Remembering Compile: It's been 20 years since Compile closed its doors

Compile left its mark across multiple genres, developing loads of games that are still a blast decades later, and their successor studios have helped keep the spirit of the original alive.

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.

Compile lasted for just over two decades in the video game industry, and those years were often tough ones. From nearly the beginning, they were in search of a breakout game that would alleviate financial concerns, and spent a considerable amount of their development time working on ports and contract development in order to spend the months (and sometimes years) they wanted to on their original games. The quality was almost always there, and positive critical reception, too, but the sales never quite reached the level they needed to in order to leave the financial precarity behind. And then, on November 6, 2003, Compile shut down following a filing for bankruptcy the previous year.

Before that bankruptcy and the final scattering of Compile’s remaining staff, however, came highly influential shoot ‘em ups, worldwide success in the puzzle genre, role-playing games, dungeon crawlers, action-adventure games, a trio of excellent virtual pinball titles, and more. Compile consistently released original games for less than two decades, but the library they left behind is full of classics and ambition, successful ideas and intriguing ones. And while Compile itself closed down, a number of studios were almost immediately founded by its former employees, each carrying on different parts of Compile’s legacy for the past 20 years.

Compile was making notable works nearly from the beginning. While founder and original sole full-time employee, Masamitsu Niitani, started the company to make business software, video games soon became the focus thanks to the wave of Japanese consoles released one after the other in the early 80s. One of those games, A.E., was developed in 1982 for Atari 8-bit computers: according to publisher Broderbund’s co-founder Doug Carlston, it was the first game developed by a Japanese studio for those systems. Much of the output of Programmers-3 Inc. — Compile’s pre-Compile name — were ports of existing games to other systems, however, and that carried on through Compile’s early years, as well. As Niitani explained in a 1998 interview released in the book, Complete Compile, “We ported a lot of MSX games to Sega consoles back then. Only Compile was doing that kind of work. And with the SC-3000 and the MSX being so similar, it was two for the price of one… We were always looking for low-cost, high-return business. (laughs).”

Zanac was where Compile started to show off far more than just a talent for porting. It wasn’t their first original game, nor their first enjoyable one by any means, but Zanac was innovative. Zanac wasn’t the first shoot ‘em up to include some kind of adaptive game intelligence into its systems, as that had been going on in some form since the days of Namco’s Galaxian, and 1982’s Xevious brought the idea of “rank,” which determines how difficult your run in an STG is going to be based on your playing of it, into sharper focus for a large audience. Zanac would first release in the summer of 1986 for the MSX (and then again in the fall for the Famicom Disk System), and it built on rank systems in a meaningful and influential way.

Rather than just making enemies more aggressive the longer you survived a la Xevious and Fantasy Zone, Zanac procedurally generated its enemies and enemy formations differently depending on factors such as which weapons you had equipped, how strong they were, and how successful you had been at staying alive. Zanac, and its successors in the Aleste series, are actually easier to play if you avoid powering all the way up: this allows players with less skill or experience in the genre a chance at completing the game, and for experienced players looking for a game to ruin them through challenge to get what they’re looking for, as well.

This kind of adaptive system was used in many other Compile shoot ‘em ups going forward, and they developed a fairly clear style between Aleste, one-offs like Gunhed/Blazing Lazers, Seirei Senshin Spriggan, and others in the genre. Almost always a plethora of weapons to choose from, upgrade systems that required the player experiment to figure out their preferred loadout, oftentimes a primary and secondary weapon which upgraded in different ways and achieved different goals, and tons of enemies. Dodging bullets was required in Compile’s shooters, but the real challenge was in avoiding the sometimes overwhelming number of enemies that took up precious real estate on your screen. The style was beloved enough by both the people playing the games and other developers that it ended up being copied outright, such as when Hudson Soft decided that the PC Engine’s Star Soldier games should be more like Blazing Lazers than the previous Star Soldier titles, or when Naxat Soft either partnered with Compile to create new shooters, or, like with Hudson, had Compile-style shooters made by studios that weren’t Compile.

