Hudson Soft

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

~ the obit ~

i missed this one for the ordinary reason: the hardware never came to Turkey. Hudson's console was sold in Japan and North America and almost nowhere else, and the software that made the company famous reached me the way most Japanese software reached anyone here, which is on a copied cartridge with the maker's name still in the title screen and no meaning attached to it. i learned that Bomberman and the PC Engine came from the same company in Sapporo long after both had stopped mattering.

Yuji and Hiroshi Kudo opened a shop called CQ Hudson in Sapporo on 18 May 1973, selling amateur radio equipment. The name came off a steam locomotive, because the brothers liked trains, and the company mascot for the next four decades was a cartoon bee. They moved into personal computers in 1975 and into games in 1978, writing software for Japanese machines that never left Japan.

In 1984 Nintendo licensed an outside company to publish for the Famicom for the first time, and the company was Hudson. That is the origin of the entire third party model on Nintendo hardware. Hudson's Famicom port of Lode Runner sold over a million copies, Bomberman had arrived the year before, and from 1985 the company ran the Hudson All-Japan Caravan every summer, a shoot em up scoring tournament that toured the country for fifteen years.

Then Hudson built its own machine. The PC Engine launched in Japan on 30 October 1987, designed by Hudson and manufactured by NEC, small enough to sit in a hand and running games on credit card sized cards. For a couple of years it did what nobody else managed in that decade, which was take real market share away from Nintendo at home. Outside Japan it was rebadged as the TurboGrafx-16 and the American launch went badly against the Genesis.

The successor is what broke the company. The PC-FX arrived in December 1994 as a tower shaped machine built around full motion video at the exact moment everyone else went 3D, and it sold in the hundreds of thousands against millions of PlayStations. Hudson retreated to making software for other people's consoles. Konami bought 5.6 million shares in August 2001 and became the largest shareholder, took a controlling stake in April 2005, announced full acquisition on 20 January 2011, and closed the merger on 1 March 2012.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the hardware bet ~

A software house designing a console is rare and it usually ends the way this did. Hudson had built a custom graphics chip called the C62 in 1987 and could not manufacture anything, so it took the design to NEC, which had the fabs and no games business. The split worked: NEC put the machine in shops and Hudson filled it, and the HuCard format meant a game was a piece of plastic the thickness of a bank card.

The CD-ROM add-on in 1988 was the first optical drive on any console anywhere, three years before Sega and six before Sony. That is the part of Hudson's record that gets forgotten because the machine it was attached to lost. The American version failed for reasons that had almost nothing to do with the hardware, being launched at the wrong price into a market where Sega had already spent two years teaching people what a 16-bit console was.

~ the slow absorption ~

Konami did not buy Hudson in one movement. It bought a position in 2001, control in 2005, the remainder in 2011, and the corporate entity in 2012, which is eleven years of a company being disassembled while continuing to ship products under its own logo. Staff left in waves over that decade rather than on a single announcement day.

The last years were the Wii and the DS, where Hudson did well enough on Deca Sports and on Bomberman reissues to look healthy from outside. Mario Party had been Hudson's work for Nintendo since 1998, and the series moved to another studio while Hudson was being wound down, which removed the one contract that had guaranteed the company a hit every couple of years.

~ what got buried with it ~

The Caravan is the thing worth mourning. Every summer from 1985, Hudson took a truck of Famicoms around Japan and ran a two minute or five minute scoring competition on a game written specifically to be played in two or five minutes. Star Soldier exists in the shape it does because of a tournament format. There is no modern equivalent, because a publisher going to the players physically stopped being necessary the moment the players could be reached down a wire.

Konami still owns Bomberman and puts it out every few years, most recently on Nintendo hardware, and the games are fine. The Sapporo building is gone, the bee is gone from everything except merchandise nostalgia, and the PC Engine came back in 2020 as a plastic reproduction with games in it, sold by Konami, which by then owned both the machine and the company that had designed it.

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