Curated category
Japanese brands
- PlayStation (console)PlayStation was born from humiliation. On the first day of the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sony stood on stage and announced a partnership…
- SegaSega is a Japanese video game company whose history reads like a map of the entire industry's evolution. It began not with video games at all, but with slot…
- FujifilmFujifilm began life in 1934 as a subsidiary of a Japanese chemical company called Daicel, making photographic film. Few corporate origin stories seem less…
- PokémonPokémon began as the private obsession of a boy in Machida, a suburb of Tokyo, who spent his childhood catching insects in the ponds and fields around his…
- PlayStation ClassicThe PlayStation Classic went on sale on the 3rd of December 2018, chosen precisely because it was the 24th anniversary of the original PlayStation's debut.
- NintendoNintendo was founded on the 23rd of September 1889, not as a game company, but as a playing card business. Craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi set up shop in…
- Japan AirlinesJapan Airlines, known by its initials JAL, was born from the wreckage of World War II, its first planes leased from a Philippine carrier, its first crews…
- KodanshaKodansha, the largest publisher in Japan, began not as a publishing house but as a spin-off of a public speaking society.
- Dragon QuestDragon Quest, the Japanese role-playing franchise that first arrived on the Famicom on the 27th of May, 1986, turned into something Japan had never quite…
- Square EnixSquare Enix was born from the union of two companies that had long watched each other across Japan's video game landscape.
- PlayStationPlayStation entered the world in Japan on the 3rd of December 1994, and within a decade it had done something no console before it ever managed: ship more…
- SNKSNK began not as a video game company but as Shin Nihon Kikaku, a small Japanese firm founded in 1973 by Eikichi Kawasaki.
- SonySony began in the rubble of postwar Tokyo with a capital of 190,000 yen and eight employees. Masaru Ibuka opened an electronics shop inside a department…
- Sammy CorporationSammy Corporation began its life not as a gaming company, but as a spin-off of an arcade division. On the 1st of November 1975, a manufacturing and marketing…
- KonamiKonami began life on the 21st of March 1969 as a jukebox rental and repair shop in Toyonaka, Osaka. Three men started it together, two of whom had met while…
- NamcoNamco started with two hand-cranked rocking horses on a department store rooftop in Yokohama. Masaya Nakamura, the son of a shotgun repair business owner…
- CapcomCapcom sits behind some of the most recognizable titles in video game history. Resident Evil, Street Fighter, Monster Hunter, Mega Man, Devil May Cry, and…
- SoftBank GroupSoftBank Group began not as a tech empire but as a software distributor founded in September 1981 by then-24-year-old Masayoshi Son.
- Kadokawa CorporationKadokawa Corporation began not as a media empire but as a small postwar publishing house with a mission: to revitalize Japanese culture through books.
- Final FantasyFinal Fantasy began as a desperate gamble. In 1987, a Square designer named Hironobu Sakaguchi was convinced he was about to wash out of the video game…
- FromSoftwareFromSoftware, Inc. began life not in the world of dragons and darkness, but in the far more prosaic territory of business software.