Tetris Variants: Columns

Columns was the first Tetris spin-off, and by far the most successful. It combines falling blocks with tile-matching. All the blocks consist of three tiles with different colors or symbols, traditionally, six. Blocks cannot be rotated, but you can change the order of the tiles. As soon as three matching tiles are in a row, column, or diagonal, they vanish. Otherwise, gameplay is exactly the same as Tetris.

Columns was first created by Jay Geertsen (not Geertson, as he is erroneously credited in the Windows port) of HP on the X Windows system. This original seems to have vanished completely, mention of it is found only in the docs of the subsequent versions. It may never have been widely distributed. Nathan Meyers, another HP employee, ported it to DOS with some unspecified enhancements, Chris Christensen to Macintosh. John Rotenstein created an early Windows version based on Christensen's Macintosh port. P. C. M. van der Arend ported it to, or recreated it on, the Atari ST, using the hi-res monochrome monitor.

Columns for Atari ST								89		P. C. M. van der Arend
Columns for DOS										Nathan Meyers
Columns for Mac										Chris Christensen
Beyond Columns										Brad P. Taylor
Colors 1.1								90		Jim Bonczyk
Da										Min S. Kwon
Fusion										William Chin
Columns for Windows										John Rotenstein
Coloris
Columns (Sega)	Coin-Op, Sega Genesis
Columns II	Coin-Op
Bubble Bath Babes	NES							91
Tile										V.J.Catkick
Stack 'Em										Brian Boese
Su Sweet
Stack Up
Chain Reaction (ST)										Paul Margetson
Phoenix PD Columns										David Tierney
Klatrix										Mats Högberg
Fallout										Brad P. Taylor
X Rock
Colors								92		Bill Kratzer
Jewel Master
1993tris								93		Young K. Chung
Jelly Bean Factory										Mark Batchelor
Puzzle Beauty
Poitto!	Coin-Op
Zero Zone
Las Vegas Girl								94
Chetris
Columns										Brian Boese
Torus										Geoff Poole
NumLis										Kaoru Kusunoki
Xtris										Steffen Buhr
Fructus								95		Philippe Basciano
Xixit										John Hood and Thomas Pytel
Chain Reaction (DOS)								96		Thomas Pytel
Maniac Square	Coin-Op
Collidascope								97		Sergei Savchenko
Three
Coltris								98		Mike Wiering
Columns								00		Richard Davey
Flowers Mania								06

This table includes all the games that combine color matching with falling blocks (or rising bubbles) and do not fall into the very distinct Dr. Mario category. Two out of three of them are more or less faithful clones of the original Columns, the rest are variants.

Amusingly, while Tetris started out as a commercial game and Columns as freeware, later on the former would become more popular with freeware authors, and the latter with commercial projects. Right in 1990 it was released by Sega for Game Gear, Genesis, MSX and Sega Master System.

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Last modified 2007-10-06