horror mangaka Rei Mikamoto's response to a viral tweet about how Choshu Electric Railway makes twice as much money selling rice crackers as it does operating a railway: "when I worked for a game company, their best selling product was their steam buns (& they were delicious)"🇯🇵
the product he's referring to is the Puyoman, Compile's Puyo-themed manju—this wasn't a mere licensed product; Compile eventually produced & distributed these in-house, and they were not only genuinely popular but the core pillar of Compile's business in their twilight years
as others pointed out, it's super beneficial for game businesses to have reliable side-hustles because it makes them more attractive to banks and so on
it's not as out there but Koei-Tecmo earns as much via external investment as it does via games kabumatome.doorblog.jp/archives/65850…🇯🇵
...and then you get ventures like Jaleco's aquarium equipment, Data East's shiitake mushroom kits and alleged zillion other offshoots, etc which weren't nearly as successful
Puyoman's stuck in rights hell, unfortunately: Sega owns the characters, D4 owns the trademark and former Compile president Niitani owns the recipe, and while there have been a few false starts, they've never all been able to cut a deal to bring it back
every so often, Sega will try to evoke Puyoman with some new limited-time snack: Puyo taiyaki, Puyo nikuman, etc
former Compile president also promised "Nyokiman" as a backer reward for a crowdfunded version of his puzzle game Nyoki Nyoki (it didn't succeed...)
btw, if you just wanna eat something Puyo-shaped, a Japanese candy company called Lion has been putting out Puyo Puyo gummies forever—these are the newest ones, and they'll probably do another batch of Puyo Puyo Tetris gummies from next month amazon.co.jp/%E3%83%A9%E3%8…🇯🇵
here's a short video feature on Compile's empire at their arguable commercial peak in 1996—unchecked ambition, marketing spend & overzealous expansion into other industries would be their downfall; Compile went bankrupt in '98 & ended for good in '03
most of their '90s-era STG guys left at one point, to form Raizing and do other stuff, and so that's why they abruptly stopped making them
they were planning an Aleste arcade game at some point, idk if it died bc they quit or they quit bc it was cancelled
their retail stores, puyoman, etc did fine; the two big mistakes were:
Acty, a failed attempt at breaking into the productivity software market
plans to build a theme park: they had to hire tons of ppl really quickly which chewed through their money
Compile's president saw the takeover of Windows and thought he'd be able to push Power Acty as this ultra-chic super-mainstream thing and tried advertising it the way they did Puyo, with big marketing stunts, commercials, etc and it absolutely did not work
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.