Enix

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

~ the obituary ~

Yasuhiro Fukushima founded the Eidansha Boshu Service Center on 22 September 1975 to publish tabloids full of real estate advertising. Seven years later he noticed that personal computers were selling in Japan and that nobody knew who was writing software for them, so the company renamed itself Enix and announced a programming contest with cash prizes. Among the people who entered were Yuji Horii, a magazine writer, and Koichi Nakamura, a teenager. Nakamura's entry, Door Door, became Enix's first hit.

Dragon Quest shipped for the Famicom on 27 May 1986. Horii designed it, Akira Toriyama drew it, Koichi Sugiyama wrote the music, and none of the three were Enix employees. That arrangement never changed. Enix built no internal development studio for its entire history and contracted the work out, first to Chunsoft and later to Armor Project and Heartbeat, which meant the publisher of the biggest series in Japanese gaming had 134 staff on the books at the end and did not need more.

The series became a domestic event on a scale that has no equivalent anywhere else. Dragon Quest III landed on 10 February 1988 and the lines outside Japanese shops were the news story rather than the game. Enix moved into manga publishing in 1991 with Monthly Shonen Gangan and made money there too, on comics adapted from the games and games adapted from the comics.

Square and Enix announced their merger on 26 November 2002 and completed it on 1 April 2003. Enix was the surviving company on paper. Fukushima became chairman and the largest shareholder, and Square's Yoichi Wada got the president's chair. What actually happened is what happens in every merger of equals: the smaller culture stopped being visible within about two years, and the word Enix now only appears attached to the other one.

Enix's largest years line up almost exactly with the years i was first getting near a computer, and none of it reached me. The American branch closed in 1995 and no mainline Dragon Quest came out in English for six years after that. Europe waited until Dragon Quest VIII in April 2006, which is twenty years after the first game. i was in my twenties and a working engineer by then. There is no version of my life where this company was ever going to be in it, and that is worth saying instead of pretending otherwise.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

Dragon Quest was not the first console role playing game but it was the one that decided what the genre looked like in Japan for twenty years. Horii's design rule was that a player who had never touched a game should be able to finish it, so the fights are one screen with no animation on your side and the menus explain themselves. The Toriyama art is doing most of the work of making a statistics engine feel like a place.

What kept the series enormous was that Enix released a mainline entry roughly every three or four years and never let anybody else touch the schedule. That is why the queues were a news story. Scarcity was the whole strategy, and it was possible because a hundred and thirty people running a licensing operation have almost no overhead to feed.

~ the merger ~

The stated reason for the 2003 deal was development cost. A PlayStation 2 game took a studio the size of Square's several years, and both companies had watched Sony and the arrival of the next generation and decided that going alone was worse. Fukushima had also spent years saying he would not merge while Square was in trouble, and Square's Final Fantasy film had put it in exactly that trouble in 2001, which delayed everything until the balance sheet recovered.

The odd part is the direction. Enix was the profitable half and the surviving legal entity, and Enix is the half that disappeared. Square's people ran the combined company, the Square style of production won, and the last two decades of Dragon Quest have been made under a management culture that came from the other building.

~ the long tail ~

The publishing arm outlived everything. Gangan Comics is still going and still carries manga aimed at people who came in through the games. Dragon Quest is still shipping and still selling to the same country, and the twelfth entry has been announced and unshipped for long enough that the wait is a joke rather than a strategy.

Fukushima is the founder who did best out of any of this. He never wrote a line of game code, never ran a studio, and ended up the largest shareholder of the company that owns Final Fantasy, on the strength of noticing in 1982 that the interesting people were sitting at home with no way to sell what they had written.

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