Compile was set up to sell office software, and its office software would not sell. What kept the young Hiroshima company alive was a conversion of Namco’s Galaxian for the Apple II, which shifted a few hundred copies. Over the next fifteen years Compile made some of the fastest and hardest shoot-’em-ups on Japanese computers and consoles, then a falling-blob puzzle game, Puyo Puyo, that drew hundreds of players to tournaments in Japan and outlived the company. Wireframe noted the irony of its end in 2019: Compile “ended as it had begun – trying to sell business software that few particularly wanted to buy.”
Fast facts
- Founded: April 1982 in Hiroshima, as Programmers-3, Inc., by Masamitsu “Moo” Niitani; renamed Compile in the mid-1980s.
- Shoot-’em-ups: Zanac (1986), Aleste (1988), The Guardian Legend (1988), Gunhed/Blazing Lazers (1989), M.U.S.H.A. (1990), GG Aleste (1991), Super Aleste/Space Megaforce (1992).
- Other series: the Madou Monogatari role-playing games and the Disc Station disk magazine (1988–2000).
- Biggest hit: Puyo Puyo (1991), known in the West as Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine.
- End: pledged the Puyo Puyo rights to Sega in 1998; dissolved in December 2002; declared bankrupt in November 2003.
Porting for Sega
Niitani, who had “dabbled in game development a bit in the past”, kept Programmers-3 going with that Galaxian port while its business programs “flatly refused to budge”, Wireframe recounts. The next work came from Sega: converting its early-1980s arcade games, such as Borderline, Safari Hunting and Hustle Chumy, to its Japan-only SG-1000 console. That began a working relationship between the two companies that lasted into the 2000s. After the change of name to Compile, the studio spent a couple of years converting arcade games such as Lode Runner and Choplifter to the MSX.
Zanac and Aleste
Its own style arrived with Zanac (1986), a vertically scrolling shooter for the MSX designed by Niitani with the programmers Koji Teramoto and Takayuki Hirono. Wireframe found that despite the MSX’s limits it “had the pace and difficulty of a proper arcade title”, with an unusually complex power-up system. It also watched the player: “the more efficiently the player collected power-ups and slaughtered enemies, the more brutally the game would respond.” The difficulty design entry explains how that worked. The game was converted to the NES a year after the MSX original.
Aleste followed in 1988, for the Master System and the MSX2; American Master System owners knew it as Power Strike. When it was finished, Wireframe explains, the game fitted on a single MSX2 floppy disk with room to spare, so Compile filled the space. The result was Disc Station, “a magazine-software hybrid” of games, demos and music that Compile published from 1988 to 2000. Later editions cost around $40, and Niitani said they still sold well. The Madou Monogatari role-playing series first appeared on it in 1989.
Compile also made shooters for other companies’ labels. Gunhed (1989), released in the West as Blazing Lazers, was published by Hudson for the PC Engine. Wireframe called it “essentially an unofficial entry in the Aleste series”, with “ten or so different kinds” of weapons. Its pick of the run was Musha Aleste (1990) for the Mega Drive, sold in America as M.U.S.H.A., which mixed mecha with medieval Japan: a giant tank disguised as a castle, a flying gunship “capped with a smiling Noh theatre mask”, and a synth-metal score by Toshiaki Sakoda. There was more variety than the shooters suggest. The Guardian Legend (1988) crossed a Zanac-style shooter with a free-roaming adventure in the manner of Zelda and Metroid, and Compile developed pinball games and a Ghostbusters platform game for other publishers, sometimes without credit.
On the Super Famicom, Super Aleste (1992) came out in America as Space Megaforce. The American fanzine Digital Press argued in 1999 that it had been overlooked because it was on “a system not exactly known for killer 2D shooters”, and called it “bar none, THE best 16-bit overhead shooter”, with eight upgradeable weapons that the player could switch between modes at will.
Puyo Puyo
In 1991 Compile took characters from Madou Monogatari and put them in a puzzle game. Puyo Puyo, which Wireframe credits to Niitani himself, first came out for the MSX2 and Nintendo’s console. Pairs of coloured blobs fall into a well; join four of a colour and they burst. Sega offered to make an arcade version, and it was the two-player game that took off: clearing blobs sends a shower of blank “garbage” blobs on to the opponent’s side. Wireframe called the competitive mode “a masterstroke”, with “hundreds of players” turning out for live tournaments in Japan.
