Past meets present: Wonderland of Carbuncle

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.Compile truly did have more in common with independent developers of the modern era — the kind releasing games on itch.io themselves, not the ones getting the major pushes from relative behemoths in the space like AnnaPurna Interactive — than with many of its peers in its own time. Yes, Compile had the relationship with Sega, and it had loads of console and handheld games on all the systems of the major players of the 80s and 90s, but a massive percentage of its library was actually contained within its digital magazine, Disc Station. And those mags and the games within, regularly released for MSX and NEC PC hardware, tell a story of a far different and even more prolific company that kept trying new things and making the games…