This is has always puzzled me. Why did the original arcade Sega Tetris only have cc rotation? System 16 had the potential for at least 3 buttons so why the decision to excluded a cw rotation?
I know that some cabs in the wild only had one button although the hardware supports all three as CCW. Maybe they didn't want to lock arcade operators into requiring a 3 button panel where one seemed sufficient. It was also the relative early days of Tetris, and (unless Vs. Tetris, the proto-Tengen, was released before Sega) I'm not sure any games had multiple rotation buttons up until that point; Vs., Tengen, GB, NES, etc. all had two rotation buttons because there were two buttons on the panel/controller for the hardware platform used, -- might as well use both, and what better use of the other button as an alternate rotation direction! -- but before then most games were using the old "up-to-rotate" style numpad control configs. Famicom Tetris, which could have had multiple rotation buttons, was still essentially a port of the other BPS home computer Tetris games and used a "down-to-rotate, A to drop" control scheme as to stay in line with the rules and capabilities of that version on other platforms. I also wonder if it could be a programming concession or shortcut like that of the rotation ceiling, but that seems less likely -- it's not an especially hard issue to negotiate around. So, my best guess is that it was more likely related to the state of design of existing games and/or wanting to open up the possibility to installing in any cab regardless of number of buttons on the panel (so long as it was at least one!).
Yeah. sega tetris predates two rotation directions. all games before VS tetris and gameboy tetris that i know of only rotate counterclockwise. We have Nintendo to thank for being able to rotate both directions it seems.
