Thread by @gosokkyu

Panel de Pon's 25 years old! this was Nintendo's first original, non-character-branded puzzle game, but they immediately corrected that "mistake"—almost every subsequent game was rebranded, reskinned or bundled with the likes of Tetris, Yoshi, Pokemon, Dr. Mario & Animal Crossing

the Panel de Pon commercial's sort of notorious for not matching the tone or communicating much about the game at all it's sort of in the milieu of the more out-there Puyo Puyo commercials of that era but that series was an established hit by that point...

Panel de Pon was co-created by Intelligent Systems &they had a soft spot for it—they put up an elaborate-for-the-time homepage that they maintained well into the '00s (it's still up! intsys.co.jp/game/panepon/🇯🇵) & the devs used to compete at the annual "Seika de Pon" fan tournament

recently, an old UK mag was unearthed that contained a suggestion from a Nintendo PR rep about potentially reskinning Panel de Pon as a Killer Instinct game—fwiw, I asked a couple of ex-Rare ppl and they don't recall hearing of that idea back in the day

https://twitter.com/SMWikiOfficial/status/1294653713706037250

oh and I figure everyone's aware but just in case: a few months back, Nintendo released Panel de Pon internationally for the very first time via Nintendo Switch Online—it's completely untranslated, but there's a quick menu guide in this thread

https://twitter.com/gosokkyu/status/1263043562226110465

Animal Crossing Puzzle League is a minigame inside Animal Crossing New Leaf for 3DS—you can unlock it by collecting the 3DS furniture item & getting high scores in all the modes unlocks clothing items themed around Panel de Pon protagonist Lip

https://twitter.com/PonyTatsujin/status/1320900443023855617

for the unaware, a quick rundown of Panel de Pon's history with reskins:

Panel de Pon (SFC) became Tetris Attack (SNES), with characters/sounds from Yoshi's Island & later brought back to Japan as Yoshi no Panepon

Tetris Attack/Yoshi no Panepon (GB) was a Yoshi game everywhere

Pokemon Puzzle League (N64) was only released outside of Japan—it's a reskin of an unreleased Panel de Pon sequel that was eventually ported to Gamecube & released only in Japan as part of Nintendo Puzzle Collection

incidentally, the N64 version was recently found by a collector

Pokemon Puzzle Challenge/Pokemon de Panepon (GBC) was released worldwide & again, it's a reskin of a cancelled Panel de Pon sequel for GBC—there's a ton of PdP data still in the ROM and there's even a secret debug code you can use to play a basic PdP-themed game on real hardware

the version of Panel de Pon found in Dr. Mario & Puzzle League/Dr. Mario & Panepon (GBA) is completely generic: no fairies, no Nintendo characters, just this little koala guy from the GC version who's just kinda there sometimes

Planet Puzzle League/Panel de Pon DS is the most recent standalone entry—it's another non-themed game but it does at least attempt an aesthetic, unlike the GBA version

the JP version includes a single classic Panepon wallpaper with Lip, which was removed from the other versions

there's also a barebones DSiWare version of the DS game which you can still buy on 3DS eShop

aside from the Animal Crossing minigame mentioned earlier, and reissues on Super Famicom Mini, Virtual Console, NSO, etc, that's pretty much the last we've seen of Panel de Pon....

outside of Smash & Animal Crossing, Panel de Pon's most prominent cameo is in the Japan-only Wii adventure game Captain Rainbow, which features a very liberal interpretation of Lip and many other obscure Nintendo characters 🇯🇵

in case he hasn't made it obvious, Masahiro Sakurai's also a big Panel de Pon fan: not only does Smash include an ever-growing number of nods to Lip, his 2005 puzzle game Meteos is most directly comparable to Panepon, and he concepted a Lip-themed powers for Kirby Super Star

speak of the devil

https://twitter.com/Sora_Sakurai/status/1320923171034451968

one more thing: here's a translation of the Panel de Pon developer interview from IntSys' Panepon website timelyhoward.com/?p=104

it's one of very few Panel de Pon dev interviews out there—I know of only two others, in fact—so it'd be nice to translate the others someday