At a glance: Columns · Game Gear · Sega, 1990 · Puzzle · Score: 7.5/10
Every handheld war needs its puzzle game, and Columns was Sega’s answer to Tetris — not a clone of it, which is precisely why it worked. Jay Geertsen’s falling-jewels design, acquired by Sega and polished into the Game Gear’s North American pack-in, asked a different question from Nintendo’s line-clearing: not how neatly you can stack, but how cleverly you can match. Columns of three jewels fall; line up three or more of a kind — vertically, horizontally, diagonally — and they vanish in a flash and a chime, the stack above tumbling down into chain reactions you half-planned and half-prayed for. Thirty-five years on, it remains the definitive Game Gear puzzler and the game more original owners played more than any other.
The pack-in status matters to its story. In North America, Columns came in the box, which made it the first Game Gear game millions touched and the system’s ambassador in schoolyards where the console war was fought one recess at a time. It was a shrewd choice: where Tetris sold the Game Boy on elegant simplicity, Columns sold the Game Gear on colour. The jewels — ruby, emerald, sapphire, amber — glow with a richness the rival machine’s green screen could not dream of, and the whole presentation, Greek columns and temple ornament framing the well, leans into a classical elegance that still looks classy.
The magic jewel and the chain
The rules reward foresight with fireworks. A Magic Jewel appears occasionally and deletes every jewel of the colour it lands on — the game’s great leveller and its best comeback mechanic. Chains are the soul of high-level play: a first match drops jewels into a second, the second into a third, the score multipliers singing upwards while the well empties in a cascade that feels like pulling a thread and watching a tapestry unravel in your favour. The Game Gear version plays this beautifully. The well is perfectly legible on the small screen, the jewels are generously sized, and the controls — rotate the column, nudge it, drop it — are as responsive as the genre demands.
Modes cover the era’s bases well. The standard game runs against rising speed across nine starting levels. Flash Columns inverts the challenge — a pre-filled well, a target jewel buried at the bottom, a clock and a move-efficient mind required — and it is arguably the better single-player game, a proper puzzle mode hiding inside an arcade one. Two-player versus, via the Gear-to-Gear cable, sends garbage to your opponent’s well in the genre’s sacred tradition, and it works a treat: Columns head-to-head is tense, spiteful and funny in the way only linked handhelds ever were.
Game Gear versus the rest
Columns lived on many machines — the Mega Drive version is handsome, the Master System version perfectly serviceable — but the Game Gear edition has a claim to be the definitive one, because the format fits the game like a glove. Short sessions, instant restarts, a well you can read at a glance on the move: this is a bus-stop game in the best sense. Against the Master System build, the handheld version sacrifices nothing that matters; the well is the well, the magic jewel sparkles in both, and the Game Gear’s palette gives the jewels a jewel-like quality its TV sibling, oddly, never quite matches on a period CRT. What you lose is the bigger screen’s breathing room in two-player split-screen — which the link cable answers by giving each player a machine.
Tetris sold the Game Boy on simplicity. Columns sold the Game Gear on colour — and on the chain reaction, the prettiest sound in puzzle gaming.
The soundtrack deserves its mention: a serene, harp-like main theme — Clotho, named for the Fate who spins the thread — that loops without grating across long sessions, joined by tenser pieces as the well fills. It is puzzle-game music done right, present but never pushy, and the little arpeggios that greet a chain are a dopamine mechanism decades before the term was fashionable.
Where age shows
The honest faults are the genre’s growing pains. Random jewel sequences can deal you columns that no skill can save, and late-game speed makes the rotation of a three-jewel column feel clumsy in a way Tetris’s shapes never do — the eternal Columns debate, and it is fair. There is no save for scores beyond your own memory, no marathon statistics, none of the quality-of-life apparatus modern puzzle games take for granted. And the diagonal match, the series’ signature, is a love-it-or-hate-it skill: generous to the observant, invisible to the rest of us until it is too late.
The long session
Columns’ deepest virtue only shows over time: it scales with the player. Beginners match what they see and survive on the magic jewel’s mercy. Intermediates learn to build — to set a column not for the match it makes but for the collapse it promises. Experts play the diagonal game at speeds where the well seems to empty by telepathy. The game’s speed curve is patient enough to teach all three levels in one sitting, which is why it colonised so many lunch breaks: a five-minute game teaches you something a fifty-minute game cashes. Puzzle games live or die on that teaching curve, and Columns, for all its period roughness at the edges, has a great one.
Its legacy is worth a line, too. Sega kept returning to Columns — sequels, remakes, a permanent seat in its compilation line-ups — because the core loop never dated, and the Game Gear original remains the version with the strongest claim on history: the pack-in, the ambassador, the game that proved a falling-block puzzler could be about colour and chains instead of lines and tidiness. Tetris won the war of the puzzle games, as it won most wars. Columns kept its country.
The two-player game deserves a closing salute of its own, because linked Columns was a small social institution: the garbage attacks arriving just as a rival’s well neared safety, the magic jewel detonating a comeback, the best-of sessions that structured more than a few friendships’ hierarchies. The cable cost little, the game came in the box in North America, and the result was the rare pack-in that doubled as the system’s social network. Modern puzzle games network the world. Columns networked the playground, and the playground remembers.
There is a last, material pleasure to the cartridge: it is everywhere. As the pack-in it sold by the million, remains the cheapest essential on the system, and works as the perfect first purchase for any new Game Gear owner — a complete, classic game for loose change. Few masterpieces are this available. Fewer still are this welcoming.
Verdict
Columns is the Game Gear’s puzzle cornerstone: a genuinely different idea from Tetris, executed with elegance, colour and one of the great chain-reaction systems, and perfectly fitted to its machine. It lacks the infinite cleanliness of its great rival’s design, but it compensates with spectacle and charm, and its Flash mode remains an underrated puzzle campaign in its own right. No Game Gear collection is complete without the pack-in that taught a generation to match three.