We all have that one game, half unknown, that we feel only we have played, but we love deeply, don’t we?
I have a few of these, and I could talk for hours about each one, but for the luck of our regular reader, I will focus on just one in today’s article. The Super Nintendo game Jigsaw Party (or as it is known outside of Japan, Pieces).
Jigsaw Party is a game that is part of my story because it was part of my childhood in a profound way. I never really understood the extent of my affection for this game, and I have been thinking about it – and playing it too – quite often in these last months.
Okay, but first let’s talk about what Jigsaw Party actually is. This is a Super Nintendo game where the objective is to assemble various puzzles by yourself, against the Artificial Intelligence, or assemble them while playing against or cooperating with someone else.
Yes, that’s it.
I swear to you it is that simple.
The 90’s were crazy, right? Imagine this being considered a premium game… Ah… I miss this kind of head and footless design in the gaming industry. I miss it a lot…
Remember when we used to rent tapes? Probably those under 30 don’t remember, but this was something I did constantly when I was a kid. For the youngsters reading this, I’m going to have to open a parenthesis here in my article about Jigsaw Party to explain how a video game tape store works, because it is important for the understanding of the rest of the text.
Now then. A video game store was a business that made available several titles for several video game platforms which a consumer, duly registered at the store, could rent for an X amount of time upon payment of a Y amount of reals, and this amount varied a lot from one video game store to another.
I rented videogame tapes weekly, or almost weekly. My favorite video game stores were 2 that were relatively close to my house, Tatsu Games (a small store and relatively far from home, that I didn’t go much) and Hot Games (my favorite, and that exists until today, of course, the business model of the guys is no longer renting tapes).
Every Thursday or Friday I would go to Hot Games to rent tapes, the day of the week I would go there depended on the promotions they had. I still remember my store registration number, which I had to give every time I rented something. My registration number was 241.
The history of Hot Games is very important to my development as a gamer because it actively participated in my formative years. It was thanks to the catalog of games available in this store in the 90’s that my taste for games was shaped. They were a store with a relatively large collection of games ranging from the Nintendinho, through the Master System, Super Nintendo and Mega Drive (and consequently also more modern consoles, as time went by).
Jigsaw Party was one of those games that were part of my formative years. And I only know about the existence of this game because one day it appeared in my video game rental store and was available for rent.
I was about 6 or 7 years old, and I had just gotten a Super Nintendo. At the time I only had Super Mario World for it, so we always rented tapes to play on the weekend (me and my brother most of the time, but my parents rarely played either).
On one of these weeks, I was responsible for renting the tapes (usually we rented one or two… This week we rented two.) and I had already chosen Star Fox as the first tape to be rented. When we were choosing the second one, I remember looking through the several boxes of games available for rental and finding something I had never seen before.
The boxart of the game was of a puzzle piece being chased by a broom. I found it interesting, could it be a cool platformer? Maybe. I ended up renting it without thinking much about the game. If it was bad, at least I had Star Fox guaranteed, which I already knew was a game I would enjoy.
When we got back home, I went straight to test the new game I had rented. The Pieces logo came bouncing towards me and that was it. I was getting ready to… Putting puzzles together on my super nintendo…?
É…. I didn’t get too excited at first, I’ll be honest. But as I played the single player mode, against opponents controlled by the Artificial Intelligence, and then going into All Play, where you just put together different puzzle images with rules you select yourself, something clicked for me.
Playing Jigsaw Party is a deeply relaxing experience, and this game manages to preserve that characteristic to this day when I decide to play it again.
Being a gamer in Brazil during the first half of the 90’s was a huge territory to conquer. The access to information was extremely limited due to the little diffusion of the internet in the country, and the video game magazines available on newsstands were not able to cover everything that was happening in relation to releases in the industry.
The video game stores were a very rich source for learning about new games through the store’s offerings, but not only that. It was possible to extract information about new releases, game tips, which games were good and which were bad simply by talking to the employees and other customers who were also there to rent videogame tapes. Come to think of it, it was almost a club.
This club was one that I frequented with some regularity, even when I didn’t rent any tapes that week, and many friends from my street also went to Hot Games, a place where you could play arcade games, rent a console for 1 hour to play the latest stuff without taking the game home, and just hang out in the late afternoon.
And even then, nobody talked about Pieces. Actually nobody cared to talk about the Jigsaw Party. Even though I showed the game to everyone and even played it with them for years, none of my friends or acquaintances from that time cared about the game. They still don’t to this day, really.
I suspect that Pieces was my first contact with a really niche game, whose public interest, even within the gamer bubble, is negligible, if there is anyone who remembers or even enjoys this game besides me.
I also think that, after this time of my childhood, I never talked about Pieces again with anyone, it’s a game that I catch myself playing once in a while, but I never felt the need to talk about it because no one I knew was interested in it and I know that no one I know now is interested in Pieces, even though I’ve played it.
