The people involved with Tetris were unhappy with this naming stunt, which they feel both harmed the Tetris brand, and made it so that Panel de Pon could not be appreciated in its own right and remembered with its own name. They called it Tetris Attack just to piggyback on the success of Tetris, in the same way that rebranding this as a Mario game was piggybacking on the success of Mario, because, according to the marketers from above, original things don't sell, and everything should just be a sequel or a spin-off of the one thing that somehow slipped through their fingers and got to be successful without their meddling. It also makes it sound like this is the cool version of Tetris, or the hard version of Tetris, or like the Tetris shapes are coming to attack you. needlessly aggressive for a puzzle game about blocks. While the game is often two-player versus, with successful moves from one player impeding the other, the word "attack" is. And it has very little to do with Attack, either. The only thing it shares with Tetris is that they're both puzzle games, and there are blocks to move around. Even though it has nothing to do with Tetris. ![]() ![]() Panel de Pon wouldn't do, so they called it Tetris Attack. Not content to mess with the entire soul of the game, the localizers also completely messed up the name. Is it really true that little boys would have objected to a game with power metal fairies? Angry American Garbage Block! And whoever added that text box on the right must be a passionate graphic designer. And, although the marketers wanted to strictly present video games as a toy for boys, it's not like there were no women or girls who owned a game console themselves, or lived in a house with an console that the whole family could use. Thinking back to her childhood friends, Denise even thinks that the boys she knew at the time would have enjoyed playing this game without batting an eye at it featuring fairies. This was around the same time as the Care Bears, Rainbow Brite, My Little Pony, Troll dolls, and Lisa Frank - when rainbows were powerful and high fantasy, and fairies were in, and boys weren't yet completely stifled by oppressively gendered marketing. However, it did well in Japan, and we think this could have worked in the US too. Since the game didn't get to come out at that time, we can never know if it would have done well in the US or not. ![]() We cannot find anything as to why, but we can speculate it had to do with how, at that time in the US, marketers were trying to turn video games into a thing for little boys only, and they didn't think that little boys should play a game about fairies, with a fairy as the main character. Tetris Attack is wonderful, if you are allergic to fairies.
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