Past meets present: Columns II: The Voyage Through Time

Thanks to a Sega Ages release, 1990's Columns II is finally available for purchase outside of Japan.

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Tetris helped power Nintendo’s early consoles and handhelds to the immense popularity they enjoyed, but Sega had its own puzzle series on its hardware, and while overshadowed by what would become a worldwide phenomenon that remains one of the best-selling video game franchises of all-time, Columns was pretty great, too. And unlike with Nintendo and Tetris, this was literally its own puzzle series, as well, as match-three puzzler Columns was developed and published by Sega for the Genesis and Mega Drive.

Columns released in Japanese arcades in March of 1990, but wouldn’t hit North America and Europe until the summer. Maybe that’s part of why its sequel, Columns II, didn’t make it outside of Japan until nearly three decades later, even though it was right there in Japan’s arcades just a few months after the first one came out. Columns II: The Voyage Through Time released in July of 1990 as the original Columns was just getting settled in overseas, and was a significantly different game than the basic original, which just had you playing a game mode that wouldn’t end until you failed or managed to score 99,999,999 points. You probably are more used to games ending with the first of those.

Software engineer Jay Geersten is credited as the designer of the original Columns, as it’s a game he came up with while working for Hewlett-Packard, essentially as a way to practice programming. While he might have lacked commercial aspirations for the game, Sega had heard of it through one channel or another, and bought the rights to it from a lawyer who had themselves bought the rights from HP — Geersten told them himself he had made it on company time and on company property, basically foregoing his own rights to it. While in Geersten’s version of the game, the blocks were just colored, in Sega’s they became gems. Additional changes included the speeding up of the game as you scored more points and moved further into it (though, unlike with Tetris, there was an ebb and flow to the speed — sometimes the speed would hit hard, then it would dial down a bit, and then come back with a vengeance later) as well as multiplayer.

The original Columns wasn’t just pushed aside forever once its sequel came out. It was the original pack-in title for the Game Gear, just like Tetris was a pack-in for the Game Boy, and received a Genesis/Mega Drive port, as well. These ports were more fully featured than the arcade original — I suspect part of the reason Columns II hit arcades as quickly as it did is because the basic Columns was so simple that there was a ton of obvious room to upgrade on right from the start. While you had just the one mode in the original arcade edition of Columns, its early ports included a “Flash” mode where clearing a flashing block was the whole point — you’d work your way down through a set of existing gems to clear the flashing one, ending the puzzle, and be scored on not just your points, but how long it took you to clear the stage. And you could adjust the difficulty, what level of play you’d start on (which impacted how fast gems would fall down), and so on in the Genesis edition, too.

Columns saw not only a standalone release, but also inclusion in 1995’s Genesis 6-Pak cartridge that included half-a-dozen Sega-produced titles from the system’s first year: Columns, Golden Age, Sonic the Hedgehog, Streets of Rage, Revenge of Shinobi, and Super Hang-on. That collection is actually how I was introduced to Columns (and Shinobi, and Streets of Rage) in the first place decades ago, and how its first theme, “Clotho,” ended up worming its way into my head for the rest of my life.

Columns has that simple yet deceptively deep thing going on, like all the best line-clearing/matching puzzle games. Everything starts slow enough for you to pick up on how you’ll do much better building up to a chain of clears all in one go instead of pecking away at one three-set match at a time, so you get some time to start experimenting and building structures out of gems that’ll all come crashing down — in a good way — with the right piece put into place later on. You’re matching same-colored gems in sets of three or more, whether horizontally, diagonally, or vertically, and new pieces drop from the top of the column-shaped play area in sets of three, too, forming their own column. Sometimes they’re a set of three colors, sometimes, two, sometimes one, but they’re always a set of three gems regardless of the particulars of the color arrangement.

