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> so your advice is basically, go ahead and make your derivative tetris game but just call it something else?

Every game is derivative.

Almost every human thought and action is.

The language you speak. Your opinions. Even your preferences are shaped by things you've seen and copied.

If you said that every game (or whatever) must pay the predecessors for every mechanic they reused, we'd be left with nothing but taxes to be paid to the dead and retired. Those no longer carrying the torch forward.

I don't think that many thoughts are derivative. One certainly doesn't learn thinking by imitation, at least in early childhood and not directly in later life stages. Yes, many "library-like" algorithms (those for simple and narrow, well-understood tasks) are derivative, but there is much other thinking - "fluid" thinking as a whole, and also many particular small tricks / heuristics that are discovered independently by many smart individuals.

That is not my advice, and this is not a rip off.

Yes, that was clearly stated. Are you trying to insinuate something?

It doesn't matter what you do it only matters how you frame it