- 14 hours ago
If you're a 90s kid like Jason, you probably grew up with Tetris. But not like Maya Rogers grew up with Tetris. Her dad brought the game from the Soviet Union to the rest of the world. Now Maya runs the brand herself, and the job is trickier than it sounds. How do you honor something people feel deeply nostalgic about while also making sure a seven-year-old in 2026 cares about it too? Maya joins Jason to break down the strategy, including one surprisingly powerful legal move that keeps anyone from just copying the game and calling it something else.
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00:00What is it that you can take with your product brand IP at the core of it? What makes that
00:06special? And I think if you can refine it and really define that part of it, then you can start
00:11expanding it. Running a business means solving problems. I tell you how the smartest entrepreneurs
00:19do it. Hi, I'm Jason Pfeiffer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and this is Problem Solvers.
00:27You could make the argument, I'm going to make the argument, that Tetris is the most popular,
00:35well-known, best video game in the world. And I'm not saying that just because today I'm talking to
00:39the president and CEO of Tetris. I'm saying that because is there truly a simpler game, a just more
00:47intuitively connective game. Tetris came out in 1984. I was born in 1980. I wasn't playing Tetris
00:55when it came out, but I was playing Tetris pretty shortly after. And I can remember standing on a
01:01stage at Nintendo World Championships, or at least the local version of it that I went to,
01:07and playing Tetris and then winning a Game Boy where I just played more Tetris.
01:11And now as an adult, I look back extremely fondly upon Tetris. And I thought, I will be honest,
01:19that is a moment in time. That is a video game that changed video games. And then I learned
01:27that there is a person whose name is Maya Rogers, who is the president and CEO of Tetris,
01:32who is thinking bigger about what this brand could be. And I had to know, how do you
01:40think about something that is this classic, but that is also anchored to a very specific thing?
01:46When I think of Tetris, I think of playing a video game in the eighties and nineties and rethink it
01:51for
01:51a modern audience in a modern ecosystem. That is what we're talking about today on Problem Solvers.
01:58I have Maya Rogers with me. Maya Rogers, thank you so much for joining me and answering these very
02:03pressing Tetris questions. Thank you for having me, Jason.
02:07Okay. Maya, you are the CEO and president of Tetris. What does that mean?
02:14You know, for me, it's not just about the video game, but it's about the experience
02:18that people have endured around the video game. And really my charge is to take the brand beyond,
02:26right? So you kind of mentioned, you know, the game came, the game was created in 1984
02:32by a guy named Alexey Pajitnov, who was a programmer out of Russia. And he's still involved
02:39with the business today, but it's about how do we make sure that this experience that really changed
02:45the video game world, how do we make sure that that is a protected and, and sort of spread around
02:52the world because Alexey created the perfect game. And this is why the game is so relevant today.
02:59And we've done so many variations of it, but as CEO of Tetris, I feel that, you know, it's something
03:05that I grew up with also, and it brings me joy. And how can I spread that to the rest
03:09of the world?
03:10And that's what I do. That's what I get to do every day.
03:13Okay. I want to know your answers to these questions of how to spread this brand and this joy,
03:19but first we should know where you're coming from and what experience and expertise you're
03:24bringing to this. So tell me a little bit about you and how you became CEO of Tetris.
03:30Many of you may have watched the Tetris movie on Apple TV plus that came out three years ago. Now,
03:36it is a story about a guy named Hank Rogers, a Dutch American entrepreneur who goes to the Soviet
03:41union in the 1980s to try to get the handheld rights for Tetris. And Hank Rogers happens to be
03:49be my father. So for me, same last name. So for me, I was, when you say like, I grew
03:57up with,
03:57you grew up with Tetris. I literally grew up with Tetris. I remember when my father had brought it back
04:02home for the first time and we were playing it, you know? So my experience really is, yeah, I've,
04:09I've lived and breathed the world of Tetris through a childhood. But now I've been running the company
04:16for the last 12 years. And yeah, my career started with Sony PlayStation. You know, I worked on Gran
04:24Turismo and Hot Shots Golf and I did, I was in charge of localization. So games that came out of
04:30Japan. And so I should also mention that I also grew up in Japan during this time. So really I
04:38grew
04:38up in the era when Nintendo came out, Famicom came out and it wasn't just that our family was playing
04:44it.
