Mr. Rogers Goes to Hollywood — Via Moscow
A new biopic of Honolulu Henk Rogers gives a Hollywood spin to the entrepreneur’s quest to popularize the game Tetris.
Before Henk Rogers became locally known for helping convince Hawaii policymakers to wean the state off fossil fuels to produce electricity by 2045, Rogers had another career as a video game designer and dealmaker who exported the game Tetris from the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
Now, Apple Original Studios has made that chapter of Rogers’ life into a Cold War thriller, complete with parades of Soviet tanks, gloomy cityscapes of Moscow and KGB agents chasing the dashing Rogers, who is played by , a British actor perhaps best known for playing Elton John in the biopic Rocketman.
It’s a fitting if unintentional connection since Rogers has also set his sights on outer space. His projects include HI-SEAS, a 1,200 square-foot Mars habitat on the Big Island where crew members live in Mars-like conditions for up to 12 months to simulate exploration of the Red Planet. His International MoonBase Alliance is working to build a space station on the moon.
The movie Tetris isn’t out yet – it’s scheduled to  on March 15 and on Apple TV+ on March 31 – and Rogers could not be reached for comment.
But some insights can be gleaned from . While some action scenes strain credulity, one scene portrays a deal pivotal to Rogers’ fortune.
In the scene, Rogers is at Nintendo’s headquarters, and an engineer in a white lab coat shows off the . Rogers convinced Nintendo to package the Game Boy with Tetris, a deal that led to him selling tens of millions of copies of Tetris. But first Rogers had to get the game out from behind the Iron Curtain, the adventure the movie appears to portray.
