OT Using High Tech for Fun and Games
by Bruce Benson
Think of the new Beetle, or PT Cruiser, or Thunderbird, and you get the idea of what Henk Rogers' Blue Planet Software is doing for computer games at Hawaii's Manoa Innovation Center.
"We take an intellectual property, mostly games, and we take the interesting parts and bring them up to date with a new look and feel, then we license people who take them to cell phones, or on-line, or other ways," he said.
The company's business plan is akin to picking up the rights to do a reprise of a famous marquee like the Thunderbird, but bring it out as a modern, sophisticated machine, with licensees doing the sales and marketing.
Several designers strip games down to their basic elements, brainstorming how to put them back together with a look and feel that appeals to contemporary players. "Then we bring in students to take them out for test drives, so to speak. We pay them $10 an hour. In the course of a year we will use dozens of kids, lots of testers," Rogers said.
Who makes a good tester? "Basically we look for someone who is observant and who has an opinion. We like someone who will say, 'This game stinks and this is whats wrong with it.' The target audience for games today is much broader than it used to be. So we need lots of opinions from our testers."
At the moment, Rogers turns to friends of his sons, ages 20 and 16, for recruitment, as well as word of mouth. Occasionally, if a situation demands a super tester, the company will fly someone to Hawaii.
Besides programming yesterday's games for today's market, Blue Planet also manages their quality control. "We manage a brand the way Disney would manage its licensees for Mickey Mouse," Rogers said. "We do the equivalent of checking the quality of the shirts, making sure they represent Mickey Mouse the way we want. We approve the product before its release, and then do sample checks afterwards."
Rogers' most famous game is Tetris, which is to computer games what Monopoly is to board games. Sales of Tetris have run well into the tens of millions of copies for what some gamers believe to be the better part of a billion dollars.
Blue Planet Software is a 50% owner in The Tetris Company, managing the Tetris brand and licensing Tetris to companies worldwide. "It's now being licensed into a number of new areas," Rogers said. "One is set top boxes that you find on top of the TV set. They are becoming more powerful, and are starting to be able to play games as well."
The biggest market, however, is online games, and nowhere is Tetris played more energetically than in Korea, where one Tetris Company licensee has a stunning 12.6 million registered members out of a population of 40 million. Rogers said membership is free, with users paying for premium services, such as an avatar. Avatars can be described as the screen manifestation of a person, who in turn can imbue his or her avatar with unique characteristics.
"For example, your membership comes with one avatar, but it is dressed only in jeans and a t-shirt. If you want him or her to wear anything else, you have to buy it, and that's where we get our royalties. These purchases for your avatar can include other clothes, hairdos, pets, even cyberspace plastic surgery."
Rogers said the licensee sells $200,000 worth of avatar clothing and accessories every month in the Korea market.
Another important market for Blue Planet and The Tetris Company is wireless, which includes granting licenses to play Tetris on the telephone. The company has divided the world up into four territories Europe, the U.S. and Canada, Japan, China and some of the other dragons except Korea, and of course Korea.
In addition to downloading ring tones or screen savers, the newest phones, sometimes called 3G for third generation or 2 1/2G, can now download graphics for games.
Rogers' newest venture, Blue Lava Wireless, is a group of local game designers and developers bent on putting Hawaii on the worldwide mobile game map. Blue Lava's first product was, of course, Tetris. Since then the company has been turning out "casual gamer" games at the rate of one per month.
"Blue Lava has proved its ability to make great games on quality and on schedule, and is now entering its second phase," Rogers said. "Our designers and developers will bring their deep roots in Role Playing Games, or RPG, to the next set of games. Who knows, maybe they will come up with the next Magic the Gathering, or Pokemon."
Rogers said Blue Lava is also entering into a reciprocal publishing arrangement with G-Mode in Japan and Come2Us in Korea, giving Blue Lava more than 100 game titles to sell in the US market as well as the ability to sell its products in the Japan and Korean markets.
Playing hardball with Tetris
In computational complexity theory, there are types of problems known as NP-Hard, meaning they are especially difficult because you cannot devise a shortcut or smart algorithm to solve them quickly. As a set, these tough puzzles are sometimes called the Traveling Salesman Problem, where the challenge is to find the most efficient route for a salesman who has to visit a lot of different locations.
A trio of scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently analyzed the game of Tetris to determine its computational complexity. They found the 17-year-old game to be NP-Hard, meaning you cannot efficiently calculate the moves needed to win, even if you knew the complete order of pieces and could take all the time you needed.
For Henk B. Rogers, learning that Tetris is NP-Hard must seem like a perfect allegorical analysis to describe the twists and turns of a significant part of his career. He is the traveling salesman who befriended Alexey Pajitnov, the Soviet computer scientist who invented the game, and Rogers today runs a Honolulu firm that is 50% owner of the Tetris Company.
Originally from Holland, Rogers lived with his family in New York City during his teen years. When his father, an international businessman, moved to Japan, Rogers enrolled at the University of Hawaii. "I was a computer science/dungeons-and-dragons major, and drove a taxi at night to take day classes," he recalls.
Rogers later lived in Japan, where he programmed a role-playing game called "Black Onyx." He formed Bullet-Proof Software and the game sold more than 100,000 copies in the Japanese market. BPS became a Nintendo Japan licensee with close connections to Nintendo chairman Hiroshi Yamauchi. Those connections helped Nintendo gain Western console rights to Tetris at a time when several other companies were involved in the same quest.
Rogers flew behind the Iron Curtain in 1989 and made a deal with the Soviet government for Tetris on hand-held game machines, and then licensed the Gameboy rights to Nintendo. This would be the first of a string of Tetris deals he was involved in.
Rogers befriended the author of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov, during his Moscow negotiations. So when the rights to Tetris were set to revert to Alexey in 1995, he asked Henk for help. "Alexey basically made me an offer I could not refuse," Rogers said for this interview. So in 1996 Rogers company, Blue Planet Software, and the U.S. branch of the former Soviet ministry of software export Electronorgtechnika (Elorg), formed "The Tetris Company".
Like lighting an endless chain of rockets, Rogers' coup set off struggles of epic proportions that took him to corporate boardrooms and courtrooms around the world for years. Sparks of interest, as well as enmity, still fly. His role as the traveling salesman in helping bring Tetris to the world was reported at length in David Sheff's 1999 book, "Game Over, How Nintendo Conquered The World." Rogers will also be seen in an upcoming Discovery Channel-TTC-TV series on the history of the computer. And he is preparing for a BBC one-hour special on the history of Tetris. He might begin by telling them, "Well, this wasn't easy..."
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