Square Co., Ltd. was a Japanese video game development studio and publisher. It was founded in 1986 by Masafumi Miyamoto, who spun off part of his father's electronics company Den-Yu-Sha. Among its early employees were designers Hironobu Sakaguchi, Hiromichi Tanaka, Akitoshi Kawazu and Koichi Ishii, artist Kazuko Shibuya, programmer Nasir Gebelli, and composer Nobuo Uematsu. Initially focusing on action games, the team saw popular success with Final Fantasy in 1987. A role-playing video game, it became the first in a franchise of the same name. Later notable staff included directors Yoshinori Kitase and Takashi Tokita, designer and writer Yasumi Matsuno, artists Tetsuya Nomura and Yusuke Naora, and composers Yoko Shimomura and Masashi Hamauzu.
Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. is a Japanese multinational holding company, video game publisher and entertainment conglomerate. It releases role-playing game franchises, such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Kingdom Hearts, among numerous others. Outside of video game publishing and development, it is also in the business of merchandise, arcade facilities, and manga publication under its Gangan Comics brand.
The 64DD is a magnetic floppy disk drive peripheral for the Nintendo 64 game console developed by Nintendo. It was announced in 1995, prior to the Nintendo 64's 1996 launch, and after numerous delays was released in Japan on December 13, 1999. The "64" references both the Nintendo 64 console and the 64MB storage capacity of the disks, and "DD" is short for "disk drive" or "dynamic drive".
SNK Corporation is a Japanese video game hardware and software company. It is the successor to the company Shin Nihon Kikaku and presently owns the SNK video game brand and the Neo Geo video game platform, and electronics. SNK's predecessor Shin Nihon Kikaku Corporation was founded in 1978 by Eikichi Kawasaki. In 1981, the name was informally shortened to SNK Corporation, which became the company's official name in 1986.
Konami Group Corporation is a Japanese multinational entertainment company and video game developer and publisher headquartered in Chūō, Tokyo. The company also produces and distributes trading cards, anime, tokusatsu, pachinko machines, slot machines, and arcade cabinets. Konami has casinos around the world and operates health and physical fitness clubs across Japan.
Enix Corporation was a Japanese multimedia publisher who handled and oversaw video games, manga, guidebooks, and merchandise. It was founded in 1975 by Yasuhiro Fukushima as Eidansha Boshu Service Center, initially as a tabloid publisher and later attempting to branch into real estate management. Beginning in 1982, Enix began publishing video games. Three notable early collaborators were designers Yuji Horii and Koichi Nakamura, and composer Koichi Sugiyama. Horii, Nakamura and Sugiyama would all work on the 1986 role playing video game (RPG) Dragon Quest for the Family Computer; one of the earliest successful RPGs for consoles, it spawned a franchise of the same name which remains Enix's best-known product.
Yuji Naka, credited in some games as YU2, is a former Japanese video game programmer, designer and producer. He is the co-creator of the Sonic the Hedgehog series and was the president of Sonic Team at Sega until his departure in 2006.
Rockstar Games UK Limited is a British video game development company and a studio of Rockstar Games based in Edinburgh. The company was founded as DMA Design in Dundee in 1987 by David Jones, soon hiring former classmates Mike Dailly, Russell Kay, and Steve Hammond. During its early years, DMA Design was backed by its publisher Psygnosis, primarily focusing on Amiga, Atari ST and Commodore 64 games. During this time, they created successful shooters such as Menace and Blood Money, but soon turned to platform games after the release of Lemmings in 1991, which was an international success and led to several sequels and spin-offs. After developing Unirally for Nintendo, DMA Design was set to become one of their main second-party developers, but this partnership ended after Nintendo's disapproval of Body Harvest.
Harvey Smith is an American video game designer and writer, working at Arkane Studios.
Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC (SIE) is an American multinational video game and digital entertainment company of Sony. Jointly established by two subsidiaries in 2016, it primarily operates the PlayStation brand of video game consoles and products. It is also the world's largest company in the video game industry based on its equity investments.
