Remembering Compile: Compile is closed, but Compile lives on

The studio itself has been shut down for 20 years now, but that doesn't mean its former developers stopped working.

Compile, founded in the early 1980s, was a standout developer in its day. That day is long past now, however: as of November 2023, it’s already been 20 years since the studio closed its doors. In its over two decades, though, Compile showed off influential talent, and became the start of a family tree of developers across multiple genres that’s still growing today. Throughout November, the focus will be on Compile’s games, its series, its influence, and the studios that were born from this developer. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Years before Compile filed for bankruptcy, years before they inevitably shut down, the company struggled with their financials. This was often self-inflicted, in the sense they made the games they wanted to make for the systems they wanted to make them for, and took as long as they needed to do so. Which is to say, it was self-inflicted for admirable reasons. It would sometimes interrupt the cash flow, though, which led to Compile developers becoming ex-Compile developers in order to strike out on their own.

They lost their dungeon crawler developers first, in 1989. Then the ones who made their trio of pinball games for Naxat Soft. Then, in 1993, it was the majority of their shoot ‘em up developers that departed, and, while Compile would keep making Puyo Puyo titles, the people originally responsible for those games left, too. This is not to say that Compile lacked talented developers or worthwhile ideas in the latter half of the 90s due to all of these exits. When the company’s doors closed, they were still putting out intriguing Disc Station titles, working on a spiritual successor to Puyo Puyo since they had lost the rights to it to Sega, and had released Guru Logi Champ and Zanac X Zanac, which included the modern and high-quality update to Zanac, Zanac Neo, as their final retail titles. There was still creative juice left at Compile, but no cash. And so, Compile closed its doors.

What all of these various exoduses from Compile meant, though, is that the studio’s family tree is massive, and, like Compile itself, branched out genre-wise. Takeshi Santou was a sound engineer with Compile, and he left the company in 1989, along with other developers, to form Sting. Sting is responsible for some truly great games like Baroque, Yggdra Union, Knights in the Nightmare. Their titles usually have some kind of twist to them, in the way Compile’s so often did. Baroque isn’t “just” a dungeon crawler, but is a deeply unsettling first-person dungeon crawler focused on horror. Dying is a vital part of the game: you can beat Baroque in an afternoon if you avoid combat and rush through to the top of the tower in order to try to kill God, as you’ve been tasked to do by an angel, but that misses the point of the game. Each death reveals more of the game to you, as more and different NPCs arrive on the scene to populate the procedurally-generated dungeon floors, revealing more of the game’s plot to you and the world its story is being told within as you go.

Image credit: MobyGames

Riviera: The Promised Land is a harem-style dating-sim strategy RPG. Knights in the Nightmare is a “strategy-shooter role-playing game,” a bullet hell RPG where you have to determine a tactical plan before heading into battles where you have so many projectiles to dodge. The Dokapon Kingdom games are role-playing board games, with battle royales and minigames and a spinner in addition to loads of RPG trappings. Sting makes a point of genre-mashing and nonconventional approaches to conventional games, and while they’re certainly a developer for a niche audience, they’re also still making games today — in fact, they’ve been around longer than Compile was.

When a number of shoot ‘em up veterans left Compile in 1993, they formed Raizing with ex-Toaplan devs — Toaplan was already approaching its own end at this point, and not every developer waited until the doors actually closed to make their exit. Raizing — now known as Eighting or 8ting — is still active (and in fact ported Pikmin 3 to the Switch and then co-developed 2023’s Pikmin 4 with Nintendo), but they aren’t making shooters any longer. That era lasted for less than a decade before many of those shoot ‘em up developers ended up elsewhere (such as Cave), but before it ended, Raizing, too, made memorable games that were often just a bit different than expectations.

Shippu Mahou Daisakusen is known as Kingdom Grand Prix in English: it’s a shoot ‘em up, of course, but it’s also a racing game. You press the fire buttons to attack enemies, and hold them down to accelerate, with your goal being both the destruction of those trying to destroy you, as well as finishing ahead of your rivals in the race. Battle Garegga might seem more straightforward than a racing STG at first, but it’s a masterpiece that balanced scoring and survival in a way that had never been done before, and still hasn’t otherwise: in order to live, in order to make it to the end, you had to intentionally kill yourself at the most strategic moments. It took the rank system that had been iterated on by some of Compile’s own work, such as in Zanac and Aleste with the “Automatic Level Control,” and sent it into overdrive. You had to score points to gain extends or else you’d lose, but scoring points meant raising the difficulty, which meant you had to then die on purpose to lower the difficulty. And since you needed more points for extends, and doing nothing still raised the rank, well. What a game.