You can swap which gem is where in the three-gem column with the press of a button, and it’s here that you’ll find the key to your chain clears. Anyone can put a red gem on the bottom to touch two existing red gems on the play area, but once you start recognizing that hey, the red should be on the bottom and the blue should be on top so that when this lands it’ll actually start a chain reaction that’ll clear unrelated colors below, then you’re golden. A game of Columns can still go south in a hurry, from “hey I’m in control” to “oh god one piece was placed incorrectly I’m going to be screwed” in the blink of an eye, but at least with more experience this happens because the game is moving so quickly that you have to react instantaneously and plan for the next piece before you can even control it, and not because you don’t understand what you’re doing or need to do.

Columns II would add a bit more meat to the proceedings. There was a “Flash” mode just like in the coming ports of Columns, but in this one, you’d play a series of stages of increasing difficulty instead of as more of a time trial arrangement. The first stage had one flashing tile to clear, then stage two had two, then you got to play a bonus stage (seen in the above video) where you’d try to clear all of the tiles up top by releasing a specific one in a specific spot as a clock ticked down. The more tiles you clear, the larger your bonus score. In addition, the tiles would occasionally change into skulls, and if you cleared tiles that included the skull, the bottom of the play area would raise up, which would either end your game or make things more difficult for you, depending on how high your existing structure was.

You might have noticed the switch from “gem” to “tile” in the last paragraph: that’s because, in Columns II, there are a variety of objects you’re trying to clear. The game is the same regardless of which tile set you’re playing with, but the various sets are meant to imply the titular voyage through time you’re taking here. The distant past, where the tiles look like fossils, some undefined mid-history timeline where they’re all gems again, or a distant future where everything is gems… again, but looking more like cut metal instead of a refined gem? Honestly, Sega could have done more with this concept as far as the tiles go, but the often great music at least fits the eras, and the art you’ll see that fills the play area when you lose is era-appropriate, too.

In addition to “Flash,” there was also a Vs. mode, and there is an Infinite play mode, too. This includes the flashing tiles, but instead of ending a stage for you as they did in Flash, here, they clear every tile of the same color as that one. The game keeps on speeding up as you go, and it can be pretty difficult to post high scores, between the general low point totals awarded for successful matches in Columns in general, with how quickly things can unravel if you make a couple of poor choices in a row. Here’s an example of clearing a Flash tile in Infinite Mode, and how quickly it can help bring some order to the game again (while also increasing the difficulty because hey, you succeeded):

Of course no one outside of Japan could experience any of this for decades, at least not legally, as Columns II didn’t receive a console port for years. It came out on the Sega Saturn in 1997, but once again only in Japan: the rest of us would have to wait until 2019, when it was included as part of the Sega Ages line on the Nintendo Switch, to be able to play the first sequel to Columns. Which is even funnier, really, to wait that long, when Columns III did receive a worldwide release, and was even labeled as the third game. We all knew this was missing forever, with Sega not even trying to hide it like Square used to do with Final Fantasy games, and yet, it still took 29 years for it to see the light of day outside of Japan.

The Sega Ages port, to the surprise of no one familiar with the series, is stuffed with all kinds of options for play (like Infinite Mode without those aggravating skulls present, or a stage select), bonus modes, online leaderboards, and even the original Columns game, too. If you have a fondness for the original Columns, well, for one, this is how you’d play a copy you own on the Switch, but even more importantly, you’d enjoy its sequel, which refines and adds and expands on the concept of the original in ways that make it obvious why it hit arcades so quickly after the launch of the first one.

There’s a true simplicity to Columns and its sequels, but there is to Tetris, too, and that’s part of what has kept them both so much fun for all these years. Little wrinkles come and go, modes are added and subtracted, but it’s always Columns in the end, isn’t it? And the core game of Columns is incredibly strong, enough so that its “lost” sequel could make its way out of Japan 29 years later and still be a complete joy to experience without it requiring all kinds of upgrades to get it to that point. Grab the Sega Ages edition on Switch if you’ve got that hybrid system: that release of Columns II is all of $8, and just hearing the “Arabian Jewelry” theme every now and again alone is worth at least that much.

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