Henk Rogers, one of the grandfathers of gaming, has a new book out, The Perfect Game, and we talked about it in an interview and again in a keynote talk at the Gamescom Latam expo in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

More than 131,800 people attended Gamescom Latam, with many of the fans dressed in cosplay. The dashing Rogers was dressed up in his best Tetris outfit, and in Brazil he could still find fans and admirers for a game that was more than 40 years old.

Rogers noted that he worked on the script with Tetris cofounder Alexy Pajitnov, and the Hollywood scriptwriters had taken so many liberties with the story behind the Tetris movie that Rogers decided to write his own autobiography. It includes the time of Rogers life before Tetris, during Tetris, and after Tetris. And it has a lot of life lessons for people like game developers to learn from. [Rogers will speak at our upcoming Xsolla Connect/GamesBeat Engage event on June 5 in Los Angeles].

Henk’s daughter Maya Rogers, who took over the Tetris company years ago as CEO, mentioned to me it was the “greatest business development story of all time.” But on stage, I told Henk that I thought the story of Tetris coming to the West was more like the greatest friendship story of all time.

Rogers discovered the game at a CES show, then hunted down its creator behind the Iron Curtain of the 1980s, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were still in a Cold War. Rogers went to the Soviet Union on a tourist visa and tried to cut a business deal with the bosses of Alexy Pajitnov, who created the original.

During the negotiations, Rogers and creator Alexy Pajitnov got along because they w...