GamesBeat: True. What have you been up to lately? Do you have any updates on Tetris and the kind of reach it’s found over the years?
Rogers: We have 425 million total paid mobile downloads. That’s all just on mobile. We had 35 million on the original Game Boy. Boxed products, I think altogether we sold something like 70 million.
GamesBeat: How much of that is really recent? It sounds like a lot of it would be on smartphones?
Rogers: It’s really spread over the whole period where phones have become able to play games. That first happened in Japan. Then it sprang up in the U.S. and Korea and other places. That’s a total number over the last 14 years or so.
GamesBeat: I’d imagine that’s accelerated, though. Do people still want to play it on smartphones and tablets?
Above: “Mr. Tetris” Henk Rogers.
Rogers: Yeah. We’ve had to change the game. The original game was controlled with a keyboard, and now it’s a touchscreen game. That fundamentally changes some things. But it’s still doing fine.
GamesBeat: Do you still only sell it as a premium download, or have you made the leap to free-to-play in any way?
Rogers: Yeah, we have made that jump. That 425 million number doesn’t count free-to-play. We have Tetris Blitz now. Electronic Arts secured the mobile rights and decided to do a product that’s similar to their Bejeweled Blitz, a free, item-based game. That’s another level on top of the 425 million paid downloads.
GamesBeat: So Tetris is still holding its own, basically. Why do you think that is?
Rogers: Tetris reaches a basic pleasure center that people have, I think. It lets you create order out of chaos. The game is very random. The same thing never quite happens twice, so your brain has to be making decisions all the time. People like being able to make decisions instead of just doing things according to rote memory.
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All hail the king that is Tetris!
Face the future.. Gamecenter ID: nikkom_nl (oh no he didn't!!)
