Remembering Compile: Zanac

Zanac wasn't Compile's first game by any means, and not even its first shoot 'em up, but it's where their real legacy and mark on the industry began.

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.

Xevious is the shoot ‘em up that changed everything for the genre. It guided the direction of effectively everything notable that came after it, in the same way that so many action-adventure games owed a debt to The Legend of Zelda, or platformers to Super Mario Bros., or role-playing games to Dragon Quest. The standards and the expectations of the vertically scrolling shooter were set in 1982, and everything after that was something of a modification to them.

Masato Maegawa, the founder and president of Treasure, once explained it like this in an interview published right before their own classic STG, Ikaruga, released in arcades. “After Xevious, STG developers tried to add items, power-ups, and all manner of gimmicks and contrivances to their new games. Some went the route of making STG games more flashy and outrageous, filling the screen with intricate danmaku patterns that were fun to dodge, or having awesome bombs and explosions, or an interesting backstory and gameworld. But for vertical STGs, even by Xevious we see many gameplay elements perfected… With STG games, it’s not about the system: it’s the level design and enemy placement that really makes them what they are.”

Zanac, released in 1986, is one of those games very clearly influenced by Xevious, and with obvious nods to it included within. Early pre-release versions of the game were even more Xevious-like, in fact, with different weapons needed to defeat enemies on the ground and enemies in the air. As development went on, however, Zanac started to take shape as something else entirely, something significant in its own right that could be more than “just” a slight deviation from Xevious. And that’s because of what Zanac introduced to STGs: procedurally generated enemies.

Xevious had a “rank” system, and while it wasn’t the first shoot ‘em up with one (or even the first Namco shooter with rank), it was also literally Xevious, meaning the exposure to and influence of this particular rank system was greater than any that had come before. Rank is, in short, how the game responds to your own performance: if you’re building up a massive arsenal of power-ups and never dying, a game with a proper rank system isn’t going to just let you keep plowing through it, but will raise the enemy speed, aggressiveness, and even their number in order to keep you feeling challenged. This allows inexperienced players to make their way through something like Xevious while not feeling condescended to —if the game is plenty challenging as is, there’s no need to raise the difficulty in-game — and for more experienced players to not feel as if the game’s challenge is beneath them: it will lower itself or rise to the occasion, depending on what the player themselves, through their actions, suggests is necessary.

Image credit: MobyGames

Zanac’s system was more complicated and involved than what Xevious utilized. It utilized an adaptive AI system, named “Automatic Level Control,” that would calculate, on the fly, what enemies should be showing up, how many of them, how aggressive bullet patterns should be, and so on, based on what weapons you’ve equipped, how powerful those weapons are, how often you’re firing them, how many enemies you failed to defeat, and how long you’ve managed to avoid death despite ever-increasing odds against you. It’s a game that can seem easy until you actually do die, and then suddenly, the fury of the AI doesn’t recede all at once: if you die one time, you’ll probably die two or three times, as you begin to adjust to your lack of upgraded weapons on a screen that’s still full of the foes that arrived to fight a fully powered-up space fighter. Whenever you look at your extra lives and think, “hey, I have a lot of them saved up,” no, you don’t.

There are intricacies to the system, as well. Failure to destroy a boss before the timer reaches zero will actually raise the ALC as punishment. Destroying recon craft will lower it, even if you’re armed to the teeth when you do it. Destroy a boss and then begin a new level, and you’ll get a little bit of a reset, so it’s not a constant rise until the game becomes unplayable. You’ll see the changes happen in real-time, though, especially if you’ve got a sense of how these things should work in practice. It’s all amazing that something this intricate was put in place back in 1986, on a platform, the MSX, that could barely handle scrolling without problem, never mind these kinds of incessant calculations.

Zanac was largely the work of just a handful of developers, with eight total listed in its credits, and a couple of others who didn’t make it even that far. Takayuki Hirono was the game’s designer and programmer, along with Compile’s founder and president, Masamitsi Niitani, but this wasn’t the case at first. The aforementioned early version of Zanac was programmed and designed by an unnamed Compile developer, who stepped away from the project for unknown reasons, which opened the door for Satoshi Fujijima, aka “Pac” — sometimes to save space and sometimes because companies wanted to hide their talent from other studios, fake names were often used in game credits, and at Compile, those names were often three-letter arcade game names like “Pac” or Niitani’s “Moo.” Anyway, Fujijima began to move the game away from its more Xevious-like elements, and introduced the power chips you would collect to upgrade your primary weapon: that became a staple of Compile shooters, that ended up added in by someone who didn’t even stick around on the Zanac project long enough to end up in the game’s credits!

