Two blobs drop into the well together, joined at the side. Turn them, steer them, and when four or more of one colour touch, they burst and everything above falls into the gap. If the fall lines up another group of four, that bursts too, and so on down the screen. In Puyo Puyo the player’s real work is building those chains in advance, because in a two-player game every chain is turned into clear “nuisance” blobs that rain down on the opponent’s side. Compile, a Hiroshima studio known for its shooting games, made it in 1991 as a spin-off of its role-playing series Madou Monogatari. In Japan it filled arcades; in the West most players met it under someone else’s name.
Fast facts
- Developer: Compile. Wireframe credits the design to the company’s founder, Masamitsu Niitani.
- First released: October 1991 for the MSX2, from Compile, and for Nintendo’s Famicom Disk System, from Tokuma Shoten.
- Arcade version: 1992, with Sega.
- Mega Drive: December 1992 in Japan.
- Western versions: Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine (1993, Mega Drive and Game Gear) and Kirby’s Avalanche (1995, Super NES; Kirby’s Ghost Trap in Europe).
- Owner: Sega, which bought the rights from Compile in the late 1990s and has made the games itself since 2001.
How it plays
The well is six columns wide. Pairs of puyo, the blobs, drop from the third column; the player moves and rotates each pair, and when four or more of one colour touch side to side (diagonals do not count), they clear. The game ends when the third column is blocked. Sega’s own American description of the Western version put the rule in one line: “You must connect four or more beans of the same color to free them.”
Each clear in a sequence is a step in the chain, and in a two-player game the chain decides the attack. Edge explained it in 1994: “When a player manages to drop several group of blobs, a counter-shower of clear blobs rains down on the other player, thwarting any blob-dropping plans they might have had.” Those nuisance blobs cannot be cleared by matching. They only disappear when a group bursts next to them, so a player buried under them has to dig out with chains of their own. Edge’s reviewer, looking at the Super Famicom version, thought the game “isn’t quite the blatant Tetris rip-off that initial impressions suggest” and had more in common with Sega’s Columns.
The first versions were simpler than what followed. According to Sega Retro, the 1991 game had no story mode and none of the cast of Madou Monogatari except its heroine, Arle, her pet Carbuncle and the puyo themselves, with a set of puzzles in a Mission mode. Wireframe identifies the two-player competitive mode of the later versions as the “masterstroke”.
The arcade and the Mega Drive
Sega saw the game’s arcade potential, and the two companies released Puyo Puyo as a coin-op in 1992. It drew, in Wireframe’s words, “hundreds of players to live tournaments in Japan”. The Mega Drive version followed in December 1992. Edge reported that it stayed at the top of the Japanese Mega Drive charts for about six months, helped by a price about £20 below most Mega Drive games.
The sequel, Puyo Puyo Tsu (1994), added the rule that has stayed in the series since: nuisance blobs sent by one player can be cancelled out by the other’s chains before they fall.
In the West
Sega did not sell Puyo Puyo abroad under its own name. In 1993 it became Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine for the Mega Drive and Game Gear, with the villain of the Sonic the Hedgehog games imprisoning “the happy bean folk of Beanville”, as Sega’s own magazine put it. Banpresto and Compile’s Super Famicom version, Super Puyo Puyo, became Nintendo’s Kirby’s Avalanche in North America in 1995 and Kirby’s Ghost Trap in Europe, with characters from HAL Laboratory’s Kirby games. Club Nintendo told German players how to bury opponents “under a mountain of crystal-clear ghost stones”.
Sega’s series
Compile had other games, but Puyo Puyo became its business, and in the late 1990s it was in financial trouble. Wireframe traces the crisis to an expensive business program, Power Acty, launched in 1998, whose failure forced Compile to restructure and sell the Puyo Puyo rights to Sega. Sega Retro adds that the sale came with a loan and a licence for Compile to keep making the games until 2002, which it could not repay; Compile went bankrupt and closed. Sega began making its own Puyo Puyo games in 2001, and Sonic Team rebooted the series with new characters in Puyo Puyo Fever (2003), released abroad as Puyo Pop Fever.
The series has kept going. Sega’s Puyo Puyo Tetris (2014) put the two puzzle games side by side, and Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 followed in 2020. In 2024 D4 Enterprise re-released the original MSX2 and Famicom versions in its Project EGG service, with Sega’s permission. Wireframe called the series “Compile’s most lasting contribution to gaming”.
Sources
- Edge issue 7, April 1994, p. 70: Super Puyo Puyo (Super Famicom; Banpresto, Compile) testscreen: the two-player attack, the comparison with Columns, the Mega Drive release in December 1992 and its chart run, and the Western renaming.
- Sega Visions, December 1993, p. 128: Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine for the Genesis and Game Gear (Beanville; “connect four or more beans”).
- Club Nintendo (Germany), Kirby comic special, 1996, p. 35: Kirby’s Ghost Trap.
- “Compile”, Wireframe issue 25, October 2019, pp. 48–53: the 1991 MSX2 and NES releases; Madou Monogatari; Niitani as designer; the arcade version and tournaments; Power Acty, the sale of the rights to Sega and Compile’s bankruptcy.
- Wireframe issue 44, October 2020, p. 26: Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 and its 2014 predecessor.
- Edge issue 134, March 2004, p. 88: Puyo Pop Fever review.
- Sega Retro, “Puyo Puyo (franchise)”, “Puyo Puyo (1991)”, “Compile” and “Kirby’s Avalanche” (web, secondary): release dates and publishers of the 1991 versions; the 1992 arcade release; the rules and Tsu’s offsetting rule; the sale of the rights around 1998, the 2002 bankruptcy and Fever; Kirby’s Avalanche as a Western version of Super Puyo Puyo; the 2024 Project EGG re-releases. https://segaretro.org/Puyo_Puyo_(franchise)