Enix

Japan · Founded 1975 · Publisher

A real-estate advertising firm turned games publisher that found its creators through a programming contest, then built Dragon Quest with them. Enix outsourced nearly all development and merged with Square in 2003.

Yasuhiro Fukushima, an architect turned entrepreneur, founded the company on 22 September 1975 as Eidansha Boshu Service Center, a publisher of real-estate advertising tabloids. In the early 1980s he moved into software by organising the Enix Game Hobby Program Contest, with ¥1 million in prize money. The winners shaped the company's future: Yuji Horii with the tennis game Love Match Tennis, Koichi Nakamura with the puzzle game Door Door, and Kazuro Morita with Morita's Battlefield. Enix's business model was unusual among Japanese publishers. Rather than building large in-house teams, it commissioned outside developers and kept few creators on staff. Horii and Nakamura's Chunsoft developed the early Dragon Quest games; Quintet made ActRaiser (1990); tri-Ace made Star Ocean (1996) and Valkyrie Profile (1999). Dragon Quest itself, developed from 1985 with music by Koichi Sugiyama and character designs by Akira Toriyama, was released in 1986 and sold more than a million copies in Japan, establishing the template for the Japanese console RPG. Overseas, Enix had a harder time. Its North American subsidiary, which had published titles such as ActRaiser, closed in November 1995 after weak sales. At home Dragon Quest made Enix one of the most profitable publishers in Japan, and on 1 April 2003 it merged with Square to form Square Enix, with Enix as the legally surviving company.