After Fujishima was also pulled away from Zanac is when Hirono came into the picture, per his own recollection. And Hirono would end up being involved in a significant portion of Compile’s shoot ‘em ups from here on out, with credits as a programmer on the various versions of Zanac, Aleste, Aleste 2, Blazing Lazers, Gun-Nac, Super Aleste, MUSHA, Robo Aleste, Spriggan Mark 2, and Power Strike II, design credits on quite a few of those, as well as Sylphia, and as a supervisor on some of those titles, as well as Seirei Senshin Spriggan and GG Aleste. Hirono went from the third designer attached to what ended up being a highly influential shooter, to one of the primary names you’d think of when discussing Compile’s shooters. Kind of incredible to think that he got his shot here in large part because two others had to leave the role first, considering how tied into the company’s future he was after this.

While Fujijima added the one staple of Compile shooters with the power chips and upgradeable primary weapon, Hirono moved to add another: an absurdly large selection of guns to choose from. In the case of the original Zanac, there isn’t that much differentiation between them, but upgrading did allow for some noticeable differences between them. There are eight of these secondary weapons, some of which have a limit to how many times they can be used before they run out, all represented by a number. It’s not pretty, but it does help you keep track of what does what and which numbers you’ve already tried out.

When Hirono took over, there were just the four weapons, and they were mostly variations on the standard shot, as well as an air-to-ground attack that was unnecessary after Fujijima’s changes to the game. That number changed to eight, and again, while they weren’t quite as different as they would be even by the time of the first Aleste, it was still something, especially as weapons changed as they upgraded. Like the third subweapon, for instance, is a single rotating ball of energy helping protect your ship from foes and incoming bullets, but it grows in number as it powers up, becoming a rapidly rotating shield that’s also a weapon around your ship, and in its final form, is actually two rapidly rotating shields made up of multiple energy orbs. You can see why things get hairy when you die and lose your upgrades, because you basically become unstoppable until you do get stopped. And then you’re even more stoppable until you can power back up.

Thanks to little hidden tricks like an ability to instantly power up to max, and a plethora of weapon upgrades and choices around, you can get back to where you were so long as you survive that initial onslaught of unadjusted foes. That trick, by the way, is a real gamble: power chips are hidden inside boxes that float down from the top of the screen. Not every box has a chip in it, but when you shoot a box, it’ll begin to flash, and you’ll be able to see what’s inside before committing to shooting it further. If you decide to just risk it and ram into the box without that preview, however, and it contains a chip, you’ll receive not just one chip, but five at once, powering up your primary shot all the way so that it fires a faster moving multi-shot instead of a slow single-fire one.

And this risk-and-reward system came out of an issue arising from the hardware of the Famicom, which is where Zanac was first ported after its MSX release. As Hirono tells it:

You see, in the MSX version, the boxes were all white, but by shooting them you could change their color to red, green, or blue, which let you know what they contained within. On the Famicom, however, changing the color of individual sprites like that on the fly was very difficult because of the way the Famicom handled color via palettes. So we changed it so the box would flash when it was shot, and while it was flashing you could see the chip within.

The problem was fixed… or so we thought! The new problem was, when there were too many sprites on the screen, you’d get sprite flicker, and that messed with the box flashing effect.

Say you shot a box, and it started flashing, showing you a chip was inside. The sprite flicker had the unfortunate effect of making that box disappear entirely—so the player thought a chip was there ripe for the taking, but when he went to get it he would die from the collision with the box. We were freaking out, but then an unlikely solution occurred to us. Why not make it so the player could just pick up the chips from a flashing box (without needing to destroy it completely)? That would fix the problem, but then a further idea came: what if we made it so it was ok to collide with any boxes that contained chips, regardless of whether they had been shot (were flashing) or not…? That would make it a gamble, of course, but if you won the gamble then we could reward the player.

There are multiple changes between the MSX and Famicom versions of Zanac, and most are inarguably for the better. The MSX version is difficult, potentially overly so, but the balance in the Famicom one is better, making it more approachable — and the ALC can handle the rest to ensure that it’s still a challenge for those looking for it. It just feels a lot less like slamming into a wall from the start, which the MSX one could be for some. One thing that made the Famicom (and eventual NES) version inherently easier is that it was designed with a wider play area in mind. The MSX had a sidebar containing score and ALC information and the like taking up space and narrowing the playfield so that it looked like a vertically oriented vertical shoot ‘em up: the Famicom edition, however, is a horizontally oriented vertical shoot ‘em up, with much more space to move around. Considering how filled the screen gets with enemies and bullets — much more than you’d imagine for 1986 — that extra navigable space can be a lifesaver.

