SameGame

You are presented with a 20×10 grid of blocks of three or five different colors. Two or more joined blocks of the same color can be removed. The more blocks you remove in one turn, the more points you get. A typical formula is (n-2)². There is usually a bonus for clearing the field completely, or a penalty for each remaining block, but trying to clear as many blocks as possible in one turn gains the most points.

History

In 1985 Kuniaki Moribe created Chain Shot! for the Fujitsu FM 8/7. It was distributed with the monthly magazine Gekkan ASCII and later ported to several other home computer systems.

1992 Eiji Fukumoto re-created this game as Same Game (sometimes spelled SameGame) for the Unix platform. Wataru Yoshioka ported it to the NEC PC-9801, then the most popular home computer in Japan, and possibly to DOS/V later. This version is said to have had very good graphics. It became very popular when Wataru Yoshioka uploaded it to the FGALAM LIB 5 BBS.

Further ports include at least Macintosh and Windows 3.1, with the former having the greatest impact outside Japan. As far as I could find out, the chronology of versions runs like this:

Clones and Spin-Offs

There are several remakes and clones under similar or different names. Same Game is part of both Linux desktop distributions as KSame resp. Same Gnome.

Breakthru!						93		Steve Fry
Clickomania!						98		Matthias Schüssler
Roof Rats
Tile Fall								Adam Dawes
Click'98						99		Timo Gronwald
MacStones								Craig Landrum
SameGame (Amiga)								Ronald van Dijk
SameGame (O.T.)								Olof Tjerngren
Bubbles						01		James Bunting
Cascade						02		Lars Hutzelmann

Links

• History of SameGame