Edge, reviewing the Super Famicom version in 1994, reported that the Mega Drive game had stayed at the top of the Japanese Mega Drive charts for about six months after its release in December 1992, helped by a price about £20 below most Mega Drive titles. It thought Puyo Puyo “isn’t quite the blatant Tetris rip-off that initial impressions suggest. In fact, it shares more similarities with Sega’s Columns”, and it liked the two-player game best: “a counter-shower of clear blobs rains down on the other player”. Sega renamed the Mega Drive game Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine for the West and dressed it in Sonic characters.
The puzzle game changed the company. When Edge visited MileStone, a shooter studio founded by former Compile staff, in 2005, its head said that “many of us had joined Compile to develop [shooting games], but the company was only interested in Puyo Puyo, so we didn’t really have the chance to fulfil our dream.”
Collapse
As the 1990s went on, Wireframe writes, several key staff left, and a bigger blow followed: Power Acty, a piece of business software given an expensive launch in 1998, failed to sell despite “a few cute faces from Puyo Puyo”. Japanese Wikipedia describes it as groupware for internal communication at large companies, whose development costs ran out of control. In 1998 Compile was forced to restructure, and it pledged the Puyo Puyo rights to Sega in return for a loan. Sega Retro reports that Compile could go on using the licence until August 2002, with the option to buy the rights back if its finances recovered. It could not. Compile was dissolved in December 2002 and, according to Japanese Wikipedia, declared bankrupt by the Tokyo District Court in November 2003.
Among its last games, Wireframe noted, were Zanac X Zanac (2001), a PlayStation collection of the original Zanac and a new sequel, and its last commercial release, the Game Boy Advance puzzle game Guru Logi Champ (2001).
After Compile
Sega kept Puyo Puyo, and its own studio, Sonic Team, took over the series. Sega Retro records that the rights to Madou Monogatari went to a company called Aiky in 2003 and that D4 Enterprise bought the rest of Compile’s back catalogue in 2005. Former Compile staff founded MileStone in 2003 to make the shooters they had wanted to make; Edge found it working on the arcade shooter Chaos Field.
Niitani ran Compile Heart, a subsidiary of the publisher Idea Factory, from 2006 until he retired in 2012. In 2016 he came back with a new company, Compile Maru, and a falling-object puzzle game, Nyoki Nyoki, which he hoped would be “the third generation” of puzzle games after Tetris and Puyo Puyo.
Sources
- Wireframe issue 25, October 2019, pp. 50–53, “Developer Profile: Compile”: Programmers-3 and the founding in 1982; the Galaxian port; the SG-1000 and MSX conversions; Zanac and its designers; Aleste, Gunhed, Musha Aleste and Toshiaki Sakoda; The Guardian Legend, the pinball games and Ghostbusters; Disc Station; Puyo Puyo, its designer and its tournaments; Power Acty and the sale of the Puyo Puyo rights; Zanac X Zanac and Guru Logi Champ.
- Edge issue 7, April 1994, testscreen: Super Puyo Puyo (Super Famicom) review, with the Mega Drive game’s December 1992 release, chart run and price, and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine.
- Edge issue 151, July 2005: interviews with small Japanese developers, including MileStone (“the company was only interested in Puyo Puyo”; Chaos Field).
- Digital Press issue 39, January 1999: Space Megaforce retrospective (Power Strike; “THE best 16-bit overhead shooter”).
- Mean Machines issue 21, June 1992, and Nintendo Power issue 42, November 1992: Super Aleste as a Japanese release and as Space Megaforce in America.
- Sega Retro, “Compile” (web, secondary): the founding date; the SG-1000 ports; Blazing Lazers/Gunhed and the pinball games as contract work; Sega’s offer of an arcade Puyo Puyo; the loan, the licence to August 2002 and the buy-back option; Aiky, D4 Enterprise and MileStone. https://segaretro.org/Compile
- Wikipedia (Japanese), “コンパイル (企業)” (web, secondary): Hiroshima; Power Acty as groupware and its costs; the dissolution on 8 December 2002 and the bankruptcy declaration on 6 November 2003. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/コンパイル_(企業)
- “Compile founder Masamitsu Niitani establishes new company Compile Maru”, Gematsu, 18 May 2016 (web, secondary): Compile dissolved in 2002; Niitani at Compile Heart from 2006 to 2012; Compile Maru and Nyoki Nyoki. https://gematsu.com/2016/05/compile-founder-masamitsu-niitani-establishes-new-company-compile-o
- Wikipedia, “Compile Heart” (web, secondary): founded in 2006 as a subsidiary of Idea Factory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compile_Heart