Defining the Japanese videogame market was no easy task for the man who introduced the country to the RPG.

Henk Rogers arrived in Japan in 1976, young, jobless and hot on the tail of a girl. Within eight years he’d have written, designed and coded his first videogame, sold Japan a genre that would go on to dominate its videogame industry creating billions of dollars of worldwide revenue, and, naturally, made the girl his wife. In 12 years, he would discover a game called Tetris at a Las Vegas game show, and would travel to Russia with Nintendo to secure the exclusive rights to market it on consoles. For a man whose only experience of coding was working on mainframe computers as a student and whose only brush with gaming was in pencil-and-paper roleplaying, starting out was no mean feat.

“I was an avid gamer as a student at the University of Hawaii in the 1970s,” he explains. “I’d joke that my minor was in Dungeons & Dragons. We had a gamer’s club called ARRGH (Alternative Recreational Realities Group of Hawaii) where we’d play with our own unique rule-set, and I think it was here that I caught the game design bug. Personal computer software publishing became a viable business in Japan in 1982. I noticed shops selling computer games on cassette tape popping up here and there, so I decided I wanted to make a game, went down to Akihabara and scoured the shops to try to work out what might be involved.”

Full story: next-gen.biz