Frontier Developments plc. is a British video game developer founded by David Braben in January 1994 and based at the Cambridge Science Park in Cambridge, England. Frontier develops amusement park management simulators Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo, and has produced several games in David Braben's Elite series, including Elite Dangerous. The company takes its name from the earliest titles in the Elite series with which it was involved, a port of Frontier: Elite II and development of Frontier: First Encounters. In 2013, the company was listed on the AIM segment of the London Stock Exchange. It published third-party games under the Frontier Foundry label between 2019 and 2022.
Team Ninja is a Japanese video game developer, and a division of Koei Tecmo, founded in 1995 as a part of Tecmo. It was founded by Tomonobu Itagaki, and is best known for franchises such as Ninja Gaiden, Dead or Alive and Nioh.
Sega Technical Institute (STI) was an American video game developer owned by Sega. Founded by the Atari veteran Mark Cerny in 1990, STI sought to combine elite Japanese developers, including the Sonic Team programmer Yuji Naka and his team, with new American talent. STI developed games for Sega Genesis, including several Sonic the Hedgehog games, before it was closed at the end of 1996.
Mitchell Corporation (株式会社ミッチェル) was a Japanese video game developer based in the Suginami ward of Tokyo. Roy Ozaki served as president, and Koichi Niida served as vice-president. Some employees were former Capcom and TAD Corporation employees. The company was originally established on February 1, 1960, as an import/export business by the father of Roy Ozaki. Ozaki and Niida took over the company and began acting as exclusive overseas agents for such video game companies as Visco, Video System, Seta, Metro, Home Data, and other small video game manufacturers in the 1980s.
Vanillaware Ltd. is a Japanese video game developer based in Osaka. An independent company, it was founded in 2002 under the name Puraguru by George Kamitani, a game developer who had previously worked at Capcom and Atlus, and directed Princess Crown (1997) for the Sega Saturn. Beginning as a small studio developing Fantasy Earth: The Ring of Dominion for Enix, in 2004 the company moved to Osaka, Kansai, and changed its name. Kamitani wanted Vanillaware to create successor projects to Princess Crown, beginning with Odin Sphere.
WiiWare was a service that allowed Wii users to download games and applications specifically designed and developed for the Wii video game console made by Nintendo. These games and applications could only be purchased and downloaded from the Wii Shop Channel under the WiiWare section. Once the user had downloaded the game or application, it would appear in their Wii Menu or SD Card Menu as a new channel. WiiWare was a companion to the Virtual Console, which specializes in emulated games originally developed for other systems instead of original games.
Sega Corporation is a Japanese multinational video game and entertainment company headquartered in Shinagawa, Tokyo. Its international branches, Sega of America and Sega Europe, are headquartered in Irvine, California, and London. Its division for the development of home video games, has existed in its current state since 2020; from 2015 to that point, the two had made up separate entities known as Sega Games and Sega Interactive Co., Ltd. Until 2024, Sega also handled amusement machine games. Sega is a subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings. From 1983 until 2001, Sega also developed video game consoles.
Namco Generations was a brand name created by Namco Bandai Games for modernized remakes of their older video games. It was introduced in 2010 in conjunction with Pac-Man Championship Edition DX for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Galaga Legions DX was the second game to use the brand, being released in 2011. Two other games were in production under the Namco Generations label, a Metro-Cross sequel named Aero-Cross and a remaster of Dancing Eyes, both of which were cancelled.
Kersploosh!, known in Europe as Splash or Crash and in Japan as Hyu~ Stone, is a action video game developed by Poisoft for the Nintendo 3DS. The game was released on the Nintendo eShop in Japan on June 7, 2011, in Europe on February 28, 2013 and in North America on March 7, 2013.
Arcade Archives is a series of emulated arcade games from the late 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, and Nintendo Switch, published by Hamster Corporation. A sub-series called ACA Neo Geo is focused on rereleasing Neo Geo titles in their original arcade format, unlike many services with attempts to emulate the console versions.
