One of my favorite written interviews I've published in a long time is The Man Who Won Tetris, a conversation with Henk Rogers, the man who successfully licensed Tetris to Nintendo in the late 80s and still manages the franchise along with creator Alexey Pajitnov.

If you haven't read about the fascinating events involved in that original licensing operation, I suggest you do so. There's a timeline here, but I would recommend securing Game Over by David Sheff. It seems to be out of print now, but I imagine the internet could fairly easily facilitate the purchase of a new or used copy.

Since those days, Rogers has apparently become quite wealthy, which comes as little surprise given the enduring popularity and marketability of Tetris. Aside from games, he is an active entrepreneur, philanthropist, and spokesperson in areas such as conservation, energy, and space colonization.

He ends up looking forward to such a degree, however, that discussions about these topics can end up being somewhat amusingly jarring. So, while I do hope you'll read the full interview, I wanted to isolate a few passages that kind of blew my mind as I was reviewing the transcript for publication:

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HR: The second [major goal in my life] is ending war. I think if the first one gets solved, the second one is a lot easier. There are a lot of places in the world that have already sort of worked out their [differences]. I would say it's a hormone imbalance of society.

CR: Do you mean organizations like the European Union?

HR: Yeah. They sort of got together. And look at Japan. It used to be a little country that used to fight each other, until they said, "Wait a minute. We're actually one people." Someday, all people the world are going to wake up and say, "Hey, we're all one people." We're doing something with Tetris that hopefully helps us move in that direction.

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HR: Then we'll have the world cup, and then we're going to work [Tetris] into the Olympics someday, hopefully.

CR: Okay, so that's two of your four goals down.

HR: Three is to make a backup of life on Earth.

CR: Okay.

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CR: Do you have difficulties keeping perspective? When you're managing numerous companies on a day-to-day, or month-to-month, or year-to-year basis, and in another part of your brain you're thinking about things that could be happening years or even millennia from now, how do you keep those things in order?

HR: I actively divide my time. I only go to the office three days a week: Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Saturday, I play golf, mostly for political reasons.

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I think my favorite line in any interview I've ever done might be "Saturday, I play golf, mostly for political reasons."

And despite the fact that I do find these passages pretty funny in terms of how they constantly confounded my expectations of what would be said (of course, in some cases that is enhanced by being out of context), I do find Henk Rogers to be an interesting person, in part because so few people I speak to in the game industry have goals that so completely transcend the game medium or artistry or the games industry or personal wealth.

I don't personally have much confidence that we'll eradicate war or stop using fossil fuels or terraform and colonize Mars -- at least not within a timeframe I can visualize -- but it's nice to know there are people out there who are more optimistic than I am, and who have more means than I do, who are giving it a shot anyway.