Have a look at the game that became Puyo Puyo

Last week Japanese game dev Moo Niitani reportedly announced that two old MSX games developed by his now-defunct studio Compile will soon be released on Project Egg, a digital Japanese platform for vintage games.

The news comes courtesy of the old game enthusiasts at Retronauts, and is worth paying attention to because the games in question -- Dominon and Dominon X -- are early versions of Puyo Puyo, the mega-popular Japanese puzzle game franchise. Niitani reportedly found them in storage relatively recently, and plans to release them as-is -- unfinished and potentially bug-ridden. 

Puyo Puyo was the flagship franchise for Compile, which was founded by Niitani in '83 and open through 2003.

According to Retronauts, Dominon was originally a numbers-based puzzle game (see screenshot below) that Compile intended to release in its regular MSX2 digital magazine Disc Station; the game was heavily revised to focus on color-matching mechanics and, when married with some characters from Compile's Madō Monogatari RPG franchise, became Puyo Puyo. 

The rights to Puyo Puyo were sold to Sega in the late '90s, and the games have continued to enjoy a strong following in Japan. They're less well-known in the West, though that  changed a bit this year when Sega localized Puyo Puyo Tetris  (which, as you might expect, mashes up Puyo Puyo with Tetris) for the West and released it on the Nintendo Switch and other platforms.