A History of Matching Tile Games

[Kaos]

A really well written article.

http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/swapadjacent

[soniCron]

If you like that, you should read his book (http://www.amazon.com/Half-Real-Video-between-Fictional-Worlds/dp/0262101106/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-1830781-4644823?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178986572&sr=1-1).

[Coach]

A really well written article.

http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/swapadjacent


From the article: "From the perspective of Bejeweled, the major subsequent innovation is the interaction method of swapping tiles as introduced in Panel de Pon (figure 10, Intelligent Systems 1995)."

Well, there is a C64 tile swapper, appropriately named Swap, from 1991:
http://www.lemon64.com/games/details.php?ID=2580. It's an interesting game as gravity is not turned on by default, but you can use a turn-on-gravity option a certain number of times. This makes it much more a game of skill than Bejeweled and the likes.

I certainly wouldn't bet on this as the first tile swapper, however...

[Coach]

He also credits Hexic as the first (2004) matching game with a hexagonal playing field but, the above mentioned, Swap already had squares, triangles and heagons for tiles.

Still, an article right up my alley. But massive research is needed to get these issues straight and right.

[soniCron]

Well, with 10's of thousands games -- if not 100's of thousands -- its an expensive and time-consuming task to get facts straight. And with the academic community in its infancy, it's to be expected there will be many mistakes for many years until it builds a critical mass capable of sustaining a peer-reviewed system.

It's a hell of a start, though, and perhaps some of you should invite him over here to our forums?

[grid]

Another notably missing game from this article is the relatively recently released Puzzle Quest. I've actually thought about writing this very type of article, and am rather upset I missed the opportunity to be first.

I might take a stab at my own version of his "family tree", as I disagree with a few of his decisions. Particularly with the placement of Lumines, as a direct decedent of Dr Mario (wha!?!).

What about Puzzle Pirates? What about Zoo Cube, Zoo Keeper, Pokemon Trozei, or the recent Honeycomb Beat?

--
martin
http://chesstris.com/