Even so, it has some interesting stories about its development. What I want to address in this text today is one aspect of Pieces that is most intertwined with my main emotional memory with games, the soundtrack.
Yes, I love the music of Pieces, specifically the soundtrack track simply called Puzzle Music 03.
This song is a waltz. And I have always been delighted with the decision to include a waltz in a video game about putting puzzles together. I can’t quite say why I love this track specifically so much, but I find it very well constructed and very beautiful as well. Puzzle Music 03 is a contrast to the other tracks on the Pieces soundtrack in that it is a quiet song, while the others are much more upbeat.
A few days ago I was scouring the internet for more information about the game after a short gaming session, since I realized I knew almost nothing about the development and who the people involved with this project are. I looked around and found much more than I expected.
And yes, we are going to get, again, into that part of my texts where I talk about how I feel about a certain product, or about a certain facet of this product, or about something that may even be insignificant about this product, because it was this feeling I had in the days I spent diving deeper into the history of the development of Pieces that inspired me to write this post.
To begin this prose, the pedigree of Pieces is relatively high since it was the first game developed by Nippon Ichi. Yes, Nippon Ichi Software, developer of the Disgaea series games, Nippon Ichi Software America, distributor of the Atelier and Danganronpa series. Anyway. Pieces was the studio’s first game, back when it was still called Prism Keikaku.
As the studio’s first title, published by Hori in Japan and Atlus in the West, I found it very interesting and extremely risky to make a game about putting puzzles together, since this was against the tastes of the public in the 90s. The game would be a hard sell for Super Nintendo consumers.
The game was considered a critical success and I would venture to assume that it was also satisfactory in sales for Nippon Ichi Software, since the company is still active today, despite the name change.
Now that we know a little bit of the history of who was behind the release of this game, let’s increase the granularity of this information because remember I commented about the soundtrack of the game being one of my favorite things about it? Well, I want to talk a little bit about the composer of it.
In the credits, the composer of Pieces is known only as Nobuyuki. Yes, it is not easy at all to find information about the teams that developed games at that time, most of them used pseudonyms, abbreviations, nicknames, etc., in the credits.
Nobuyuki Hara, composer of Pieces is not one of the best-known names in the medium, I admit, and his work is always relegated to assisting bigger names, such as Naoki Kodaka from his time at Sunsoft.
And it was through an interview given by Naoki Kodaka and posted on the Shmuplations website (which can be found here: http://shmuplations.com/sunsoftmusic/ ), about the songs they created during their stay at Sunsoft that I learned a little more about Nobuyuki Hara’s work and that he had passed away in 1995 from an unexpected illness.
It was shocking. Less than 1 year after the release of Pieces, its composer died. I felt my heart sink reading this, and during this interview, Naoki Kodaka tells how excited Nobuyuki was about their work back when he was a simple audio engineer at Sunsoft.
Kodaka fondly recalls the enthusiasm of his colleague who would always say things like:
🙶Kodaka, just wait until you hear the amazing sounds I just created on the Famicom! Please write an amazing song with them!
And then he would stay there in the office waiting for the composition to come out until dawn and as soon as the process was over he would always exclaim something like:
🙶Leave the rest to me!🙷
My brothers… Reading that made my heart very full. Nowadays Naoki Kodaka is a teacher and has abandoned his composing career, but he carries that fond memory of Nobuyuki with him wherever he goes and that I think is one of the coolest and most loving things in the world.
Nobuyuki passed away at the age of 25 and that one song he created for an extremely niche game was something that moves me a lot today. Puzzle 3 is a song that to me represents childhood, represents the wonder of discovering something new that I love, and represents how crazy but successful video game soundtracks are, where including a waltz to put a puzzle together is something that marries so well.
So I would like to dedicate this article to Nobuyuki Hara’s work as a sound engineer on classic games like Batman for the Nintendinho and especially his latest work as composer on Pieces.
His work with the musical part of the video game industry is something I appreciate very much and it is a shame that he is no longer with us, who knows where his career as a composer would end up?
I hope that regardless of where he is, he is at peace. I will always be grateful for the things he created. Whether it was a sound font for Kodaka to shine during the Nintendinho era or a song that represents so much to me.
So that’s it… Maybe this is a bit anticlimactic at the end, but I think my emotions and conclusions about Jigsaw Party and what this game represents to me are still too complex for me to unravel. Who knows, maybe I will come back to this subject in another text when I discover something new in relation to all this?
That’s it, my brothers. Enjoy your games, even if they are niche games. Nobody knows your tastes better than you do. Your favorite game might be some Zelda game or it might be Pieces or even Ghost Sweeper Mikami for the Super Famicom…
No game is worse for being little known and every game has an amazing story of development. Many people gave everything they had in their development to bring the best possible product to the market and I find this fascinating.
But what about you, my good guys? Do you also fall in love with a super unknown game? Tell me more in the comments or on twitter, I love to hear these stories!
Until next time, my brothers, I hope you enjoyed this little marathon about the game Pieces!