04:44It was everybody in my school, all my friends, you know? So I really grew up in the video, the,
04:49the renaissance of the video game era through the Famicom and Nintendo days.
04:54Right. And for those who don't know, certainly in the eighties and nineties, Japan was the origin
05:00point for video game culture. The most classic games were coming out of that country, that region,
05:05right? Although Tetris, interestingly, was a anomaly to that because Tetris came out of Russia.
05:10Yeah. So, you know, it was, so the history of it is Alexei created it in a lab and once
05:18he did,
05:18right, everybody in the lab started playing it and really spread like wildfire throughout
05:22Russia and Eastern Europe and eventually made its way to the UK. And from there, it was showcased at
05:31CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. And that's where my father discovered it. He knew there was
05:37something special about the game. He kept coming back to it over and over. And he basically got a
05:44tourist visa and flew to the Soviet Union and tried to find a ministry of games. And this is how
05:49he got
05:49the rights to Tetris and brought it to Nintendo. And so, you know, Nintendo didn't create Tetris, but,
05:57you know, Hank was sort of the person that convinced, you know, Mr. Arakawa and to bring Tetris to the
06:04Game Boy and it was the perfect match. And that really, I think, changed the trajectory of the
06:09Nintendo business and the Game Boy business and, you know, what video games are today.
06:13Totally. And it certainly changed the trajectory of my childhood because I spent a lot of time playing
06:17Tetris on the Game Boy. So, okay, Maya, I'd love to hear you unpack how you see a brand like
06:25Tetris now.
06:26Where are the opportunities? And as I ask that question, I just want to layer on top of it things
06:31that I'm
06:32observing, which is, okay, number one, Tetris doesn't have a character. There's no Mario to
06:38anchor it around. So there's no narrative necessarily to even anchor it around. And I
06:44suppose that creates some challenges, but also maybe a lot of freedom because Tetris can be so
06:49many things in so many different ways. So maybe start from the beginning as you just look at this
06:56brand and think, what can this be now? Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. You know,
07:01there's pros and cons of not having characters and we've toyed with the idea many, many times.
07:06But the beauty of it is that Tetris is geometric and it is sort of a universal thing that people
07:11can relate to. So we can collaborate with different companies and different brands.
07:16Like last year, we did a collaboration with Minecraft. We did a collaboration with StumbleGuys.
07:21Right now we have a collab with Space Invaders on the mobile game, for example. But I think it's
07:27really the universal play and there's something about the human want or need to want to create
07:35order out of chaos. And that mechanism, however it's played and however it's displayed, Tetris kind
07:41of gives it to you in the perfect way. And so I think for us, it's just making sure that
07:46that is
07:46sort of wherever games are played, we try to create some kind of variation of Tetris.
07:52Yeah. This makes me wonder if you have a specific North Star for what you ultimately want consumers
07:58to do. And here, I'm just going to guess, I haven't talked to the CEO of Lego about this,
08:04but as I think about the great job that Lego has done with their movies and their push into pop
08:11culture, it all funnels back to purchase Legos. As a father of a 10-year-old and a 7-year
08:19-old boy,
08:20I can see it working. Those kids love, love putting together Lego sets. And those are really
08:26expensive Lego sets that we got to spend a lot of money on. So I can see how this works.
08:30You watch
08:31the Lego movie, you feel engaged in Lego. And they did an interesting thing where they did create
08:35characters inside of that world in a way that kind of didn't really exist before in Lego.
08:39And the ultimate point of it is to drive people towards the hero product.
08:44Do you think similarly, do you ultimately want people to be playing Tetris the game? Or do you
08:51want to think of Tetris as more of a, I don't even know, a multi-level experience, brand, lifestyle,
09:02whatever?
