When Henk Rogers first read the script for the Tetris movie, he was shocked. “There was so much Hollywood in the movie,” he tells The Verge. “It just drove me nuts.” The film largely follows a pivotal period in Rogers’ life, when he traveled to the Soviet Union to navigate the complex rights issues for Tetris to bring it to platforms like the Game Boy. There, he connected with game’s creator Alexey Pajitnov, with whom he eventually formed a lifelong friendship, and turned Tetris into a global phenomenon.
Technology
Henk Rogers on telling the real story of Tetris: ‘I have to set the record straight’
The movie turned this experience into something resembling a high-stakes spy thriller — and while Rogers ended up loving the final product, that initial experience inspired him to tell the story of what really happened. “While reading the script I said, ‘I have to set the record straight,’” he says.
That story now exists in the form of the book The Perfect Game. While Rogers originally sat down to write about the events that transpired in the movie, he soon realized the story was much bigger than that. “I started writing it, and somebody looked at it and said, ‘That could be a book, it’s just not big enough,’” he explains. “I didn’t want to rewrite that part and add water, so to speak, so I added the before and after. So it ended up being about my game career.”
The Perfect Game starts out by exploring Rogers’ early life, bouncing around from the Netherlands to New York City to Hawaii, before eventually landing in Japan, where he founded Bullet-Proof Software and went on to release the influential RPG The Black Onyx. Even before the book gets to the Tetris part of the tale, it’s filled with fascinating insight into the early days of game development. Rogers talks through the many complications and nuances of dealing with publishers and funding, as well as releasing and marketing a game in Japan despite not speaking Japanese.
But things really kicked into gear at CES in 1988, when he flew to Las Vegas in search of a new game to publish and stumbled on a puzzle game about falling blocks. As he tells it, he knew immediately that he found something special. “I left the Consumer Electronics Show with a sense of purpose,” Rogers writes in his book. “I was determined to publish Tetris in Japan.” That proved tricky, of course, due in large part to the web of copyright laws in the Soviet Union at the time. Rogers found himself traveling back and forth between the Soviet Union and Japan, dealing with everyone from the higher-ups at Nintendo — including legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto — to the intimidating employees at Soviet trade organizations.
“There’s times when my memory is a little shady, but it was such an exciting time that I pretty much remember.”
Rogers’ account is a detailed one, and he says that he wrote the book entirely from memory. That said, he did check with his friend Pajitnov on a few details, which resulted in one of the book’s more charming features. At various points, Pajitnov’s thoughts are inserted into the book, where he often disagrees with Rogers on small details, like how impressed he was by the Famicom version of Tetris or the quality of the elevator in his apartment building.
“Alexei read my manuscript and was writing in the margins where his memory is different, so I decided to keep those and put them in the book,” Rogers explains. “There’s times when my memory is a little shady, but it was such an exciting time that I pretty much remember.”
Even if it’s missing the Hollywood thrills of the script that inspired Rogers to write in the first place, The Perfect Game is a fascinating read, particularly if you’re interested in game development anecdotes. And because the story covers the entirety of Rogers’ career to date, which includes setting up The Tetris Company and bringing the game to just about every platform imaginable, there are a lot of stories about pivotal points in the medium, from the launch of the Game Boy to the burgeoning days of mobile gaming.
The story is especially notable as Tetris continues to thrive. In addition to the movie and book, Rogers was also featured prominently in Digital Eclipse’s playable documentary Tetris Forever, and the game still pops up frequently in places like Nintendo’s new music app. Rogers has largely stepped away from the business, which is now run by his daughter Maya. So now when he sees the game appear somewhere surprising, it elicits a different kind of feeling. “It feels like success,” he says. “Every time Tetris pops up somewhere, or a new deal comes down the pike, it’s like, ‘Wow, she’s killing it.‘”
As for that movie, Rogers changed his mind when he actually saw it, describing the film as “emotionally correct,” even if it didn’t get all of the facts right. “The first time I saw it I cried about things that never actually happened,” he says.
Technology
Amazon.com says things are fixed after some issues with logging in and checking out
If you were having issues shopping on Amazon or loading your playlists on Amazon Music on Thursday, you weren’t alone. For over three hours today, Downdetector showed a sizable spike in people reporting issues with checkout, search, and logging in. The problem seemed to be affecting both the site and the mobile apps. But an Amazon spokesperson tells The Verge that the issues are now fixed.
“We’re sorry that some customers may have temporarily experienced issues while shopping,” Amazon spokesperson Jennie Bryant says in a statement. “We have resolved the issue, which was related to a software code deployment, and website and app are now running smoothly.”
Several Verge staffers experienced issues themselves when there were problems. Clicking through to many products produced a “sorry, something went wrong” error, and even pages that did load were not showing pricing. Users reported being repeatedly logged out of their accounts when trying to check out or load their cart. Even the parts of Amazon.com that were working seem to be loading slowly.
The company has been dealing with AWS outages in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates due to drone strikes by the Iranian military, but there has not been any word of more widespread outages in the US or elsewhere.
Update March 5th: Added comment from Amazon saying that things are fixed.
Technology
$163K in fake medical bill charges; AI uncovers it for you
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Last summer, a man’s brother-in-law suffered a fatal heart attack. The hospital bill for four hours of emergency care: $195,628.
