9 Video Games That Got Away With Being Total Rip-Offs

9. Columns

What It Ripped Off: Tetris. Tetris enjoyed massive success in the late 1980s when it came bundled with Nintendo's bulky brick of handheld goodness called the Game Boy. Its catchy music never grated on you even during marathon sessions and its block sorting, line forming gameplay satisfied the OCD person that's inside all of us. It was the first killer app for handheld games and created a whole new market for addictive puzzlers. And so of course Sega jumped on the bandwagon and did exactly what Nintendo did (contrary to their famous 'we do what Nintendon't' marketing phrase) by releasing a puzzler of their own called Columns. Columns may very well be the most unimaginative title ever, second only to "Block Sorting" or "Puzzlepocalypse" (actually that one sounds quite good). Columns plays very similarly to Tetris, except that you had to line up three of the same jewels instead of creating lines across the whole screen. What innovation! The similarities don't end there. The game speeds up as the player's score rises and ends when the columns reach the top of the screen. Sounds familiar, right? Sega also released Columns on their battery-sapping Game Gear handheld in the hopes of catching the same success Nintendo had with the Game Boy (spoiler: they didn't).