09:02Well, it's really both. But if you look at the Lego business, what made them sort of the global,
09:09you know, industry leader today is that they went back to the basics. They went back to the
09:14factory lines of how do you modify and make sure that that's the original game or the Tetris,
09:24not Tetris, sorry. The original Lego set is, you know, easy to purchase and all of that. They
09:29streamlined all of that first before they were really able to expand it into characters and movies
09:33and what it is today. And I think similarly with Tetris is it all comes back to the game.
09:39The core game has to have that, that thing that's going to make you come back. And so
09:45always game is number one. And so wherever games are played, you know, video games are going to be
09:51played for the rest of time. But it's just going to different, it's going to be in different
09:55platforms and different ways to play. So making sure that the same, what do you call it? The
10:03creating order out of chaos kind of mechanism, like that is what makes Tetris. And also what makes
10:07Tetris unique is that we were the first game to say that we were able to protect the gameplay.
10:13There was a lawsuit back many years ago that kind of proved that you can protect the brand
10:21with gameplay. And so it's always going to be the game, but now we've expanded it beyond video games.
10:28So today, if you ask my kids who are five and almost seven, you know, their play with Tetris is
10:35through the board game or through a Tetris tumble. It's through toys. It's, you know,
10:39they're almost too young to play video games, although they're starting to now. But we've
10:44expanded it to the point where you can play something that is not the original video game
10:50form factor. And people still relate it to, oh, this is Tetris.
10:55I wasn't aware of the legal stuff, but just unpack that for a second, because that sounds really
11:00interesting. In other words, because Tetris is geometric figures, it is not, you know, a square
11:08or a line of squares is not protectable the way that the Super Mario character is. And so that in
11:19a way
11:19could make Tetris seem to be easily knocked off. But what you have managed to do was secure
11:26intellectual property protection for the gameplay structure so that even though you can't protect
11:32the individual pieces, you can protect the way in which they interact. Is that right?
11:37Absolutely. So nobody else can make a Tetris game. People think that it's, you know, so we do a lot
11:43in
11:43the sort of the IP enforcement side. But what you think of when you play Tetris, you know, without
11:49going into the details, if it plays like Tetris, if it feels like Tetris, then that is protected.
11:55Got it. That's so interesting. Okay, so how do you think, or rather, Maya, as I'm thinking about this,
12:03I'm realizing that there was a trap that you could have fallen into. And that trap was purely
12:12playing off of people's nostalgic relationship to Tetris and just trying to get it into the places
12:19where people my age and their 40s are hanging out in pop culture and just kind of ride that for
12:26a
12:26while. People are nostalgic. They might engage with Tetris. Maybe they want to buy a Tetris shirt.
12:32And you could have done that. But what you would have done is you would have essentially anchored the
12:36brand to the aging of the population. And then at some point, it wouldn't have gotten past
12:40down or wouldn't have gotten picked up. So how do you think about playing Tetris to these different
12:46audiences? Sounds like you are thinking about how do you get it in front of and engage with an
12:51audience like me who thinks about it from their childhood. But then also, how do you introduce it
12:57totally fresh and anew to my kids? How are you thinking about those two different approaches?
13:03So we became a licensing business some time ago. So this is what we do now. We, you know, basically
13:11work with, you know, what I call subject matter experts, right? They know their audience in that
13:16field. So they're coming up with ideas. Obviously, we are also involved in that process. But for example,
13:22in the video game side, right now, there's a game called Tetris 99, which is a battle royale style that
13:30exists on a Nintendo Switch world. And that was a new iteration that brought Tetris into a whole new
13:37set of players, right? Younger generation that is playing Nintendo Switch. We have a game called
13:42Tetris Effect or Tetris Effect Connected. And that was a game that initially launched on the PSVR.
13:48And it really brought Tetris into a whole new generation. And I mean, when I say whole new
13:53generation, like they made, you know, with our partners in hands, they made this game into a surreal,
13:59like amazing music and visuals kind of experience that you had never seen with a Tetris game before.