Remaining active and open sadly has not been the fate for every studio staffed by ex-Compile employees, however. Milestone Inc. formed in April of 2003, half-a-year before Compile finally called it quits. They’d just miss a decade of existence themselves, and also closed due to financial issues, though, these were of a different sort than Compile’s.

Milestone was founded by the Compile developers still interested in making shoot ‘em ups, but they didn’t want to make traditional ones. No, Milestone essentially wanted to make niche shooters, and when I say that I do mean niche-within-a-niche. On top of this emphasis on shoot ‘em ups that might not even appeal to the majority of genre fans due to the art style, gameplay structures, and the actual gameplay, Milestone also put their games on unpopular platforms that were sometimes beyond their peak. If you somehow needed proof there were ex-Compile employees in the mix, well, there you go.

Milestone’s initial games released for the Sega NAOMI arcade hardware, with ports to the Dreamcast beginning in 2004: Sega’s final console had already been discontinued worldwide for three years by that point, but it did still receive official, licensed releases in Japan for years after. In fact, the last of them was a Milestone game: Karous, a shoot ‘em up, released on March 8, 2007. Milestone would get out of their habit of releasing Dreamcast and GameCube games, with much of their history spent developing Japan-exclusive Nintendo DS games, until their closure in the spring of 2013. Their president, Hiroshi Kimura, was arrested for illegal financial activities involving the sale of shares in another company, MS Bio Energy: both companies would shutter because of this.

Milestone’s developers would pick themselves up off the floor and join another studio, Klon, in the wake of this, before leaving and forming their own: RS34. This new venture acquired the rights to Milestone’s games, too, so in a way it’s as if the studio simply lost its president and then renamed itself, which feels even more true when you realize that RS34’s focus has very much been on franchises that Milestone created, such as Radirgy, Illvelo, and Karous.

Not all of the former Compile developers became Milestone developers as the studio was closing. Initially, those still there after the Milestone bunch left were working on a puzzle game, Pochi and Nyaa, which was supposed to be the spiritual successor and potential replacement for Puyo Puyo, Compile’s flagship franchise that they had been forced to sell to Sega when they filed for bankruptcy. And then, more importantly and more damning to their future, couldn’t scrape together the money to buy back from Sega when the time came, either. Pochi and Nyaa was being developed for the Neo Geo CD in partnership with Taito, but Compile was forced to close down before the game was completed. Instead, Masamitsu Niitani, president and founder of Compile, formed a new studio after Compile’s closure for two reasons: to maintain control of intellectual property, and to complete Pochi and Nyaa. This studio, Aiky, has just two games to their credit: Pochi and Nyaa on the Neo Geo CD as originally intended, and then a Japan-only Playstation 2 version of the game, which included a number of improvements and changes, as well as additional characters.

Just over one year after Pochi and Nyaa’s expanded edition released for the PS2, Aiky sold Compile’s various intellectual properties to D4 Enterprises, which is how so many Compile games have ended up on D4’s subscription service for classic games, Project EGG. (And why D4 was able to create a successor game to Guru Logi Champ in Snapdots.)

Niitani, along with additional ex-Compile developers, would then go on to found Compile Heart, a subsidiary of Idea Factory — itself formed by ex-Data East developers — in 2006, and remain atop its management structure until he retired from the role in 2012. Compile Heart is mostly known for its role-playing games like Hyperdimension Neptunia, the Record of Agarest War strategy/dating sim series, and the Mary Skelter dungeon crawlers. If you’ve never played these games, just know that this is the same developer who made a game called “Moe Chronicle,” and you’ll get a sense of what you’re in for. If you know what someone means they say a kind of weird RPG is a 7/10 game as a compliment, well, that’s been Compile Heart’s deal for 17 years now. Moe-obsessed, awkwardly horny role-playing games with sometimes fascinating gameplay systems attached, sometimes popular enough to be spun out into other media. None of that is said as a negative: these games have an audience, and it’s obviously a significant enough one for Compile Heart to keep making these games and new series with similar vibes, and for nearing two decades now.

It wouldn’t be a Niitani company without a puzzle game, though, and Compile Heart made one of those, as well. Octomania released in arcades (also on NAOMI hardware) and then was ported to the Wii. While it didn’t take off like Puyo Puyo did — to be fair, few puzzle games in history have — like the other efforts of Niitani’s various studios, Octomania was still a fine and entertaining effort, clearly made by developers who understand what makes a puzzle game work.

