longer top of his agenda.

Along with the Tetris creator, Alexey Pajitnov, Rogers is best known for bringing the best-selling video game out of the Soviet Union to the masses in the 1980s.

The Tetris origin story is one filled with twists and turns, enough to inspire a 2023 Apple TV thriller starring Taron Egerton.

But reality is a different story, and the game of sliding colorful blocks into place is just one chapter in the life of the Dutch-born game designer.

Speaking to Business Insider at Outernet, an installation in central London hosting a huge multiplayer game of Tetris to mark its 40th anniversary, Rogers said his own story took a left turn after a near-fatal heart attack in 2005.

“In that ambulance on the way to the hospital, I said, ‘No, I’m not going,'” Rogers said. “‘I still have stuff to do.'”

New mission: Solve the climate crisis

After his brush with death, Rogers stopped “chasing the almighty dollar” and refocused his attention on several new missions.

One of the most pressing agenda items is the climate crisis, which Rogers wants to help tackle through initiatives like the Blue Planet Alliance and Blue Planet Energy, organizations he founded to help governments and communities achieve a fossil fuel-free future.

“We are all living in what I would consider a lifeboat, and the lifeboat has holes in it,” he said. “There are people who have the jobs to make to drill more holes in the lifeboat. That’s insane. That is not a job. That’s a crime. A crime against humanity, a crime against nature, and we have to recognize it as such.”

That might sound gloomy, but Rogers is optimistic: “I don’t have hope — I have determination.”

Still, the climate crisis is just one item on Rogers’ to-do list. Others include discovering “how the universe ends,” finding a means to end wars — a goal Rogers admits he hasn’t “gotten anywhere” with yet — and last, but not least, bringing people to space.

Carving a niche in the new space race

It’s no secret that there’s a “billionaire space race” going on — there’s Elon Musk with Space X, Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, and Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic, to name a few heavyweights.

The field may be crowded, but Rogers isn’t focused on competing.

“Everybody else is thinking about how to get there,” he said. “I’m thinking about what do we do when we arrive.”

The answer to that, Rogers said, is building settlements suitable to sustaining human life on the moon, Mars, and beyond. The goal is lofty, but he’s actively working toward it through the International Moonbase Alliance, an organization he started in 2017 in Hawaii, where he spends a lot of time whenever he’s not at home in New York.

“As far as we can tell, there’s no other place in the universe that has our life as we know it,” Rogers said. Therefore, it’s “an unacceptable risk” not to have a “backup of life,” he added.

Working with NASA, the alliance has completed five missions, during which people spend months at a time in a facility simulating environments on other planets.

Although Rogers is not particularly a fan of President Donald Trump, who has indicated that space exploration is a priority of his second term, he is open to funding from the current administration.

“A lot of the business leaders have said, ‘You know what, we got to put up with this for four years. So let’s figure out how we can move the ball forward instead of fighting,'” Rogers said.

Once a gamer, always a gamer

Rogers may be busy with other projects, but hasn’t totally abandoned the gaming world.

He remains the president of The Tetris Company, which he founded with Pajitnov, and keeps an eye on the changing video game industry.

Esports, for example, have become “a little too violent” for Rogers’ taste. “I made a vow early in my career as a computer game designer that I would never work on a game that I didn’t want my children to play.”

While he no longer considers himself a gamer, he still scratches the gaming itch from time to time. His go-to is racket sports — table tennis when he’s in New York and pickleball whenever he’s in Hawaii.

Roger said racket sports are how he gets in his “cardio.” He doesn’t enjoy exercise without an element of competition and there’s little chance you’ll catch him at the gym: “If I had a trainer that was gamifying it, then I might.”