Published in All About Series Vol. 2 – Puyo Puyo (December 30, 1993). Reprint of a conversation originally featured in Micom Basic Magazine between two of its editors and two key Puyo Puyo developers from Compile.
We reached out to have a discussion with Tsukamoto and Morita, members of the development staff at Compile who brought us Puyo Puyo. It’s packed to the brim with insider stories, secret info, and all sorts of other fun topics the developers are revealing for the first time. If you don’t read this, you’re going to regret it. (This interview was held December 7th, 1992. It has also been slightly revised compared to the version published in Micom Basic Magazine’s February 1993 issue.)
Until Puyo Puyo was born
Yamashita: Let’s start by talking about the events leading up to Puyo Puyo being created.
Morita: At first, it was a completely different game. It was called “Dohminoes”, with dominoes numbered 1 through 6 acting like Tetris blocks, and if you line up 1s they would all clear, and it wasn’t fun at all. By the way, the development team’s name at the time was “the assembly for creating Dohminoes”, which was also uncool (laughs). So, we ended up starting over, shifting the staff around, and held a planning meeting regarding what kind of falling block game to make. That’s when Puyo Puyo first appeared.
[Compile Maru, a company founded in 2016 by Compile’s founder Masamitsu Niitani, released “Dominon” on D4Enterprise’s Project EGG service for retro PC games in 2017. This is based on the “Dohminoes” concept, with the goal being matching three consecutive numbers in a row (with 6 wrapping back around to 1) to clear them. “Frankly, it sucks.”]
Tsukamoto: It originally looked too much like other falling block puzzle games, but we really stressed over creating something original.
Yamashita: Why was there such a gap from the release of the MSX2 and Famicom versions up to the release of the Arcade and Mega Drive versions?
Tsukamoto: To tell you the truth, we originally thought the Famicom version would be the last. But then the game ended up finding underground success in some regions thanks to magazines.
Morita: Basic Magazine and Famicom Hisshoubon really gave us some crazy praise.
Tezuka: Oh, I wrote both of those (laughs).
Tsukamoto: And then that’s where the talk of releasing a Mega Drive and Arcade version came in. But from there, it took a while. We had to do location tests, back-and-forths with Sega who was publishing the game…
For instance, one of the changes from the Famicom version is that when you do a chain and send an attack over, warning Puyos will appear at the top of the screen. This was actually something Sega requested. “Can’t you add some kind of a visual representation for when a player is attacking their opponent?”.
Tezuka: That definitely ended up being effective.
Tsukamoto: I think of that as being Sega’s know-how at work. You could say it’s a technique they fostered in the world of arcade games. They made all sorts of difficult requests for us, but of course, we learned a lot through it.
Tezuka: Oh, this is something I’ve been wondering about. Does the contest entry ticket in the manual of the Mega Drive version have any particular use?
Morita: Nope, right now it has no use at all. We put it there in case we wanted to do something with it later, like an entry ticket for the future. You could say it was like insurance. But in the end it wasn’t used for anything at all.
Tsukamoto: By the way, the PC-98 version also had entry tickets in them. Six of them, in fact.
The CPU routine is like this!
Yamashita: I’d like to ask about the game itself now. Is the order of the Puyos you get entirely random?
Tsukamoto: Yup, it’s completely random.
Tezuka: My understanding is that in the Famicom version, each person gets a different Puyo order, while in the Mega Drive version, both players get the same.
Morita: Knowing what color comes next helps you with setting up chains. So if both players don’t get the same Puyo colors, it’ll seem like there’s some kind of foul play going on.
Tezuka: Especially when you’re going against the computer.
Morita: We really haven’t done anything unfair like that.
Yamashita: What are the AI routines for the CPU player like?
Tsukamoto: There’s three modes: Panic Mode, Building Mode, and Consumption Mode. Panic Mode is just trying to clear out Puyos, Building Mode is setting up chains, and Consumption Mode is clearing those chains. And then the timing for which each character performs these are manually configured.
Yamashita: In the most extreme case, if you set the algorithm to its ultimate form, would the CPU just be unbeatable?
Tsukamoto: Well, we intentionally made the CPU a bit easier. Plus, there’s the existence of Garbage Puyos. For instance, if you send over Garbage Puyos while the computer is thinking, its current line of thought will come to a complete halt.
Yamashita: Looking at it like that, that would mean the first and foremost technique for guaranteeing a win against the CPU is sending over Garbage Puyo.
Tsukamoto: That’s right.
Tezuka: If you can send 18 or so over in succession, you’ll probably win.
Morita: But the later opponents are set to drop Puyo at crazy fast speeds. You can’t win by playing carelessly.
Tezuka: That’s true. The later stages, especially Zoh Daimaoh (stage 9), are really tough. Though after that wasn’t so bad, and I managed to beat the final boss Satan (stage 13) on my first attempt.