Compile Heart also managed what Compile did not, which was to regain access to the rights to much of Compile’s own history. Puyo Puyo is still out of reach, as that’s Sega’s, but D4 has entered into multiple agreements with Compile Heart to allow for riffs on Compile’s work, such as the Madou Monogatari-esque Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God, or outright sequels, like with the recently announced Madou Monogatari 4 that’s being published by Compile Heart and developed by — wait for it — Sting, which includes former Compile developers to this day. Niitani might have retired from his role as president at Compile Heart over a decade ago, but the new person chosen for the role in 2023, Naoto Tominaga, is former Compile, too, while Hikaru Yasui, the new director of Compile Heart, isn’t former Compile but is former Sting. Given that, it’s no wonder that there was this push for the partnership with Sting and D4 — and Sega, who owns the Madou Monogatari characters as part of the Puyo Puyo deal — to make the first numbered entry in the dungeon crawler franchise in decades.

While Niitani retired from management in 2012, he actually formed another studio a few years later, in 2016. Known as Compile Maru, it’s essentially a return to what Niitani was doing in the earliest days of Compile when it was just him and whatever part-time help he’d bring aboard. Compile Maru has developed two games so far: Nyoki Nyoki: Tabidachi Hen for the Nintendo 3DS, which resembles Pochi and Nyaa, and Dominon for Project EGG, which is a puzzler featuring dominoes. It’s obviously a small-scale operation and all, but it’s good to see that Niitani, who was there from the day Compile formed until the day it closed, remains in the industry in spite of the trouble his most enduring creation faced throughout its two decades.

Even Aleste lives on now, post-Compile. D4 sold the rights to the series to M2, a studio that’s mostly known for extraordinary ports of classic games, but does dabble into the realm of new on occasion, as well. GG Aleste 3 is a thing of beauty developed for the Game Gear in 2020, and released as part of M2’s Aleste Collection, which is part of their ShotTriggers series. Senjin Aleste is an arcade Aleste title, released in 2021, and M2 is still at work on Aleste Branch, which is expected to release for various consoles in 2024. In addition, M2 is partnering with Compile Heart to make a shoot ‘em up in “late-2024” as well — M2 is certainly familiar with the Compile style of shooter, so what better partner to have than they if the most direct successor to Compile is getting back into that genre after decades away?

This also isn’t the only M2-related reunion involving Compile. Cat Hui Trading is a studio founded by Takayuki Komabayashi, formerly of M2 (among other things, and their current project is a shoot ‘em up for the Famicom, titled Chouyoku Senki Estique, or, Changeable Guardian Estique. Takayuki Hirono, Hiroki Kodama, and Satoshi Fujishima — all former Compile, all with shoot ‘em up credits for that company on their résumés. Fujishima, while working on Zanac, introduced the Power Chips that would become a staple of Compile’s shooters. Hirono took over on Zanac after Fujishima exited the project, and greatly expanded the ship’s arsenal and weapon options — he was the programmer, designer, and/or supervisor on the majority of Compile’s shoot ‘em ups from that point forward, and with good reason. And Kodama was the designer and artist for the Compile-developed GG Aleste titles on the Game Gear: in short, there’s an absurd collection of knowledge of 8-bit shoot ‘em up development in place here, decades after both the Famicom stopped seeing official releases and Compile moved on from 8-bit tech.

Kodama is also developing another 8-bit shoot ‘em up — this one for the Game Gear — known as Gun Stream, alongside former Hudson Soft composer Takeaki Kunimoto, who composed for some of their early shooters like Star Soldier. Gun Stream already has a challenge version, caravan-style, that’s out in the wild in limited numbers. But a full game release is expected in 2024. Like with Changeable Guardian Estique, one hopes that these aren’t just relegated to the retro systems they were developed for, and instead see a wide release on modern platforms, too.

Compile is gone. Compile’s former employees, clearly, are not. If anything, they’re mostly as prolific as they’ve ever been, undaunted by the changing tastes of gamers and publishers that force pivots and closures. Continuing on, in one form or another, to continue to make games that contain anywhere from a little bit to a clear demonstration of the kind of spirit that made Compile’s games so special in the first place. We could stand to have more of Compile’s library available in the present, and in places besides just Project EGG. Compile Heart’s change of direction hopefully means they’re expanding beyond the moe-focused RPG development they’ve been known for. And this reemergence of not just Compile shooters, but the people who made them, is excellent news even if they don’t end up releasing worldwide or on modern platforms. Though, again, do that.

Compile might have closed, but between their influence both during and after their existence, and the persistence of the studios that sprung forth from them to make the games they want to make where they want to make them, we’ve at least managed something of a renaissance period for their works. And hopefully it’s one that lasts.

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