AQ Interactive

» see aqi.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

AQ stood for Artistic Quality, and the Japanese company liked to point out that the two letters also punned on 永久, eikyū, meaning eternity. It lasted six years.

The chain starts in March 2000 with a studio called Cavia, founded by a group that included Hayao Nakayama, who had been president of Sega in Japan for most of the Mega Drive era. Cavia spent five years buying its neighbors. It took a consolidated stake in Scarab in September 2002 and in Artoon in May 2004, renamed Scarab to feelplus in March 2005, and then on 1 October 2005 did the structural move the whole thing had been building toward: Cavia renamed itself AQ Interactive, became a pure holding company for sales and management, and spun a fresh Cavia Inc. out underneath itself to keep making games.

Its first published title was Tetris: The Grand Master ACE, an Xbox 360 launch game in Japan on 10 December 2005. Over the next five years the group put out an unusually scattered catalog: Arcana Heart on PS2, Bullet Witch and Vampire Rain on 360, a Ju-on horror game on Wii, Blue Dragon Plus on DS, a Pokémon arcade card machine, a browser-based Three Kingdoms strategy game, and the Korg DS-10, which was a working synthesizer sold on a games console. It also owned Xseed, the American publisher, from 2007, which is how a Tokyo holding company's name ended up on the back of boxes in the United States.

It listed on JASDAQ on 28 February 2007 and moved to the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange on 25 March 2008 under the code 3838. On 10 May 2011 it announced a merger agreement with Marvelous Entertainment and a company called Liveware. The delisting came on 28 September 2011 and the merger took effect on 1 October, with Marvelous as the surviving entity. The result was named Marvelous AQL.

~ the case file ~

~ the sega diaspora ~

The staff list is what makes this group worth a grave. Artoon was founded by Yoji Ishii and Naoto Ohshima, both out of Sega, and Ohshima is the man who designed Sonic the Hedgehog and Doctor Eggman. Scarab, which became feelplus, came out of UPL. Sitting above all of it was Nakayama, who had been running Sega in Japan while most of these people were still inside it.

So AQ Interactive is what a company looks like when a generation of Japanese developers from one collapsed platform regroups under one roof. The Last Story, co-developed with Mistwalker for Nintendo and released on Wii in 2011, is the clearest artifact of that: Mistwalker was Hironobu Sakaguchi's studio after he left Square, and the two lineages met on a Wii exclusive in the group's final year.

~ the holding company problem ~

A holding company over a stack of studios makes sense while the studios are winning contracts. It stops making sense the moment the overhead is larger than the margin, and from 2010 the structure started unwinding in public. Cavia was folded back into the parent in July 2010 after NieR, which was announced at the time as Cavia's last title. In August 2010 the three studio web sites were merged into a single AQI development page, which is the small quiet step a multi-studio group takes ahead of the legal one.

In January 2011 AQI sold 85 percent of Microcabin to Fields, a pachinko machine company. In May it sold part of its arcade business to Enheart. On 1 August 2011 it formally absorbed its three remaining development subsidiaries into itself, which left no studios underneath it at all. Two months later there was no AQ Interactive either. The last annual numbers it published, for the year to March 2011, show consolidated revenue of 7.239 billion yen and 288 consolidated employees, down from the 393 the group had carried a year before.

~ the day the ticker stopped ~

Code 3838 traded for three and a half years on the second section. The en.wikipedia article dates the company's end to 5 October 2011, citing a press party where Marvelous AQL celebrated the consolidation and announced a new title. That party was four days after the fact. The Japanese record, including the merger notices AQI filed itself, puts the effective date at 1 October 2011, with Marvelous Entertainment as the surviving company and AQ Interactive and Liveware both extinguished into it.

Japanese mid-tier publishers of this era almost never reached me directly. The games did, through Xseed and through whatever got a European release, and the Korg DS-10 in particular was sold and talked about as a music tool rather than as a game. The company behind them was invisible by design, which is what a holding company is for, and the most famous thing about it stayed buried in a shareholder table: Nakayama held 21.38 percent to the end.

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