Depending on where one looks, legal concerns over the Tetris game are not necessarily new. In 1989, the notable game Tetris: The Soviet Mind Game, which was produced by Tengen, was removed from the market after a legal ruling against Tengen. (It would be interesting to know as to whether the actual issue was one of copyright or trademark.) In addition, it has been said that there was a now-obscure Tetris game that was released for the Sega Megadrive console.

Over the years, there have been multiple instances where games have resembled existing games. For instance, on the Apple Macintosh platform, there was the shareware Bakudanjin game which has been regarded as a clone of the Bomberman video game. (According to the iDevGames "Bakudanjin Postmortem" article, producing a game that constituted a clone was one of the aspects that didn't work so well with the Bakudanjin project, even though the Bakudanjin game was successfully released.) In addition, there was the freeware Arashi game which is said to be similar to the Tempest video game.

Though his donor had been anonymous, his mother had been told the man's date and place of birth and his college degree. Using another online service, Omnitrace.com, he purchased the names of everyone that had been born in the same place on the same day. Only one man had the surname he was looking for, and within 10 days he had made contact.

Under the right circumstances, a small amount of seemingly insignificant information can be quite powerful. In this case it was a date of birth, a place of birth, and the existence of a college degree. Did anyone originally think that the donor could have been tracked down via that information? For more anonymity, the information provided about sperm donors might have to be reduced.