Match-making video game

Tetris Attack is a popular match-making game.

Match-making is a video game genre which challenges the player to manipulate things on the screen in order to create matches, typically by shifting tiles around to form rows. This is kind of like a cross between a match-finding video game and a connection video game and often paired with the mechanics of a falling block video game. This genre is also often referred to as a "tile-matching" game.

Personal

Since I never didn't really find the match-making genre all that interesting when I was younger, I didn't make any attempt to seek out any of its staples. I had two friends with Sega platforms, so I may have played Columns briefly in the mid-1990s, though I have no memory of it. It wasn't until late 1990s, when NES emulation had become decent, that I played Dr. Mario and Hatris, but wasn't that interested in either because I never had a human opponent to play against. The game that got me interested in the genre, and still my favorite to this fay, it Tetris Attack.

History

Match-making games trace their inspiration to Tetris and Chain Shot, but the first to really use the mechanic of manipulating objects to form matches are Puzznic and Flipull, both released in 1989 by Taito. A few other popular titles came out in 1990 including Columns, Dr. Mario, and Klax. Each was quite successful and kept the genre going with subsequent titles like Bust-a-Move, Tetris Attack, Bejeweled, and many others.

Games

These are match-making video games that are important to me. For all games, see the category.

Title	Released	Developer
Bust-a-Move	1994-06-??	Taito
Dr. Mario	1990-07-27	Nintendo
Tetris Attack	1995-10-27	Intelligent Systems
Yoshi's Cookie	1992-11-21	Home Data, Tose

Links