Datam Polystar

~ the goodbye ~

In May 1990 the record company Polystar spun its game music division out into a separate business. Game soundtracks in Japan were a real market by then, big enough to support a dedicated label, and the new company was set up to work that market rather than to make anything playable.

It did not stay on that side of the fence. Within two years Datam Polystar was publishing on the Super Famicom, including the side-scroller Musya and the puzzle game Cacoma Knight, both of which reached America through SETA. It went on selling soundtrack albums the whole time, including records for Sega and for Sony, so the catalog has orchestral arrangements filed next to cartridges.

There was no route from any of this to me. A Japanese publisher of mid-tier Super Famicom games in 1992 had no distribution into Turkey at all, and the consoles that turned up in Ankara shops in those years came through grey importers. The games here came to the West only when another publisher carried them, and the soundtracks never came at all.

The company had exactly one president, Yukio Kakehi, from the month it was founded to the day it was struck off.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the letters stood for ~

DATAM is short for DATA MUSIC, which is the kind of compound name a record label gives a department rather than a brand anyone is expected to say out loud. The music business stayed the spine of the company long after the games had stopped. Its final release of any kind was an album in 2009, a collection tied to the manga artist Izumi Takemoto.

After that there is nothing. No closing announcement was made and no final statement was published. The company simply stopped doing things, and in the registry's own terms it became a dormant company: still on the books, no longer trading.

~ roommate ~

What Datam Polystar is actually remembered for arrived on the Sega Saturn in 1997. ROOMMATE is a communication game built around a character named Ryoko Inoue who shares the player's apartment, and the title is the entire premise. Three more Saturn entries followed through 1999, and a run of smaller PlayStation titles after that. The genre is one of the least exportable things Japanese consoles ever produced, and most people outside Japan who know these games at all know them through emulation rather than through a shop.

~ the register closes ~

Japanese company law does not require anyone to announce that a business is over. A company that stops filing with the registry eventually gets treated as dissolved whether or not its owners ever say so, and the paperwork catches up years later. That is what happened here. On 7 February 2019 the commercial register was closed against Datam Polystar, with the liquidation recorded as complete and the company's legal personality extinguished on the same entry.

The gap is the striking part. The last thing the company did was release a CD in 2009, and the state did not get around to formally ending it until 2019. For a decade there was a company on the register with a president and nothing to preside over.

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