Hudson Soft

• 1. Introduction

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  Hudson Soft was born not from a love of games, but from a love of trains. On the 18th of May 1973, brothers Yuji and Hiroshi Kudo registered their new company in Toyohira-ku, a district of Sapporo, Japan. They named it after a locomotive that regularly ran past their childhood home: the Hudson, a class of engine the brothers admired deeply, known in Japan as the C62. The company mascot was a bee named Hachisuke, a nod to the founders' roots in amateur radio. In Japanese, hachi means both eight and bee, and Hokkaido's radio call sign is JA8. That detail tells you something about what Hudson Soft was before it became one of Japan's most recognized game makers.

  Before Bomberman, before Mario Party, before the TurboGrafx-16, there was a small radio shop in Sapporo called CQ Hudson. And the path from that shop to the heights of the Japanese game industry is stranger and more precarious than the polished game cartridges might suggest. How did a failing radio shop become Nintendo's first third-party software vendor? What drove Hudson to build its own video game console to challenge Nintendo, Sega, and Sony at once? And how did a company that helped invent multiplayer party gaming quietly disappear into a competitor on the first of April 2011?

• 2. Radio Bees and Ramen Dreams

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  Yuji Kudo had originally planned to open a coffee shop. The plan collapsed when he discovered another coffee shop already occupied the same building, and so, at the last moment, he pivoted to wireless radio equipment. The shop that became Hudson Soft started life selling radio telecommunications devices and art photographs. Neither Kudo brother had studied business management at university, and they struggled to find trustworthy people to join them. Hudson was almost always operating at a loss during those early radio-only years.

  The shift toward technology came in September 1975, when Hudson began carrying personal computer products alongside its radio inventory. By March 1978, it had opened a dedicated software store on the second floor of the CQ Hudson building in Hiragishi, a place called COSMOS Sapporo. This transition was not unusual for the era: many amateur radio shops were making the same switch because the electronic hardware overlapped. CQ Hudson itself kept selling radio equipment for decades, only closing in May 2001 when Hudson Soft wound it down.

• 3. Quantity, Then Quality

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  Through the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, Hudson Soft chased volume. At its peak pace, the company was releasing up to thirty different computer software titles in a single month. None of them were especially successful, and the approach left the company without a defining hit. That changed in late 1983, when Hudson shifted its philosophy toward quality over quantity.

  The consequences were immediate. Hudson became Nintendo's first third-party software vendor for the Family Computer, and its debut title for that platform, Lode Runner, sold 1.2 million units after its 1984 release. That same year, Bomberman arrived on the Famicom in December and was described by the company itself as a big hit. Hudson was also busy developing for other platforms: the MSX, the NEC PC-8801, and the ZX Spectrum. The company was not betting on a single platform. It was placing chips everywhere it could.

• 4. Building the PC Engine

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  In July 1987, Hudson developed an internal piece of hardware it called the C62 System and then partnered with NEC to turn that foundation into a commercial console: the PC Engine. The machine achieved second place in Japan behind only the Famicom, a genuine upset in a market that Nintendo had come to dominate. Internationally, the PC Engine launched in North America as the TurboGrafx-16, but the timing worked against it. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis had both arrived, and the TurboGrafx-16 captured a smaller share of that market than it had in Japan.

  By 1994, Hudson had independently developed a 32-bit semiconductor chip called the HuC62, which NEC used in its PC-FX console. Hudson's partnership with NEC had grown from a single console into a sustained effort to build competitive hardware against Nintendo, Sega, SNK, Atari, Philips, and Sony, all at once. Hudson continued releasing games on all of those rival platforms as a third-party developer at the same time.

• 5. The Caravan Festival

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  Every year from 1985 to 2000, Hudson Soft organized a nationwide games competition in Japan called the Hudson All-Japan Caravan Festival. The first game featured, in 1985, was Star Force for the Famicom. Every competition from 1985 through 1992, with the single exception of 1988, centered on a shoot 'em up game. Many of those early cartridges came with two-minute and five-minute timed modes built directly into them so that players could practice before the events.

  The 1988 exception is worth noting: Power League, released in North America as World Class Baseball, was a sports game rather than a shooter, the only one of its kind in the early Caravan years. The 1989 competition used a game called Gunhed, known in the United States as Blazing Lazers. A small number of special cartridges were made for that competition under the name Gunhed Taikai, and those editions became rare and expensive collectors items. After 1992's Soldier Blade, the Caravan shifted toward more casual fare, eventually centering on the Bomberman series. The games from the 1990, 1991, and 1992 PC Engine competitions were later collected and re-released on the PSP as PC Engine Best Collection: Soldier Collection.

• 6. Franchises and Outside Work

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  Hudson Soft built several long-running series of its own. Bomberman, Bonk, Star Soldier, and Adventure Island carried the company's name for years. The Far East of Eden RPG series, set in a fictionalized feudal Japan, reached its fourth main entry before Hudson's absorption. The second game in that series was ranked 12th by Famitsu among all games released in Japan, one of the more striking critical endorsements in Hudson's catalog. The Momotaro Dentetsu series, a board game-style title built around business transactions, ran to sixteen entries in Japan.

  The work done for other companies was equally significant. Hudson developed the first eight console installments of the Mario Party series for Nintendo, along with two handheld spin-offs. Those games were passed to Nintendo's NDcube subsidiary after the Konami acquisition, a studio that itself was staffed heavily by former Hudson employees. Hudson also developed Fuzion Frenzy 2 for Microsoft, released for the Xbox 360 in January 2007.

• 7. The Konami Acquisition

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  Hudson Soft's relationship with Konami dates back to at least 1985, when Hudson ported Konami's arcade game Pooyan to the MSX and the Family Computer. The formal acquisition process, however, began much later, triggered by financial crisis. Hudson's main bank, Hokkaido Takushoku, collapsed, and the company needed new financing. Hudson entered the stock market for the first time in December 2000, listing on the NASDAQ Japan Exchange. In August 2001, Konami purchased a block of 5.6 million shares, making it Hudson's largest shareholder. As part of that deal, Hudson absorbed Konami Computer Entertainment Studio's Sapporo division and renamed it Hudson Studio.

  In April 2005, Konami increased its stake through a third-party allocation of three million shares, bringing its holdings to 53.99% of Hudson stock and making it the controlling shareholder. The company's co-founder, Hiroshi Kudo, had already departed in November 2004 following financial losses. Shinichi Nakamoto, the creator of the Bomberman series who had been with Hudson since 1978, left in 2006. Veteran employee Takahashi Meijin, who joined in 1982, resigned in May 2011. Around 2010 and 2011, many Hudson employees migrated to Nintendo's Nd Cube subsidiary, led by Hidetoshi Endo, himself a former Hudson Soft president.

  On the 20th of January 2011, Konami announced its intent to acquire the remainder of Hudson and make it a wholly owned subsidiary. The transaction closed on the 1st of April 2011. Hudson's American subsidiary, Hudson Entertainment, was liquidated in the process, ceasing operations on the 31st of March 2011. The final merger with Konami Digital Entertainment was completed on the 1st of March 2012. The board meeting that approved it was held on the 12th of January 2012, and the merger was described as a voluntary agreement between the two subsidiaries, not a unilateral Konami decision. Hudson's music business was folded into Konami's KME Corporation. Konami initially retained Hudson's website and planned to continue releasing products under the Hudson brand, but by early 2014 the website had been retired. The former Sapporo headquarters continued to operate as a Konami branch until 2014, and in 2015 Konami sold the building itself.