Compile

~ the goodbye ~

Masamitsu Niitani had been working for Hiroshima Electric Railway when he founded Compile on 7 April 1982 in the Minami ward of Hiroshima, a long way from where the Japanese software industry was concentrated. For its first decade the company made shooters, and it made them well enough that the platform holders used them as demonstrations. Zanac on the MSX in 1986 adjusted its own difficulty to how well you were playing. Blazing Lazers on the PC Engine in 1989 was one of the games NEC pointed at when arguing its console was worth buying.

Puyo Puyo arrived on the MSX in 1991, built out of characters from Compile's own Madou Monogatari role playing games. It went to arcades and then to everything else, and by the middle of the decade it was one of the few puzzle games in Japan that could be discussed in the same sentence as Tetris. Compile also ran Disc Station, a disk magazine that started in 1988 and kept going for thirteen years, shipping small games and demos on a schedule closer to a publication than a product line.

Outside Japan almost none of this had Compile's name on it. Puyo Puyo reached western consoles wearing other companies' characters entirely: Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine on the Mega Drive and Kirby's Avalanche on the Super Nintendo are the same game with the cast replaced. Both look like a Sega product and a Nintendo product respectively, and neither one tells you a studio in Hiroshima designed it.

So the honest version of my distance here is not that the game failed to reach me. It is that i had no way of knowing the game i was looking at was the same game, or that it had an author. The most successful thing Compile ever built traveled internationally under a series of borrowed faces, and the company underneath stayed anonymous the whole way.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the disk magazine ~

Disc Station deserves its own paragraph because nothing quite like it survived the transition to CD. It went out on floppies for the MSX first and later for Windows, carrying playable material rather than screenshots, and it ran monthly or seasonally for over a decade. It functioned as a place to put work that was too small to sell and too finished to throw away.

It also cost money to produce and generated very little, which is roughly the story of Compile's whole management. The company hired aggressively, expanded into offices it did not need, and treated a run of hits as a permanent condition.

~ what it pawned ~

In February 1998 Compile borrowed a billion yen from Sega and put the Puyo Puyo rights up as collateral, with purchase rights attached. That is the sentence the rest of the company's history hangs on. A month later, on 18 March 1998, it filed for a compulsory settlement at the Hiroshima District Court with debts of roughly 7.5 billion yen, the largest failure the Japanese games industry had produced up to that point.

Sega ended up with the series and then licensed it back, letting Compile keep making Puyo Puyo games until August 2002. For four years the company shipped its own franchise as a tenant. When the license expired there was no follow-up product and no reason left for anyone to extend further credit.

~ the day it died ~

The headquarters had moved out of Hiroshima years earlier and by the end it was in Taito ward in Tokyo, each relocation smaller than the one before it. The Tokyo District Court declared bankruptcy on 6 November 2003 and the formal dissolution followed on 17 February 2004.

The shoot em up staff largely went to MileStone. Niitani himself ended up at Compile Heart, a subsidiary Idea Factory founded on 2 June 2006 which licensed the name without being a continuation of the company, and he retired from it in December 2012. Sega still publishes Puyo Puyo, more than two decades after taking it as security on a loan.

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