"Our initial idea in 1998 was to produce a freeware game to honor the well-known game "Tetris", which existed as arcade game under DOS many years ago, but enhanced with some new and cool features as well as some new and unique options which altogether should show the "next step" in this sort of games around.

This was also the reason why we decided for the name "Tetris'99" - an old game with new design, new features, ready for the year 1999. However, we had problems with this name since the so-called "Tetris Company" told us that they have a copyright on the name "Tetris" - so we changed it in the believe that they are right.

Then they told us that even the "look and feel" of the game is copyrighted, but our investigations have shown that - based on several parts of both, US and international laws - the "look and feel" of a software program can't be copyrighted ... otherwise, there would just exist one spreadsheet application, one word processor, one Macintosh-like Desktop ;-) and many other unique software programs (without any competition) in the world."