The man’s sister-in-law was ready to pay it. He asked her to wait. He requested an itemized bill with CPT codes, the universal billing codes hospitals use, and fed the whole thing into Claude, an AI chatbot.
Within minutes, Claude found duplicate charges, services billed as “inpatient” even though the patient was never admitted, supply costs inflated by 500% to 2,300% above Medicare rates and charges for procedures that never happened. He cross-checked with ChatGPT. Both AIs agreed. He wrote a six-page letter citing every violation by name.
The hospital dropped the bill to $33,000. An 83% reduction. Zero medical training. A $20 app.
A man cross-checked a hospital bill with AI and got it reduced by some 83%. (Neil Godwin/Getty Images)
Your bill is probably wrong, too
That story sounds extreme. It’s not.
The Medical Billing Advocates of America estimates 3 out of 4 medical bills contain errors. The average hospital bill over $10,000 has roughly $1,300 in mistakes. And less than 1% of denied insurance claims are ever appealed. Hospitals and insurers are banking on the fact that you won’t check.
AI flips that equation. You don’t need to understand CPT codes or have a medical billing degree. You just need to paste.
You can use AI platforms, like ChatGPT, to spot errors or suspicious charges on medical bills. (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The 5-minute audit
Step 1: Call your provider and request an itemized bill with CPT codes. Not the summary. The full line-by-line breakdown. You’re legally entitled to this.
Step 2: Open ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini (free versions work) and paste this:
“I’m pasting my itemized medical bill below. Please: (1) Explain every charge in plain English, (2) Flag any duplicate or suspicious charges, (3) Compare each charge to average costs, (4) Identify billing code errors or bundling violations, and (5) Draft a dispute letter I can send to the billing department. Here’s my bill:”
Step 3: Paste your bill. The AI will translate every line and tell you what looks wrong.
WOMAN SAYS CHATGPT SAVED HER LIFE BY HELPING DETECT CANCER, WHICH DOCTORS MISSED
If the AI finds errors, call the billing department and ask for a supervisor. (iStock)
Step 4: If the AI finds errors (it probably will), call the billing department and ask for a supervisor. Reference the specific codes. Hospitals resolve disputes all the time when patients show up prepared.
Pro tip: Counterforce Health (counterforcehealth.org) is a free AI tool built specifically for insurance denial appeals. Worth bookmarking.
It’s time to give your medical bills a thorough examination. The AI will see you now.
Real talk. Everybody’s talking about AI. Nobody’s showing you what to actually DO with it. My new free newsletter, Splash of AI (SplashofAI.com), gives you one trick, one tool and one “wait, I can do THAT?” moment every single week. Five minutes. Plain English. The kind of stuff that saves you time, money or both. You’ll wonder how you got by without it.
Send this to someone who is staring at a medical bill they can’t make sense of. Forward this right now. Seriously. This could save them hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and it takes less time than making coffee.
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Technology
Meta’s AI glasses reportedly send sensitive footage to human reviewers in Kenya
Meta’s AI-powered smart glasses could be sending sensitive footage to human reviewers in Nairobi, Kenya, according to an investigation by the Swedish outlets Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten. The report, which was published last week, claims Meta contractors in Kenya have seen videos captured with the smart glasses that show “bathroom visits, sex and other intimate moments.”
So far, at least one proposed class action lawsuit accusing Meta of violating false advertising and privacy laws has emerged in response to Svenska Dagbladet’s reporting, citing the company’s claim that its smart glasses are designed for privacy:
By affirmatively claiming that the Glasses were designed to protect privacy, Meta assumed a duty to disclose material facts that would inform a reasonable consumer’s decision to purchase the product. Instead, Meta hid the alarming reality: that use of the AI features results in a stranger halfway around the world watching the most private moments of a person’s life.
The Nairobi-based contractors interviewed by Svenska Dagbladet are AI annotators, meaning they label images, text, or audio, with the goal of helping AI systems make sense of the data they’re training on. “We see everything — from living rooms to naked bodies,” one worker says, according to Svenska Dagbladet. “Meta has that type of content in its databases.”
A former Meta employee reportedly tells Svenska Dagbladet that faces in annotation data are blurred automatically, though workers in Kenya say this “does not always work as intended,” and some faces are still visible. Another person reportedly tells the outlet that a wearer’s bank cards are sometimes seen in the footage they review as well.
Meta’s Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses come with a built-in AI assistant capable of answering questions about what a user can see. The glasses have soared in popularity in recent years, despite growing concerns over privacy and surveillance.
EssilorLuxottica, the eyewear giant that Meta works with to develop the camera-equipped glasses, sold over 7 million of the AI-powered glasses in 2025 — more than tripling its sales in 2023 and 2024 combined. Last year, Meta made some changes to its privacy policy that keep Meta AI with camera use enabled on your glasses “unless you turn off ‘Hey Meta.’” It also stopped allowing wearers to opt out of storing their voice recordings in the cloud.
As reported by Svenska Dagbladet, the Kenya-based AI reviewers work with transcriptions as well, ensuring Meta AI provides the correct answer to the questions users ask aloud. In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton says media captured by its smart glasses “stays on the user’s device” unless they choose to share it with other people or Meta.
“When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people’s experience, as many other companies do,” Clayton says. “We take steps to filter this data to protect people’s privacy and to help prevent identifying information from being reviewed.”
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