14:08And that is another perfect example of how we evolved the original Tetris game into something
14:15super modern, so out of the box that I think the audience wasn't expecting it. But it's been such an
14:22amazing game for us. And so it's really like if you look at the movie business, right, initial movies,
14:28black and white, no sound, and look at the movies today. Like this is how the movies have evolved,
14:34like we've evolved Tetris. So if you compared the original Tetris game, maybe on the Electronica
14:3960 that Alexei had created to even the Game Boy Tetris into all the different variations, their core,
14:46the core is the same, you're getting the same entertainment value, but the expression of it is
14:51so different and people are playing differently. So we've evolved the game in that way through the
14:56years. I remember talking to Richard Dixon, who at the time was, I think, president, sorry,
15:04Richard, if I got that wrong, of Mattel. He then said that the way in which he thought about
15:10revitalizing that brand was to always make sure that the thing that made the product special in the
15:18beginning remained at the core of that brand. So it was about possibilities. It was about growth
15:25for girls. And he did quite well, and now he's running Gap. And I tell you that story because I'm
15:32curious, as you think about Tetris, and you've just listed off all of these reinventions in a way of
15:39the game and the gameplay, what do you see as the core? What is the fundamental thing that can't be
15:46changed about Tetris? And then maybe tell me how that manifests in some of the new different
15:52varieties that you're creating. Yeah. So I think what we've kept pure is that there's a mode called
15:58the marathon mode, which is what you remember as like going from levels, you know, zero to 15,
16:05and you can kind of finish the game that way. And different versions of the game have different
16:11sort of mechanisms. But we've adopted this marathon mode, which is available on every single
16:18platform. So you might be playing a battle royale style, but you can always find a marathon version
16:24of the game everywhere you go. So that's one way we've sort of made sure that that experience of the
16:31simple Tetris game that you remember is protected and preserved. Well, that's interesting. I'll be honest,
16:38I thought you were going to say something that you had said earlier in our conversation,
16:42which was that Tetris was a game of bringing order to chaos. And I thought maybe that is an
16:48interesting, satisfying experience that you would want to embed in every Tetris thing. But that's,
16:56that's, that's not where you're anchoring it. I'm curious if you feel like that's in some way
17:00restrictive. But I think that is part of that, that is Tetris, right? So that's already like
17:06embedded within every version of Tetris is you're, you're getting that satisfactory feeling of,
17:12you know, putting pieces together and clearing lines. So in the video game world, without saying
17:18that is absolutely the experience. But if you look at what we've done with toys, it's, you know,
17:24like we have a game called Tetris Tumble, which is this giant balancing thing, balancing game that's
17:31available at Costco. And, and it's sort of like a Jenga meets Tetris. And we've also done a Jenga
17:37Tetris way, way back when, but it's taking that Tetris experience of, you know, pieces, blocks coming
17:44together or pulling pieces together. So it's not technically creating order out of chaos, but I think
17:51it's an extension of the Tetris brand. So we were doing a lot of things in the toy world that
17:56is a
17:57little bit different, right? Than clearing lines that we've done in the video games. Have you done
18:02something that you felt didn't really work? And I'm curious what lesson you drew from it?