Tsukamoto: For sure, Zoh Daimaoh is extremely hard. Although Rulue (stage 12) was probably supposed to be the hardest. And the final boss’s strong points are really strong, but we actually ended up making him recklessly think too much about getting combos… But in Compile’s shooting games, it’s tradition for the final bosses to be easy (laughs).
Tezuka: Now that I think about it, Suketoudara (stage 2) and Harpy (stage 4) drop their Puyos quickly, but only at the start.
Tsukamoto: Suketoudara is the kind of character where you see him dropping Puyos fast at the start and think “this guy must be tough”, but in actuality he’s a weak character. So you can pretty comfortably clear his stage by building 2-chains. Harpy is also a “bluff character”, where she’ll stack from the left and right sides of the screen, making some scary combos without even thinking. But once you get good at making 3-chains, she’s not too bad to clear.
Tezuka: That’s pretty much how I understood it.
Puyo Puyo is a culmination of the falling block genre
Tezuka: By the way, have you played Sanrio Carnival (Famicom, Character Soft)?
Tsukamoto: I have not.
Tezuka: The rules of the game itself are fairly orthodox, but when you’re playing two player, each person’s play field is right next to the other. So you can clear blocks that your opponent has placed from your side of the field, and essentially steal their chains. Plus, unlike in Puyo where each player has their own next piece preview, Sanrio Carnival has only one, so whoever drops their previous block first gets to use the one being previewed. I think those are both amazing ideas.
Morita: Those are some good ideas. We should’ve used them (laughs).
Yamashita: Changing subjects, what do you think makes Puyo Puyo stand out the most from other falling block puzzle games?
Morita: I’d say its universal appeal. At the end of the day, we helped ourselves to ideas from all sorts of falling block puzzle games that had already been released (laughs), though we were careful not to lean too much on any single one. We ended up seeing Puyo Puyo as being something like “the culmination of the falling block genre” (strained laugh).
Tezuka: But I think that’s what makes it such a perfectly addicting game.
Tsukamoto: Puyo Puyo’s greatest point of originality is “the existence of Puyo Puyo”. Other than that, I guess it’s the noise it makes when you clear them.
Music secrets
Yamashita: The Music Mode in the Mega Drive version of the game has some tracks and sounds that don’t get used during gameplay. What were those?
Tsukamoto: The unused music (titled “Rejection of Puyo Puyo”) was intended to be used in a cutscene that would happen between Witch and Zoh Daimaoh.
Morita: The reason the cutscene got removed was for, like many other things, storage capacity reasons.
Tsukamoto: The unused sound effects are from all sorts of unused material. We went through the trouble of making them, so we figured we might as well include them. To tell you the truth, there’s actually sound effects from Musha Aleste in there too. If you listen to them carefully, you’ll be able to tell that they’re the same effects. Though for reasons related to conversion, they ended up changing in sound a little bit.
The contribution of Garbage Puyo
Tsukamoto: I’d actually like to ask something myself this time. From the arcade version on, we haven’t had any limit on the amount of Garbage Puyo that can accumulate. What did you think of that?
Tezuka: I thought it was fun. It was something I was unhappy with in the Famicom version, where at a certain point, no matter how much you chain, the number of Garbage Puyo didn’t grow. So you would just get unusually demotivated and give up on bigger combos.
Tsukamoto: But if there’s no limit, there’s times where the match will just immediately end, which some people don’t find fun. So I didn’t know what to do about that. Though in the end, we chose the option that had the most impact.
Tezuka: Something that I think is great about Puyo Puyo is how the game’s penalty, the Garbage Puyo, don’t come in a single fixed quantity. Furthermore, it makes it so the game doesn’t just have a direct, linear progression. If it were another game, the bottom of your opponent’s field would go up, or the amount of Puyos you need to clear to win would increase, and that kind of thing just wouldn’t seem very fun at all from looking at it.
Yamashita: Head-to-head games of Game Boy Tetris are like that too. The way the bottom of the field juts up is fun, but in actuality, it doesn’t really change your opponent’s tactics at all. What they’re going to clear next doesn’t change. But in Puyo Puyo, when the Garbage Puyo come raining down, your opponent has to change their strategy immediately. I’ve always thought that was great.
Tezuka: On the topic of head-to-head games, games like Street Fighter II have those linked cabinets facing each other, right? I’ve thought it would be fun if you could do something like that with Puyo Puyo. You’ll be playing by yourself and then some challenger would show up.
Morita: We struggled with that too… In many ways, we faced limitations with the arcade version. So if I were to name the version that came out the most like we had envisioned it to, that would be the Mega Drive version. Although the one thing I regret about it is that we couldn’t fit in all the voice samples. All of those voices were done by people at Compile. Incidentally, the “Puyo Puyo~” on the title screen is actually my voice. Though it was modulated a bit.
Yamashita: Huh, really? When I go home I’ll have to give it a listen and compare (laughs).