reposting an old translation I made for someone a while back, saved to a pastebin that's always a drag to track down—if you wanna read some background info from a former Sega AM1 programmer on an unreleased arcade Columns game, have at it:
Right after the show in September 1996, once things had settled down, I was assigned to a new project.
Back then, there were two major arcade trade shows, AOU in February and the AM show in September, and there'd be a lot of projects that moved in sync with one show or the other.
The directive came from upper management: "make a new Columns game in three months."
Three months was an absurd schedule. Back then, you'd typically be able to make a game in 6 months, or 4-5 months in a pinch, but three months wasn't enough time to do anything.
"We've been told to make a falling-block puzzle game, so I guess you should come up with come with some characters and have them battle..." was the rather vague instruction given by my boss.
The first thing the assigned planner did was to drill into the department head that there was no way they could get it done in 3 months; I think he was trying to get an upfront soft commitment to the idea that it might end up being a six-month project.
The planner was my contemporary M-san. I was the programmer, along with one other person: a sempai who worked with me as a programmer on the palmistry game (Tesou Uranai Chotto Misete) and "Byousatsu" (an unreleased vertical shooter for ST-V). Another sempai who'd worked on Stack Columns helped out at the very beginning, establishing the basics of the programming and immediately leaving for another project.
Let's jump back in time about two months.
Around that time, Super Mario 64 had just been released. The planner M-san was playing it for research and noticed the screen wipes that would occur during screen transitions, in the shape of stars, Bowser's face, etc. M-san was surprised by this effect, which hadn't been seen in a game before, and he asked me, "is this something that can only be pulled off on N64?"
At that moment, I had no project and no urgent work to do, so I set to work on creating "screen transitions"—I recreated the star wipe, of course, and I must have made around 20 others at the suggestion of M-san. Some of them used features of the Saturn hardware that weren't typically utilised due to the restrictions placed upon them in-game, but because these were solely tech demos meant to experiment with screen wipes, I was able to use them.
Now that I was formally teamed up on a game with M-san, I thought I'd try to implement some of those screen wipes I'd been messing with in an actual game, with the idea being to use them for some sort of flashy effects during battle.
The versus puzzle format originated with Puyo Puyo, but Taisen Puzzle-Dama popularised overlaying large character graphics over the entire playfield; we thought we should do that with Columns, too, but it's no fun to just imitate another game...
We came up with the idea of having separate playfields but with a shared background in order to make it feel like the two characters are fighting each other in the same space—when one character sets off a chain, the background on the attacking side would scroll in a way that made it look like they were advancing on their opponent, and the bigger the chain, the faster it'd scroll.
There'd also be a "pre-chain warning" given off before chains of a certain size; specifically, right as the chain is formed, the game would stop for a second a screen-wide wipe-style effect would emanate from the gem that started the chain, so as to tell the other player, "if you don't deal with this now, you're screwed".
In other words, we were trying to inject the feel of a Dragon Ball-esque anime battle into a puzzle game.
We also tossed around other ideas concerning the possible applications for "stimulation" (referring specifically to this rather vague patent https://patents.justia.com/patent/6827645). We didn't have any graphics at that point, so I kept my focus on game feel and those kinds of production elements.
On the other hand, we faced the difficulty of tweaking the game system of Columns itself.
Columns is a game designed to be played silently by yourself, so if you try to turn it into a versus game and add interference from the other player, the game falls apart.
Maybe we could add some sort of trigger that'd somehow loosen the restrictions for clearing gems, and let you clear tons at once... I tried all sorts of stuff but I couldn't come up with any good ideas. By that token, the fact that I struggled to come up with changes just demonstrated how well-considered the original Columns game system was.
I've forgotten the details, but I remember programming something where lightning would stretch across a bunch of gems and then they'd all disappear in a flash; I put in some temp graphics for the lightning effect, but it wasn't very interesting from a game standpoint, so I scrapped it.
I also have vivid memories of showing M-san how to calculate the power of the garbage generated by chains—I told him I wanted a formula that would generate exponential amounts of garbage the larger the chain; he asked me to show him a graph, so I showed him how to generate a graph via spreadsheet and had him tweak the parameters himself until he'd come up with a solid formula. Even with something as simple of the game rules, there can be complicated formulas involved and people would presume you'd need to be a programmer to work with them, but the trial-and-error of inputting, checking and tweaking all these parameters would've been a big waste of time for the programmers, so being able to communicate and hand things off in that fashion helped with efficiency. Left to my own devices, I probably would've written a program to do what the spreadsheet did, so I was pleasantly surprised by the utility of the spreadsheet. (laughs)
I mentioned using temp graphics earlier, but these were scanned from sempai H-san, the other programmer on the project. H-san made his own doujinshi that he sold at Comiket—he was able to program, plan and code—and he had a ton of zines, so when M-san was explaining the visuals he wanted for the game, we brought him some of those zines and M-san picked the images he liked. (None of the doujinshi was 18+.) Unlike commercial manga, a lot of the appeal of doujinshi is the vibe of the illustrations rather than the actual story, so they can be useful for nailing down the aesthetic of a game.
