Compile

Japan · Founded 1982 · Developer

The Hiroshima studio that made some of the fastest shoot-'em-ups of the 8- and 16-bit eras — Zanac, Aleste, MUSHA — and then invented Puyo Puyo, the hit that outlived the company.

Masamitsu Niitani founded Compile on 7 April 1982. Through the 1980s it built a reputation for vertical shooters that were faster and more technically ambitious than their hardware suggested: Zanac (1986) adjusted its difficulty to the player's performance, the Aleste series pushed the MSX and Sega Master System, and Blazing Lazers (1989) for the PC Engine and M.U.S.H.A. (1990) for the Mega Drive remain among the most admired shooters on those platforms. Compile also developed the Madō Monogatari RPG series, and in 1991 it took that series' characters into a falling-block puzzle game for the MSX. Puyo Puyo, in which players link four or more coloured blobs to clear them and send garbage to an opponent, became Compile's defining hit in Japan. In the West it reached players re-themed as Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine and Kirby's Avalanche. The company also published a disk magazine, Disc Station, distributing smaller games across Japanese computer formats. Over-expansion in the 1990s left Compile in serious financial trouble. It restructured in 1998, selling the rights to Puyo Puyo to Sega, and went bankrupt on 6 November 2003. Its remaining properties passed to successor companies including Compile Heart and D4 Enterprise, and Niitani later founded Compile Maru in 2016.