Tetris was the first video game to be played in space. The game (and the Game Boy it was played on) spent 196 days on board the Mir Space Station in 1993, and orbited the earth more than 3,000 times. The game and system were auctioned off in 1996 for $1,220.

The Type A music used in the Game Boy version of Tetris is the well-known Russian 19th Century folk song, Korobeiniki. It originally told the story of a meeting between a peddler and a girl, who haggled over goods as a metaphor for courtship. The fact that this song was included is consistent with Tetris' Russian origins.

After the second phase of the Gulf War ended in early 1991, Dr. Stephan Scoggins, a medic during the war, mailed his Game Boy to Nintendo of America hoping to get a replacement after it was damaged when his tent burned down in a fire. While the back of the console was in fair condition, the front was melted, severely charred and blistered, and the technicians that received it initially determined it could not be fixed. As an experiment, they inserted a copy of Tetris and powered it on, and to their surprise, the console still worked. The D-Pad, A and B buttons were nonfunctional, but the Start and Select buttons worked as normal. The magazine Nintendo Power sent Scoggins a replacement Game Boy "as a special 'Desert Storm' courtesy", and his letter asking for a replacement along with pictures of the console were featured in the magazine's July 1991 issue. The damaged Game Boy was not discarded; it was later displayed at the Nintendo New York store in New York City since its opening in 2001. As a testament to the console's durability and longevity, it remained powered on, looping the title screen and attract mode demo of Tetris, and receiving timely maintenance for over 20 years, until it was returned to Nintendo of America's headquarters in Redmond, Washington in 2023.

The original Japanese version 1.0 cartridge didn't have "Korobeiniki" as the "A-Type" music. It instead had another song called "Minuet".

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was an avid Tetris player since the Game Boy's release. He got so good that he sent his scores to Nintendo Power multiple times, and always got the highest score. Eventually, Nintendo Power stopped publishing his name in the magazine. He then sent his name backwards (Evets Kainzow) in, which was then accepted and published.

In a 2009 interview with IGN conducted to celebrate the franchise's 25th anniversary, series creator Alexey Pajitnov named the Game Boy version of Tetris as his favorite rendition, describing it as the closest approximation of what he first had in mind for the game.