This article is the first chapter of your summer saga Behind the Scenes at Square Enix. Go here for a summary.
This article was originally published on Ludostrie with support from its contributors.
From Architecture to Video Games
Born in the early 1980s, Enix was one of many new players in the Japanese video game industry, at a time when the discipline was booming. It can only be one of many companies, but its profile is very atypical. The company’s origins actually date back to the mid-1970s, when it had nothing to do with video games: its initial activities were limited to publishing a newspaper with classified ads for public housing. A well-run business can employ around 20 people and invest in diversifying into other areas.
Founder Yasuhiro Fukushima is unusual. He studied architecture, but after graduation, he told himself that he didn’t want to be a simple employee, he wanted to be a businessman. In fact, he never had a career as an architect, and at first he spent a whole year exploring the world, cleaning private homes in the US, and in India he met a clairvoyant who predicted his wealth for him. He became a hippie and then returned to Japan to start his own company. After a while, he realized that there was money in the fast food business, and sent his employees to McDonald’s to work on several brands for a month to gather information on their approach. One of them was so diligent and appreciated by the manager that he didn’t quit for three months.
Fukushima Yasuhiro
The result of this experience was the opening of a robot-made takeaway sushi restaurant in 1979. The ingenuity of the approach attracted people, but it didn’t last: the quality of the sushi left to improve, and plans to open dozens of stores in the country were abandoned. After that, Fukushima got into computer distribution, then wanted to use its network to sell computer products, and thought of video games. This is an area that looks promising. Problem: He doesn’t know anything about it, and neither does his staff.
Chida Yushin
So, the idea was to launch a game creation contest, offering big money and the possibility of publishing the winner’s work. This was a fairly routine practice at the time, but Enix stood out with a very high prize: 1 million yen (about 10,000 euros) for the first prize, compared to the usual 100,000 yen range. Worryingly, there is scam precedent here, and Enix is unknown to inspire confidence. The publicity campaign for the event was a disaster and no one registered. So Fukushima would send his lieutenants to direct places to convince potential candidates: computer stores and amateur programmers’ clubs.One of the employees actually went to the headquarters juvenile jumpingmagazines that have not yet reached their peak dragon ball (its publication will start later) but is already one of the most popular in Japan. The guys from Enix managed to convince them to send a young reporter to report to them.
The reporter’s name is Yuji Horii, the future creator of Dragon Quest. As for the Enix employee, his name is Yukio Chida, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Square Enix, until his retirement in 2021.
Origin of Dragon Quest
Horii Yuji
” At the time, I was juvenile jumping and visited Enix for information.While I was there, I jumped at the chance to sign up for a game and that’s how my career as a game designer started. This is how Horii Yuji started his relationship with Enix, but not only that. Another winner of the same competition was Koichi Nakamura, who also founded game development studio Chunsoft.
Enix fixed a few things and got them working together. It was a love of video games that brought them together, especially computer RPGs from the West. ” Yuji keeps saying we should develop an RPG, Nakamura said. But while I want a game witchcraft, want to get him close final. We thought we could combine each interesting element and we ended up with Dragon Quest. »
Koichi Nakamura (left) and Yuji Horii (right).
Works that benefited from an important asset: Akira Toriyama. The young cartoonist was in the early years of his flagship’s success – dragon ball – Its publisher, Shûeisha (with whom Horii has previously worked with), “lent” Enix through a playful relationship game.
Dragon Quest manages to effectively transform Western RPG fundamentals to better suit consoles. ” There are some role-playing games that are more suitable for hobbyists, but we want to make our role-playing games good enough for ordinary people to enjoy. “, explains Horii. Famicom (NES) is a perfect medium, although the genre basically exists on computers. Although this ambition is limited (no backup, hence the need for a code system), it achieves its goal. Dragon Quest was a success, selling 1.5 million copies. Not enough to satisfy creators who quickly followed up with a sequel.
the beginning of the phenomenon
” Halfway through development, bugs start popping up and things suddenly start going wrong, but no one knows what part of the programming the bug is in. None of us were really “professionals” at the time, and we still had a firm foothold in the student world. So everyone started blaming others. “It’s your fault!!” This created a hostile atmosphere in development. Honestly, on this project, I spent more time quelling conflicts than debugging. Because of all this, the release date has been pushed back. The last game also had a lot of balance issues, despite our efforts… it was a disaster and I wanted to give up everything. »
Dragon Quest II It is the old injury of its director Nakamura Koichi. In 2014, he defined the game as his worst memory. But paradoxically, it’s also one of his fondest memories: when he saw people lining up to buy the game as soon as it was released. ” It caused such a stir that it was in the news. I’m very happy. The work has sold 2.4 million copies.
Dragon Quest Becoming an incredible phenomenon was enough to make Enix one of the heavyweights in the industry. It’s not complicated: From there, Horii’s RPG embodies Japan’s most popular video games, aside from Nintendo’s hits. But nonetheless, Enix hasn’t changed much. Horii is not an employee and remains an indie developer. Even though the publisher has permission, Horii is a part of it, and Enix can’t do anything without its consent. As for the development studio, it is also independent. Whether it is Chunsoft’s first game, it has reached Level-5 after many years.
Square and Enix, two different approaches
Enix is not limited to Dragon Quest, but retains the main idea of not actually hiring developers, only producers or jobs related to editorial roles.Consequently, the company has maintained a fairly modest size, and its growth has primarily involved the diversification of its activities, in turn creating a branch dedicated to book publishing (mainly guided by Dragon Quest), then comics and magazines, and another branch dedicated to developing spin-offs like toys and figurines Dragon Quest.
” We do not plan to create an in-house development team In 1998 insisted on marketing manager Hideki Yamamoto. We prefer to support and help developers outside of Enix. We are a publishing house, we have producers and managers, but all the programmers and graphic designers are either freelancers or work in small companies. »
In the early 2000s, when Enix merged with Squaresoft, it was home to Dragon Quest who is in a strong position. Its financials are strong, much better than Square’s, so the stock exchange is good for Enix shareholders. The resulting entity, however, was closer to Square, retaining the same CEO and Enix being demoted to vice president. It’s logical: Enix may be a successful company, but it has less than a hundred employees. On the other hand, Squaresoft has about a thousand. Quite a size, of course, not done in a day.
Another Miyamoto
The founder of Square is Masafumi Miyamoto, who apparently has nothing to do with Shigeru. He is the son of an owner who manages a company in the field of high-voltage lines. Shang Wen Shang Wen is young and wants to try different things by taking advantage of his father’s economic advantages. In 1983 he founded the subsidiary Square, which became independent in 1986. From the very beginning, the goal was to develop games. And if, unlike Enix, the problem of directly hiring people to do these productions, the original problem is the same: you have to find the right people.
Miyamoto’s idea is not bad: find creative people who can master programming, and when such knowledge is rare, what better than a computer store? So that’s what Square originally looked like, a vulgar store that you paid by the hour to use…