Back when I was a
kid and
Tetris had first gotten popular in the
United States (I'd already been playing it for a couple years, though, having run across it in an
arcade and immediately being
hooked, and then later finding a version of it on a local
BBS), I noticed that a bunch of different versions were out, some of them calling themselves
Tetris but most calling themselves things like
Nyet or
Double Blocks. My favorite versions were, in decreasing order,
Tengen Tetris (the one in the arcade, which was also possible but not very
probable to find for the
NES),
Double Blocks for the PC (since it had multiplayer, and also modem "
deathmatch", though this was long before that
term was coined), and then
Nintendo's own version (the one made by
Elorg).
In the meantime, my neighbors were housing a German exchange student. His only exposure to Tetris was the incredibly spartan Nyet, which had no next piece preview and only one direction of rotation (whereas all three of my favorite versions had a piece preview, and both Nintendo and Double Blocks had both clockwise and counter-clockwise rotation). This German was a Tetris bigot - he couldn't accept that there was any version other than his beloved Nyet. He, in fact, refused to play any version against me because I was "cheating" by having the piece preview and using the "backwards" rotation.
This leads me to another time when I was in an arcade and there was, of course, Tetris (which is still, thankfully, obligatory for arcades to have, it seems, and it's usually the only good game you can ever find in one), and I actually - perish the thought - hit game over. So I scrambled and reached into my pocket trying to pull out a quarter so I could continue, and the stupid kid who had been watching over my shoulder the whole time said, "Damn tetrisized." (This was back when Nintendo's "Get Tetrisized" ad was showing non-stop 24/7.) As though "Tetrisized" were a real word and not some stupid Nintendo marketing gimmick. And as though that didn't show that he watched too much TV and believed everything he saw in ads. Whatever. I found a quarter and continued to play, while the dumb kid just walked off, shaking his head going "Tsk, tsk, tsk" like he'd probably seen in so many cheesy sit-coms.