The Trip to Moscow That Decided the Handheld Market

Henk Rogers arrived at ELORG without an appointment, and left with the rights that made the Game Boy.

In 1989 Henk Rogers, a game publisher based in Japan, went to Moscow to sort out what he had actually licensed. He had been selling a version in Japan and had come to suspect the chain of rights behind it did not hold.

By most accounts he arrived at ELORG without an appointment — an approach that would fail almost anywhere and very nearly failed there.

What he found

He found that ELORG had never granted the rights he thought he held, and, more importantly, that the rights which mattered most had not been granted to anyone at all. Handheld rights were unencumbered. Nobody had asked for them, because in 1989 the handheld market barely existed.

Rogers had seen what Nintendo was about to release. He asked for them.

Why it mattered

Nintendo's Game Boy launched in 1989. In North America and Europe it was bundled with this game — every unit, in the box.

The reasoning was sharper than it looks. A handheld with a monochrome screen could not compete on spectacle. What it needed was something people would play in five-minute fragments, on a bus, repeatedly, for years. A puzzle whose appeal survives the removal of colour, sound and animation is close to the ideal case, and this one had already proved that on a Soviet text terminal.

The bundle did not just sell copies of the game. It defined what a handheld was for, and the Game Boy went on to sell in numbers that made the argument permanently.

The friendship afterwards

Rogers and Pajitnov became close and later founded a company together to hold and license the rights — the arrangement through which the game's author finally began earning from his own work, more than a decade after writing it.

That is the part of the story worth remembering. The commercial fight was enormous and expensive, but the outcome that mattered most came from one publisher deciding the person who made the thing ought to be paid for it.

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