I got schooled in Tetris by co-founder Henk Rogers in a 2027 VW, and it was amazing

On the show floor at New York Comic Con 2026, I found myself having a bit of an out-of-body experience.

Sitting in the passenger seat of a 2027 Volkswagen Atlas opposite none other than Henk Rogers, the co-founder of The Tetris Company. Of course, I knew why I was there: the North American debut of Tetris in AirConsole, the in-car entertainment system from developer N-Dream.

But I’ll confess to geeking out just a tad, knowing that I was with the man who helped bring Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris, arguably the single greatest game ever made, to the world. (You may also recall that Rogers was the subject of Apple’s 2023 film Tetris in which he was played by Welsh actor Taron Egerton.)

Thankfully, I relaxed quickly, in no small part because the 72-year-old Rogers, clad in a snazzy, multi-patterned blazer, is so down-to-earth. “I still prefer buttons over touchscreen, and that’s something that bothers me,” he admits before we boot up the game. “So I’m working to try to fix that.”

With AirConsole, all we have to do is scan a QR code on the infotainment system. After a quick connection, we’re able to use our phones as controllers in modes like Sprint, Marathon, Battle and Online Battle. And from there, we’re playing Tetris as you would on any other platform, swiping our fingers on the touchscreen to move the blocks on the infotainment system. It’s as responsive as you’d hope, and as a nice touch for supported car models, N-Dream added special ambient lighting features that illuminate the cabin with the appropriate colours as you clear lines.

As we sat in the car, I remarked that there have been over 200 official versions of Tetris, a testament to the timelessness of the experience. I have to ask, then: what are the important staples to maintain when bringing the classic game to new platforms like cars?

“If somebody plays the game, they have to say, ‘This is Tetris.’ That’s basically the rule. ‘Does it feel, does it smell like Tetris? Does it play like Tetris?’ If so, yeah, this is Tetris! If the answer is, ‘This is a shitty version of Tetris, we’ll tell them to go back and fix it,'” Rogers said with a laugh.

“But developers today are so much more experienced than the ones a long time ago, so it’s easier to get it right and harder to get it wrong.”

It helps, in this case, that N-Dream is a prolific developer, having brought experiences to over five million vehicles through AirConsole. As CEO Anthony Cliquot explains, the studio has cut its teeth on casual games based on recognizable IP, including Uno and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? But for him, Tetris on AirConsole has been a particularly special project.

“If I go back to the first time I played a game in a car, I was about four years old, and I was playing on a Game Boy, and the game I played was Tetris. So today, for me, sitting in a car playing Tetris with Henk was a full-circle moment of my life,” he says.

After reaching out to The Tetris Company, N-Dream says the teams “worked really closely to achieve a control scheme that makes sense” on mobile. “When you play on a Game Boy, you get the button as a feedback. When you play on a Nintendo Switch, you got buttons as a feedback. When you use a smartphone as a controller, you do not have the button as a feedback. So we had to work together to bring some vibration to give you some feedback.”

Meanwhile, he says the ambient lighting was a way to take advantage of the uniquely premium experience of a modern car.

“It’s a nice wink to the fact that the car is not a smartphone and it’s also not an iPad. You have here the most expensive gaming device ever built. It’s a $50,000 or $70,000 gaming device, in a way now, and of course, utilizing that hardware to make an experience that’s bespoke and cannot be matched on a smartphone was our goal,” he says. “So when we look at those, we’re always keen to work very closely with the car manufacturer to see what hardware could we utilize next to surprise the user to make them feel like this is an immersive place.”

Certainly, we’ve come a long way from the Game Boy era. To this day, that remains the best-selling version of Tetris thanks to Rogers’ savvy deal with Nintendo to package Tetris with the handheld, making it the killer app in the process.

For Rogers, the advancement of technology in the past four decades since has been truly something to behold. While he acknowledges that he’s not actively working in gaming anymore (his daughter Maya leads The Tetris Company while he pursues environmental causes), he’s impressed from afar with how hardware continues to evolve.

“I see machines still getting more powerful — more powerful graphics, more immersive 3D situations, and more power in the portable devices,” he says. “This device [phone] that I carry around, by any standard a few years ago, was a supercomputer, and now everybody has a supercomputer that they walk around with, and they have AI on top of it. The world is changing very quickly, and it’s going to become even more interesting.”

Indeed, he points out that phones mark a sort of natural evolution of the classic version of Tetris on the Game Boy.

“People who are far away from it, they remember ‘Tetris and Game Boy.’ And if you go back in time, people say — and I agree with them — that Tetris made Game Boy, and Game Boy made Tetris. It was such an instrumental game at that time. But if you look throughout the history of Tetris, we sold about 80 million copies of Tetris as boxed product [with] Game Boy,” he says. “And when we went onto mobile phones, we sold half a billion copies of Tetris as a paid download […] People don’t realize how big Tetris was on mobile phones. Now, today, it’s still big, but the business model has changed, where people play for free and we torture them with advertising.”

The ever-expanding portability of Tetris also has Rogers thinking about other ways for people to engage with the game, especially those with health benefits.

“Tetris has a therapeutic effect; it can actually mitigate the effects of PTSD. There’s even some evidence that it can actually cure old traumas. So, I want a handheld device that the Red Cross gives out to displaced kids or victims of whatever trauma,” he says. “That’s something I’m seriously thinking about, because right now they make you just suffer through your pain, whatever it is, and Tetris is the perfect thing to keep your mind off the pain.”

In the meantime, though, he’s been keeping his game developer mind going in a decidedly different way.

“I do play Wordle! I’ve created a metagame with a bunch of friends. I’m just an insatiable game designer. So the idea is rather than just play one day or not, we all agree to play every day, and we add up our scores for the week, and whoever gets the low score for the week gets to make a rule for the next week that everybody else has to follow,” he says.

“It gives people ideas about how to play Wordle differently by forcing them out of their comfort zone, so to speak. The idea of a metagame is valid — you should get together with a bunch of friends and compete!”

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Tetris is available through AirConsole on select automotive brands, including the 2027 VW Atlas and various BMW, Porsche and Audio models. AirConsole is included in Volkswagen’s In-Vehicle Premium plan, and three months are included with the purchase of select 2027 models.

The Perfect Game Tetris: From Russia With Love, Rogers’ autobiography about his journey to bring Tetris from a Soviet puzzle game to a global sensation, is now available in bookstores.