The MSX version of Zanac.

The Famicom version of Zanac. Image credits: MobyGames

Because of the ALC, because of tricks and secrets like the instant power-up system, Zanac remains more than just a curio these 37 years later. It might seem slow-moving in comparison to more modern shoot ‘em ups, but there’s still a lot here to enjoy, and you can see the how and why of its influence in short order. And for the time, the scrolling was actually pretty fast! The MSX was notoriously choppy when it scrolled, but if scrolling was sped up, it would work more smoothly than usual, and doing so even, in some circumstances as noted in the linked interview of Hirono, created an effect not unlike parallax scrolling. So Zanac was faster to keep things moving smoothly, and its speed was notable at the time. Basically, the kind of technical mastery Compile would come to be known for, the kind that let them put a game like Gun-Nac on the aging NES hardware while they were already developing for 16-bit systems.

Now, even though it’s still perfectly playable for fans of old-school shooters, Zanac is still very much an old-school shooter. Post-Xevious and all, yes, but even contemporary all-timers like R-Type and Gradius and still have some era-adjusted quibbles to contend with in the present, so no one is immune. There have been multiple updates to Zanac over the years, the most notable of which would be contained within the Japanese and Playstation exclusive, Zanac X Zanac. There are two Zanacs in the title, because it’s quite literally twice the Zanac. The Famicom version is contained within, both in its North American ROM and Japanese Famicom Disk System forms, while there’s also a “Special” edition that’s something of a challenge mode. In addition, Zanac Neo, a 2001 remake of Zanac that gives it a massive facelift and more besides, is the titular other Zanac.

In Zanac Neo, there are now three ships to choose from rather than the one, and a scoring system utilizing a combo meter that requires you defeat everything on screen in order to keep it going, a la (but before the release of) Eschatos, as well as a beam that powers up and can help increase score multipliers when successfully used. Visually, polygons have been implemented in addition to the sprites, and the backgrounds are more varied and less obviously in tribute to Xevious. It’s a real treat for fans of Zanac, though, it’s unsurprising that it didn’t become a hit in 2001 when it released. It entered the marketplace at a time before this kind of throwback, retro re-release would be fully appreciated, and in a genre that had retreated ever further into nichedom and complication at this point. Something as elegant as this reminder of 1986 stood no chance, upgraded and updated or no, so it’s no surprise that Zanac X Zanac would be Compile’s final shoot ‘em up before their closure two years later.

This would not be the last of Zanac, however. It received a re-release on the Wii Virtual Console, and D4 Enterprises, after acquiring a not-insignificant portion of Compile’s library, developed a mobile phone version of the game for Japanese audiences. Which is now available worldwide on the Switch through the G-Mode Archives series. It’s not the most enjoyable version of Zanac going, since it was designed with the limitations of mobile phones in mind, but it does include a smoother “Arrange” experience in terms of both gameplay and in actual performance, and unless you have a Playstation 3 with which you can still purchase Zanac X Zanac from that system’s digital storefront, well, it might be your only choice for an updated version of the game. If you do have a PS3, well, go buy Zanac X Zanac, because you can pay a few bucks for a digital version there, or you can pay about $150 for a loose disc, per Price Charting’s tracking as of this writing. Oh, and it’s only for Japanese Playstations, but the digital release was a worldwide one. The choices seem pretty clear.

Zanac isn’t the best Compile shoot ‘em up, not by a long shot, but it’s a vitally important one. It kickstarted a wave of some truly excellent shooters from the company in a period of time that was, in reality, a lot briefer than what they were able to produce within it suggests. It was a console/computer-exclusive shoot ‘em up that received respect even from the arcade crowd for what it achieved, according to Niitani himself. The adaptive AI system was another step in the development of STG rank, a way to both build on and differentiate itself from Xevious and the games it so directly inspired, which would inevitably lead to masterpieces like Battle Garegga (which itself was developed at a company founded by ex-Compile employees) at the time of the next major transition for the genre. It’s a key title in both Compile’s and shooter history, and you should at least know about its existence and what it achieved, if not give it a shot for yourself.

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