Compile ended up leaving the shoot ‘em up space in the early 90s, despite their success in the field. That had to do with the developers responsible for so many of their classic STGs departing the studio, many of whom would go on to found Raizing, which would develop some killer shooters like the all-timer, Battle Garegga. And it wasn’t the first time this had gone down, either: other than their shooters, Compile was known for their dungeon crawler series, Madou Monogatari, as well as its even-better-known spin-off puzzle franchise, Puyo Puyo. And by the time of Niitani’s 1998 interview on Compile, the developers responsible for almost all of those games had left:

We were absorbed in it, both myself and the staff. We'd often spend 2 years working on a single title, but that’s because we wanted our games to be solid. It may not have made us rich, but it was satisfying. And as a company, I think we did a good job. To be honest, though, the late 80s was a challenging time for us. That’s why we lost so many staff then. Today, we still have about a dozen of those staff employed at Compile, but the majority quit then.

…

The people who made Zanac and Alien Crush are no longer here. Even for Puyo Puyo, only part of the staff remains.

Compile could keep making Puyo Puyo — and had to keep making Puyo Puyo to stay afloat — but some series had lost all of the staff familiar with what went into making those games. Sting, founded in 1989, came out of the late-80s exodus of employees that Niitani spoke of. Takeshi Santou, a sound engineer from Compile who often worked alongside Masatomo Miyamoto, founded the studio, which would go on to create some truly memorable and non-traditional RPGs and genre-mashing titles like Baroque, Yggdra Union, and Knights in the Nightmare. Then, another wave of developers were lost as Compile, with the golden age of shoot ‘em ups as something you made money on developing coming to an end, shifted their focus more to Puyo Puyo — that’s how Raizing ended up being formed, and even more niche shooters for dedicated fans began to be developed in greater numbers.

It wasn’t just developers that Compile lost, but even the rights to their own work. Puyo Puyo was the cash cow, a puzzle game with broad, worldwide popularity that appeared on multiple platforms each time out. Kirby’s Avalanche and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine were both licensed ports of Puyo Puyo, and games like Puyo Puyo Sun appeared on basically every conceivable platform of the day, including arcade. This success led Compile to expand and spend considerable resources on getting back into business software to go with their game development, but instead, they racked up nearly $60 million in debt when collaborative business software Power Acty did not catch on as expected. In March of 1998, Compile filed for bankruptcy to right their financial ship. They would sell the rights to Puyo Puyo to their longtime partner Sega as part of this plan to get out of the red, but would retain use rights until August of 2002 to help with that goal. Compile believed selling off their flagship franchise to be a temporary move until they could get the money back to repurchase the source of their most consistent success, but August 2002 came, and the cash wasn’t there. Compile would close a little over a year later, their final game unfinished, and Sega, to this day, has the rights to Puyo Puyo, which is now one of their best-selling franchises.

This might have been the end of Compile as a company, but throughout November, you’ll see how Compile’s ambitious spirit and off-kilter ideas, as well as the enjoyment of the games that combination created, has persisted. Despite being gone for two decades now, Compile’s style is still influential. Indie developers like Terrarin draw obvious (and successful) inspiration from the Compile style in their own shoot ‘em ups, while M2 purchased the rights to the Aleste series to both re-release the classics and create new ones that feel like a natural extension of Compile’s own work. Gun Stream, an upcoming Game Gear STG, is being made by a former Compile developer, Hiroki Kodama (and it already has a “caravan” mode preview release!) Puyo Puyo is still going strong under Sega’s watch, and has even partnered multiple times with the juggernaut of the genre, Tetris. Sting is still active, as is Compile Heart, an RPG-heavy studio formed by former Compile developers, and Compile’s shoot ‘em up developers have moved on from Raizing to Milestone to RS34, seemingly never letting a studio shuttering stop them from making more and more out there and interesting shooters.

Individual Compile games will get the spotlight for the next month, as will, in some cases, entire series. There will be obvious (to some) entries spotlighting Compile’s technical skill and expertise, some less obvious ones that need attention here because the concept is just so strange as to merit a write up, and some that fit a little bit in both camps. Compile was known best for one specific puzzle series and for their early shoot ‘em ups, but they were much more than just those two things, to the point it can’t truly all fit in just one month. But let’s try to squeeze as much in as we can.

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