gosokkyu

エンド

  • 戦う人間発電所

owatte shimatta


leon
@leon asked:

Do you know of any articles or oral histories out there about the public reception Puyo Puyo 1 got, and how people reacted to its take on the puzzle genre in a world of Columns and Dr. Mario? I feel like it must have been a huge shock for multiple design-related reasons.

come to think of it, no! You'd think someone would have written something more authoritative on the subject, but I suppose all the people who lived through it see it as common knowledge... I'm seeing a lot of JP FGC oldheads reckoning with that attitude in the wake of the new SF, as it happens.

I can say that the biggest and most advanced source of tech for Puyo Puyo, from the original disk version through to the launch and early days of the arcade version, was Micon BASIC Magazine, and the wider proliferation of basic chaining forms like stairs and sandwiches can be largely attributed to them—more specifically, a writer named Ichiro Tezuka, who sorta dismissed the original version initially but quickly became its biggest cheerleader, within Bemaga and elsewhere. (One of his early comments about it being heavily derivative of other games that were out at the time struck a nerve within Compile, as their president had a complex about the originality of the game, and he even put a little self-effacing jab about the game's unoriginality in the manual for the Mega Drive port of the arcade version.)

The Bemaga staff responsible for pushing Puyo Puyo ended up forming Studio BentStuff, the publishing house behind the Ultimania series of RPG guidebooks and the '90s All About series of fighting game guides, and their All About book on Puyo Puyo reprints a lot of content originally written for Bemaga, including a feature on the tournament they held against other gaming mags. Incidentally, that book ended up establishing the format they'd use for all subsequent books; they'd done one earlier book, which offered broader profiles on multiple fighting games, but they ditched that approach for deep-dives on single games from then on.

One of the more banal factors in the arcade version's success, as echoed by a ton of arcade staff from back in the day, is that vs. matches became way more popular once they simply started putting the machines next to SF2.


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in reply to @gosokkyu's post:

yeah, the very first version was a joint release for MSX2 and Famicom Disk System, and the FCDS version was produced specifically because Compile's president had a complex about the game being derivative and wanted to put out a Nintendo version as a buffer to any accusations that they were trying to rip off Dr. Mario.

It's super basic, with no vs. CPU and no character elements outside of the title screen, but the core idea's there. The Famicom cartridge version that came out way later, after the arcade game had blown up, is basically an edit of this version to make it play a little more like the "real" games.