Henk Rogers has made an entire career out of Tetris clones. Seriously. Every Tetris game from the Tetris DS, the one with Mickey Mouse or that Japanese one where the falling blocks are naked prepubescent schoolgirls is licensed out by Henk and The Teris Company.

You wouldn't think that it would be a hell of a lot of work, or that Tetris clones would have to conform to a specific set of rules or philosophies, but as this interview with Henk over at Planet Gamecube shows, there's actually a hell of a lot of thought that goes into every Tetris iteration.

HR: We choose partners that we think can move the IP forward, in other words make Tetris a better game. So we have two kinds of licenses: ones that makes us money, and one that helps move Tetris forward, and Nintendo is one that actually does both. On the ones where the licensee is just in it for the money, we tell them what to do. We have a minimum bar that we create every year, called the Tetris Guideline, and that guideline is the minimum spec for which someone has to create Tetris. And we raise that bar every year. Part of what we do in the guideline, for example, is dictate which buttons do what. And that's so we don't have a situation where some licensee decides to make rotate and hard drop backwards. Because that's a killer thing; we want to make sure that the gas pedal is always on the right and the brake is always on the left so that players can move from platform to platform without having that kind of disaster. And it used to be that way, by the way. If you go back in time, the Sega version and the Nintendo version were completely different.

Of course, if you forget which pedal is the gas and which is the brake in your automobile, you go crashing at high velocity into your house's front porch, as I discovered in my sixteenth year. In Tetris, the consequences tend to be a bit less dire.

INTERVIEWS: Tetris from the Top: An Interview with Henk Rogers [Planet Gamecube]

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