History of Color Lines
From MS-DOS in 1992 to seven microbes on modern Android — a thirty-year journey with a legend and a tragedy inside it.
Lines 1992 — birth of the genre
Color Lines (also known as Lines or, in Russian, шарики) appeared in the summer of 1992 on MS-DOS. There were three authors: programmer Oleg Dyomin and artists Gennady Denisov and Igor Ivkin. All three worked at the All-Union Institute of Standardization and Metrology in Moscow. The publisher was a studio called Gamos. The 9×9 grid, seven ball colors and the «five or more in a row» rule became the genre’s canon — later copied by dozens of clones across every platform.
The "Olga Demina" myth
The very first version of Color Lines credited Olga Demina — Oleg’s wife — as the author. By release time, Oleg was working at Moscow City Hall and couldn’t officially sign a commercial contract, so his wife’s name went on the credits as a stand-in. For decades, English-language clones and descriptions have copied "Olga Demina" as the sole author. It’s a pseudonym. The real creators are Dyomin, Denisov and Ivkin.
Dyomin and Namco
In 1994, Oleg Dyomin died in a windsurfing accident — just two years after the release. By then the game was already in every office and school computer room in the country: according to Gamos director Evgeny Sotnikov, only about 300 legal copies were ever sold — yet millions of people played it. In 1996, the rights to Color Lines were bought by Japan’s Namco.
Lines 98 — mainstream peak
In 1998, Lines 98 came out — a Windows reimagining by an independent publisher, Sorcerer Software. Not a Gamos sequel, not part of Microsoft Entertainment Pack as often misstated. Updated graphics, new sound, distribution on every school and office game compilation — and for an entire generation, that was «the» Color Lines. In the Linux world, the open clone Five or More by Robert Szokovacs and Szabolcs Bán became part of standard GNOME Games.
Evolution: from Java to Android
From the 2000s onward, Color Lines spread everywhere — Java applets in browsers, time-killer apps on Symbian and Windows Mobile, hundreds of mobile remakes on Google Play and the App Store. The formula never changed: the same 9×9 grid, the same five-in-a-row rule, the same little thrill of a line falling into place. Only the dressing changed — fruit, candy, gems, icons.
Why "build diagonals" actually works
In 2014, Evgeny Grechnik published a reverse-engineering of the original DOS binary on Habr: the new-ball placement algorithm wasn’t uniform. A random cell was picked, and if occupied, the search went left-to-right and top-to-bottom. As a result, horizontal and vertical lines got broken more often than diagonals. The decades-old player heuristic «build diagonals» isn’t superstition — it’s a mathematical truth of the original code.
Color Lines: Microbes! — back to the roots
Color Lines: Microbes! is a modern remake that brings the genre back to its roots and moves the action into a laboratory. Instead of balls — seven types of microbes, each with its own color and a real-life bacterial counterpart. The board is a 9×9 lab glass with 10 random microbes at the start (the original Lines 1992 started with 5 — a deliberate twist in this remake). Three Petri dishes preview the next ones to drop. The rules are the classics — five or more in a row, horizontal, vertical or diagonal. The lab dressing, sixteen unique achievements and a tidy style make the experience feel nostalgically familiar and brand new at the same time.