Through those images, we started to solidify the look of the game. Let's make the main character a wizard/witch, we thought, and because it's a Columns game, let's name the characters after gems and make them wizards/witches too—they'd fight up in the air while riding on brooms, which matched up to the "high-speed scrolling attack" system I wrote about earlier.
Since Columns has 6 different types of gem, we decided to have the player face off against six other characters, with the player-character being named after some sort of "ambiguous gem-like thing" that would be challenging the others to earn acknowledgement as a true gem... I asked M-san what an "ambiguous gem-like thing" might be and he said, "how about coral (sango)?", to which I replied, "oh, my birthday's on March 5 (3/5, ie san-go)..." which made H-san immediately blurt out "A~ru!"
#This'll be lost on anyone who doesn't get what he's talking about. (He's referencing an old manga with R in the title and a character named Sango, I believe.)
I think it's true of any creative process, but watching a bunch of hazy ideas slowly solidify into something tangible is always fun, isn't it? At that point, you're still able to throw out all sorts of wacky ideas, and I was starting to think about the title of the game around that time, so of course, it was silly too.
"Kokora de Columns" was what I came up with at the time, and from then on, that's what was written on all the proposals (marked "provisional"). Game titles tend to be abbreviated to around four syllables, and M-san's preferred abbreviation was "Koko-Kora"... he always liked goofing around with words and names.
Now, I think it had taken us about two months to get to this point.
Right around that time, one of the higher-ups came to inspect the department and asked "oh, what happened to that Columns game I asked you to make?" The director led him over to our project, and when he saw what we were making, he started to get mad: "what are you doing?!" "this isn't what I asked for!", etc.
Our boss had gotten his wires crossed and completely misunderstood what we'd been asked to make—as of that September, the in-house product schedule for the crucial end-year sales season was completely empty, but having literally nothing to sell wasn't going to fly, so the intent was to make do with a simple game like Columns... in other words, the priority was simply ensuring the game was done and ready to sell before the end of the year, not fleshing it out or making it more elaborate.
We had fun making it, but the fun stopped there.
The "end-year" window would be closing in a little over a month, and in that brief amount of time, we had to make a new Columns game.
BONUS: meeting Satoshi Tajiri
This meeting took place while I was making Kokora de Columns; it was in a pretty playable state, so I'm guessing it happened around early November '96. (That game was cancelled in the middle of the month to make way for what became Columns '97.)
Pokemon was released on February 27 that same year. In the beginning, it didn't sell all that well and was never in the top-10 sales charts, but was always hovering around in the top-20... it's unusual for a game to hang around in the top-20 charts for months on end, as game sales typically drop off dramatically within a month of launch.
Around summertime, people started talking about "that game that's selling strangely". Planner M-san said "I hear it's not as much fun on your own, so let's both buy it and play it together", so I went and bought a Game Boy so we can play together, but after about a week he was like "eh, not for me" and left me high and dry... but, I digress.
Pokemon really started to explode around wintertime, so at this point, Tajiri wasn't super-famous. Right then, his work schedule was temporarily free, and he'd worked with Sega on Pulseman in 1994, so perhaps he'd come to talk about working together again, and then as with (Kenji) Eno-san, if they got him working on Saturn, he might be able to make the jump to ST-V...
After his meeting, as he was leaving the section manager's office, he seemed to catch Kokora de Columns which was running nearby, so I invited him to give it a shot. He was very polite and humble, and he had nice things to say about the flashier aspects of the production, which he thought were well-done.
Like I said earlier, Kokora de Columns was shelved, so I'm pretty sure Tajiri was the only outsider to ever play it.
(Sidenote: M-san owned quite the collection of game doujinshi, and at the time of Tajiri's visit, he had Game Freak's "Xevious 10 Million Points Guide" sitting in his desk drawer, but this meeting all happened in the space of a few minutes, so it didn't come to mind... later on, he was like "I wish I'd gotten his autograph!")
