Remembering Compile: Devil's Crush
Compile developed a few pinball games in their day that remain absolute classics of the genre decades later.
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.
There’s nothing like a real pinball machine, which is part of why they maintain such an allure three-quarters of a century after flippers were first introduced into them. There are virtual pinball games out there that are, essentially, “real” pinball tables played on consoles, computers, phones, tablets, whatever, but with some fancy graphical effects that a physical table isn’t going to pull off. And that can certainly be enjoyable, but it’s a facsimile of the real thing. There are certainly games and systems that come close — or at least close enough for people who are fine with settling a bit —like the 3/4 scale Arcade1Up virtual pinball machines, but even with those, a true pinball machine is unmatched.
Which is not to say that pinball video games are pointless or inferior (and not just because the expertise and costs associated with upkeep of a real machine are very real barriers to entry for them). It’s just that an attempt at a straight 1:1 replication of a pinball table won’t be as satisfying as playing on the actual table for a number of reasons, even if the solenoids in Arcade1Up’s tables certainly helps get it close enough for someone like myself, who lacks the funds, mechanical expertise, and space for one actual at-home table, never mind 10 of them, i.e. how many “tables” you get in one Arcade1Up machine. That’s what makes something like Compile’s trilogy of pinball games so incredible, though. The goal here was anything but replicating pinball tables, but to instead use the basics of pinball to create something that could only truly be pulled off on a video game console instead of on a table. If you’ve enjoyed a pinball video game at some point in the last 30 years, you can most likely thank Compile for that.
The Compile Crush Pinball games — Alien Crush, Devil’s Crush, and Jaki Crush — avoid trying to 100 percent faithfully recreate actual pinball tables, outside of attempting the kind of physics logic and feel you’d get from them. And that focus on avoiding the “reality” of pinball otherwise is both why they succeeded and is where their genius shone through. Each of the three has something unique to offer, which also creates a situation in which each of them is considered the best of the bunch by different people. Alien Crush is the most balanced and forgiving of the three, while Jaki Crush, being the last of the trio, pushes the concepts a bit further and looks great doing it on the Super Famicom. Devil’s Crush is generally the consensus pick for the best of them, however, and might have even been the best-selling pinball video game ever at some point, per Compile’s former president Masamitsu “Moo” Niitani.
Devil’s Crush has just the one table… sort of. It’s actually a series of tables, but the primary one is where you will spend most of your time. It’s three screens tall, with the screen moving up with the ball as you fire it up the table, and each of the screens has its own set of flippers. When all laid out, it looks like a pretty standard pinball table as far as length goes, but you also get a real sense for the art direction and overall design in play here:
Whereas Alien Crush was very much a vehicle for appreciating H.R. Giger’s whole deal, Devil’s Crush makes it look like you’re invading Satan’s medieval fortress. And yes, the game comes with the soundtrack appropriate for such an endeavor. While the title theme is fairly laid back, the main theme, and plenty of those from the bonus rooms, are some killer synth rock that help with the demonic vibe that Compile was going for here:
Other than the visual design, Devil’s Crush might not seem all that special just from looking at the above image of the table all laid out like that. That’s the thing, though: it’s not so much what Devil’s Crush looks like as what it’s hiding under the surface that makes the game as special as it is. Your goal, in terms of completing the game, is to manage to max out the score counter and see an ending featuring a pretty lady holding a huge pinball. But more generally, this is still a pinball game, and an “ending” isn’t really the point. Instead, it’s to see how long you can survive, and to hit everything to see how it reacts. What striking a wall does, what going down a hole opens or triggers or destroys, where those spinning red triangles lead if you get your ball in there. What you see when looking at the table is merely its default state before you’ve altered it with your play, and it all goes beyond what a physical pinball table can. Sure, they can lower a wall or open up a secret path to trigger new scoring mechanisms, increase multipliers, enable multiball, and so on, but you can’t actually teleport to an entirely new table to face off against a boss in a single-attempt challenge that, if successful, will mean huge things for your score.
There are six of these single-screen (and cramped, an intentional design decision that makes them feel even more separate from the main table) sub-tables, each their own challenge with its own goals, and in each case you have to avoid having the ball get by your flippers, or else the bonus room ends. You can make it back there, of course, and you don’t lose a ball for failing a bonus room, but still. It’s not complete unless you manage to take out all of the skulls, or all of the multi-headed dragon, and so on.
Plenty of the logic that makes a “real” pinball game replayable due to its depth and intricacy can be found in Devil’s Crush. Mechanisms for multipliers and lighting up the table exist throughout, with each of the three screens having their own little systems for this sort of thing, which, when enabled, will make you understand how the score counter can run right up against literally a billion points. It’s all of the extra bits that make Devil’s Crush its own thing, however, that showed there was so much more for video game pinball titles to offer than simply trying to be pinball, but on the small screen.
On that scoring note, even with all the multipliers and tricks — such as the different colored balls that are themselves point multipliers — it’ll take you ages to actually max out your score, if you can survive long enough to do it. Which is why Devil’s Crush includes the ability to save your game and resume it at any point, in addition to a password system that can start you off with some points and far more balls to play with, if you’re more interesting in seeing where the game leads to and what it contains than in actually making it happen completely on your own. I love pinball, but I’m not nearly good enough at it to even attempt to “complete” Devil’s Crush. And yet, like with pinball tables, I remain compelled by it, and just enjoy playing it like I do any other pinball title where the high score is the point: it’s just good fun that urges you to keep playing and to try to do better the next time, whether you can “finish” it or not.