18:09Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's always a gamble, right? And I think the lesson that I've learned
18:17is always when you look at a product, I guess more in the merchandising toy world, right? If you look
18:25at a
18:25product, does it evoke that same feeling that you did that, that it did when you played the video
18:30game version of it? And if, if there's no sort of direct correlation to that, then often the product
18:36doesn't do, do so well. I think, I think in the video game world, I mean, it's really also depending
18:43on the publisher, the licensee, the distribution, you know, and all of those things that are sometimes
18:51external things that come in the way. But the core of the game has always been good. It's just
18:57always been sometimes the execution and the distribution hasn't been the right form factor
19:02for games. But there's been things that I thought, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is going to be, you
19:09know,
19:09we, we do a lot of like collabs and campaigns. I'm like, this is never going to work. And then
19:13becomes
19:14like some, you know, that we did a McDonald's collaboration in China and it was a chicken
19:19McNugget shaped Tetris game that you could buy at a McDonald's. And it, you know, it, it's a funky
19:26looking thing, right? It's like a giant chicken nugget that you can play Tetris on. The kid, the thing
19:30launched, it sold out in like a day or two. And now it's like one of those cult items that
19:36people
19:36like buy on eBay, you know? And so you just never know, like how the audience is going to take
19:42the execution. I bet that there's just infinite, infinite ideas and opportunities for collabs with
19:52something like Tetris. And I wonder how you start to filter those or how you generate them and what
19:57the North Star is for what makes a good collab. It has to make sense. Like it can't just be
20:03like,
20:03oh, let's make something like completely, I don't want to say anything because we've done things in
20:07the past that didn't get green lighted or green lit. But it just wasn't like, we shouldn't be in
20:15the, you know, the frozen food aisle for, I'm not going to say what, but you know, there's certain
20:21things that just didn't make sense that we're like, it has to make sense. It has to be like
20:25some kind of pop culture. It has to be a global brand, you know, whatever it is. It has to
20:32feel
20:32right for our brand and the other brand. And so I think our problem is that there's so many
20:38opportunities. And so filtering the right ones, you know, is really a full-time job. You know,
20:44we have agents that, sub-agents that cover us throughout the globe and they're always bringing
20:50in opportunities. And so for that kind of stuff, it's more of a volume business. And it's just making
20:56sure that, okay, does it fit like our core kind of principles? And if it doesn't, then, you know,
21:01we're not going to be interested in doing something like that.
21:03In our last few minutes, I'd love for you to zoom out and take what you've learned and maybe turn
21:09it into some guidance or advice for anyone who's thinking about how to expand upon something
21:16beloved or that has worked in one arena and they're trying to figure out how to move it into another.
21:21Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, you don't have to overcomplicate things, right? Tetris was a simple
21:25game. It's difficult, if not impossible to master, but that simplicity is what worked. And so, you know,
21:34similar with Legos, they went back to the factory lines and sort of streamlined that process. What
21:40is it that you can take with your product brand IP and, you know, at the core of it, what
21:47makes that
21:48special? And I think if you can refine it and really define that part of it, then you can start
21:54expanding it. But don't try to do too many things at once. You know, like our merchandising program,
22:00we started maybe 15 years ago and it was a slow process. And now, you know, like we're very strong
22:07in the toy category, for example, but it wasn't right away a home run. And so I say, you know,
22:15simple doesn't mean that it's bad. I think, you know, it's got to be something that people can relate
22:21to. So yeah, keep it simple, stupid. Um, my, uh, final, final question, which is of all the things
22:30that you have talked about, or maybe something you haven't talked about yet. If I modern consumer,
22:35I'm going to check out one Tetris thing right now to rekindle my love of Tetris, what should that
22:41thing be? Oh my gosh. Well, obviously I would say, check out our mobile games. Um, Tetris, uh,
22:49block party is one game that is, that just came out in December. Uh, we're very excited about. Um,
22:55the other, I would say would be, we just launched a partnership with spin master. There's a Tetris board
23:02game that you can purchase, which is a really fun way to really re-engage with Tetris in a new
23:07way.
23:08We also did a collab with spin master on a Tetris, Tetris Rubik's cube. So again,
23:15kind of taking like two classic puzzle games, mashing them together in a new way. If you're a
23:20video game player, definitely check out Tetris, Tetris effect and Tetris 99. Um, those are,
23:27are games that have been around for quite a few years now, but you'll see how Tetris has evolved
23:34over the years into this modern world. And, um, you'll get a very exciting and different experience
23:41from Tetris that was very different from what you remember in the Game Boy days. Well, Maya Rogers,
23:46president and CEO of Tetris, you have the coolest job in the world. Thank you so much for your time.
23:50Thank you so much, Jason.
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