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Era 2 · After the crash: new consoles and home computers

1983–2001closed in 2001 (exact date [unverified]: February 22 or March 31),…

Bullet-Proof Software

A tiny Japanese studio run by one Dutchman that in 1989 beat the Maxwell media empire and a London middleman in the race for the rights to Tetris, and won not with money but with a personal friendship with the game's author and a $40,000 check written on the spot.

Founders Henk Rogers
Domains —
gameslicensingrights-dealsolo-founder

In brief

Bullet-Proof Software was a tiny Japanese studio run by one Dutchman, Henk Rogers, which first made one of the first Japanese role-playing games itself (Rogers himself calls The Black Onyx the first) and five years later beat a London dealer and the Maxwell media empire in the race for the worldwide rights to Tetris. The winner was not a corporation with lawyers but a man who flew to Moscow in person without an invitation, made friends with the game's author, and wrote a check for $40,000 out of his own pocket on the spot. A decade later the same studio disappeared, but the right it had won outlived the studio itself and turned into The Tetris Company.

How it started (the founders)

Henk Rogers was born in 1953 in Amsterdam, studied in New York, and then studied computer science at the University of Hawaii, where he met his future wife, Akemi. After moving to Japan by way of Hawaii in the late 1970s, he saw that American role-playing games like Ultima and Wizardry were thriving while Japan had nothing of the kind, and he decided to recreate the experience himself, even though his only programming experience was student assignments.

There was no money for a business, and here begins a rarely retold part of the story: after showing a prototype at a computer store in Akihabara, where kids crowded around it, Rogers met Halpin Ho, the son of the largest gem dealer in Bangkok. In the café of the Pacific Hotel, Rogers admitted frankly that he thought he knew how to make games but had no idea how to run a business, and he offered Ho half the company for $50,000. Ho agreed to handle the business side but in reality never once showed up at the office; all the operations (registration, accounting, rent) were handled by Rogers's wife, Akemi. The company was officially registered in 1983 in Yokohama under the name Bullet-Proof Software.

Rogers wrote the game alone on an NEC PC-8801 with 64 kilobytes of memory over about nine months. The memory limits shaped the design: he cut the number of character classes down to one, the warrior, deciding that the Japanese would relate best to that kind of hero, and he removed the inventory, placing the equipment directly on the character model. The game, named The Black Onyx after the gemstone (a subtle nod to the jeweler investor), came out at the turn of 1983 and 1984.

Year-by-year timeline

Lesser-known but significant facts

  1. The formal co-owner of 50% of the company never once showed up at the office. Halpin Ho put in $50,000 and was supposed to run the business, but the actual operations were handled by Rogers's wife, Akemi; years later Rogers bought out Ho's stake for $200,000.
  2. The name The Black Onyx is a signature under the deal with the investor. The game was named after the gemstone at the very moment the company was financed by the son of the largest gem dealer in Bangkok.
  3. The prize for a perfect playthrough was not a one-off 1984 promotion but a rule for every version of the game. The first 100 players who finished The Black Onyx with perfect karma on any of the platforms sent Rogers the password "Iggdrasil" and received by mail a real onyx stone with a certificate: not an in-game bonus but a physical gem.
  4. Shigeru Miyamoto named The Black Onyx as an influence on The Legend of Zelda. Stories about Rogers usually give all their attention to the Soviet Tetris deal, while his first game was meanwhile shaping the design of one of Nintendo's main franchises.
  5. Kevin Maxwell, who lost the rights to Tetris, did not come away empty-handed but with a consolation contract: a right of first refusal on new Tetris rights in exchange for a contract to publish Maxwell's encyclopedias in the USSR. He was satisfied with it, not realizing that Mirrorsoft had never held the rights he thought he was protecting.

Legend vs. the record

The first growth lever

The lever was not an advertising budget but a targeted round of visits to magazine editorial offices. After the sluggish start of The Black Onyx (one call in the first month), Rogers personally showed the game to the editors of computer publications: he did not send out press releases but demonstrated the gameplay live. After reviews were published in April 1984, sales rose to 10,000 copies a month through June, and by the end of the year the game had become the best-selling Japanese computer game, with 150,000 copies sold in total. Two calculated and not entirely obvious decisions were added to this: a price ¥1,000 above the market (¥7,800 against the standard ¥6,800) with a clear emphasis on 40 hours of gameplay, and a material prize, real onyx stones for the first 100 players who finished the game perfectly on any of its platforms. None of these decisions cost much money; they cost personal time and a precise bet that editors and hardcore players would become free amplifiers.

The paired story

Tetris (Elorg) and Bullet-Proof Software are the same 1989 story told from the two ends of the line. The Tetris (Elorg) dossier shows the Soviet side: a game with no legal owner was pulled toward the West for five years by three competing intermediaries who knew nothing of one another. The Bullet-Proof Software dossier shows why the smallest of the three was the one who won: Rogers already had experience of winning without money and without a name. He had once gotten half a business for $50,000 from a jeweler he met by chance and had promoted his first game through personal visits to editorial offices rather than advertising. In Moscow in 1989 he repeated the same pattern on a different scale: not Nintendo's corporate might and not Mirrorsoft's capital, but a personal friendship with Pajitnov and a $40,000 check out of his own pocket. This dossier does not redefine the years or the structure of the deal; they are taken as recorded in the paired Tetris (Elorg) dossier.

Parallels today (projects from the catalog)

What a builder can take from this in 2026

  1. If your business rests on a right that someone else grants, personal trust with the specific person making the decision weighs more than the size of your company. Rogers won not because Nintendo stood behind him but because he flew in himself and made friends with Pajitnov and Belikov.
  2. A goodwill gesture paid out of your own pocket on the spot is more convincing than any future guarantees from a large parent company. The $40,000 check written right at the negotiating table carried more weight than the status of the Maxwells' corporation.
  3. Vague wording in someone else's contract is an opportunity, not only a risk. It was precisely the fuzziness of Stein's rights that opened the window Rogers stepped through, offering Elorg real money instead of assurances.
  4. A product released without the rights holder's permission is a bet that sooner or later has to be settled with money and a personal visit, not ignored. The 130,000 copies of Famicom Tetris sold without Elorg's knowledge became not a problem but a trump card in the negotiations, though only because Rogers came in person to answer for it.
  5. A first win without money teaches a pattern that later scales. The way Rogers promoted The Black Onyx (personal visits instead of advertising, a precise bet on amplifiers) is the same pattern of personal rather than corporate pressure that worked in Moscow five years later.

Discrepancies and what we could not verify

Sources (primary first)

Secondary (context, cross-checking):

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