Controlling Devil’s Crush is simple enough. Any of the D-pad buttons control the left flippers, while the I button — the face button on the right side of the controller — controls the right flipper. The II button — for those unfamiliar, that’s where the B button would be on an NES controller, with the I being the analog to that pad’s A — is used to tilt the table. Which can be useful for nudging the ball where you need it to go, to help guide it away from your defeat or simply toward a hole you’d like it to fall into, but as with a real pinball table, you’ll be punished for overdoing it with the tilting. You’ll want to attempt to hit everything on screen to see what happens when you do — walls, doors, skulls, evil-looking coffins, whatever, you want to hit it to see what changes or how the action will be scored. The sleeping, helmeted woman’s face that awakens and, over time, transforms more and more into a reptilian creature, eventually having its mouth become a portable to a hidden sub-table, is just the brightest neon flashing table alteration you’ll discover. There are far more where that one came from.
Besides the secrets, there are also just enemies to consider: they’ll pour out from holes in the table and through doors, filling the spaces you’ve cleared, creating more opportunities for intriguing ricochets and ball paths as well as just more points. Hit them with the ball, and they’re defeated, but they’ll be back.
On the title screen, in addition to the passwords and data loading, you can choose to have the ball move Fast or Slow. It’s a comparative thing — the ball isn’t actually “slow” in the latter, it’s just slower than in Fast, which is meant for experienced players who want a little more fast-twitch out of their pinball experience, while Slow gives you a little more time to react. That makes it especially useful for either less experienced players or just those who want a little more relaxed — again, comparatively — time playing. There is also a two-player mode, which lets players take turns after every ball just like on a standard table, in addition to giving Devil’s Crush that little bit of extra replayability.
Compile didn’t keep making pinball games after the Super Famicom’s Jaki Crush for some of the same reasons they had stopped making titles in other established series and genres, which is that those developers had left the company. There’s a reason so much of Compile’s output in their last decade was Disc Station and Puyo Puyo, and it meant that we never got to see what a 3D Compile pinball game on the Playstation, Saturn, and so on would look like. The series did live on without them, however: Compile “merely” developed the Crush games, so the rights belonged elsewhere. Naxat Soft, which would end up parterning with Compile on the Spriggan series of shoot ‘em ups, published Alien Crush, Devil’s Crush, and Jaki Crush in Japan for their initial releases, with NEC — the company that co-owned the Turbografx-16 with Hudson Soft — published the first two titles in North America. You won’t find Compile’s name on the title screen like with so many of their other games: “Naxat Pinball” is what you find under the game’s logo, with “NEC/RED” the lone other credit on that screen. Compile basically ghost developed these games, as would sometimes happen with them when they’d partner with another studio, but hey, it’s no secret that these were their work. (Whereas with something like Cyber Knight, well, you really have to dig to realize that’s actually a Compile game.)
All of this made it a little easier for others to profit off of Compile’s work. Technosoft acquired a licensed to port Devil’s Crush to the Mega Drive in Japan, where it would be renamed Dragon’s Fury to avoid having the word “devil” in the title. Tengen would localize Technosoft’s port for overseas release, and then develop a sequel on their own, Dragon’s Revenge, even though their contribution to the series to that point had been localizing a port done by Technosoft, and they did all of this without any input or contributions from Compile, Naxat, or even Technosoft. Unsurprisingly, it’s considered the worst game in the series, and it isn’t close.
Alien Crush Returns, at least, was more of the Compile-style pinball experience that made their games such a success. It wasn’t developed by Compile, given it released in 2008, five years after the company had shut its doors. But it at least understood everything that made those games work while also trying something new, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was still an enjoyable series entry. Of course, as a WiiWare title, it’s now wiped from existence unless you purchased it years ago, which is only slightly worse than the fate of everything else from the series, which are either also missing entirely or are stuck on older hardware that no longer have digital shops attached — for instance, the version of Devil’s Crush I have is from the Wii U Virtual Console, and if PC Engine games are still sold on the Playstation 3’s digital storefront at all, it’s only in Japan. For whatever reason, Konami decided to only include Alien Crush in the Turbografx-16 Mini, and not Devil’s Crush as well — a confounding oversight, especially given that they’re both exceptional and for different reasons, but also another instance of it not mattering unless you already have one by this writing, considering how rare and expensive that mini console is now.
Despite the difficulty in doing so the legal way, seek out Devil’s Crush if you’ve never played before. There’s a reason that a modern day pinball classic like Demon’s Tilt was both inspired by and draws comparison to Devil’s Crush, with it also feeling like an evolution of Compile’s pinball ideal — that is, to make a video game pinball title that could only exist outside the realm of traditional pinball tables. It’s been over 30 years, and like so much of Compile’s library, it still just feels so great to play, the reasons for its influence on both contemporaries and the future of the industry so clear even now.
This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.
Just spent some time re-arranging my ROM collection(s) for my retro handheld(s)—which I spend more time fussing over than actually playing the games—and this was the first game I loaded up, the MD version that is. Good stuff.
It’s like Pinball DOOM