ILLUSION

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

~ the last words ~

ILLUSION started in 1992 as a new label inside a company called Heart Electronics Industry, and put out its first game, Angel Army, on 1 April 1993. The operating company, Ai One, was incorporated in 1996. The brand name was meant to carry the idea of visual entertainment, which described the next three decades better than anyone there could have planned.

The early catalog was ordinary for its market and mostly drawn by hand. Then on 18 May 1995 the company shipped a game built in 3D, which a 1997 issue of Dengeki Hime called the first polygon bishoujo game the industry had seen. From February 1997 onward the characters and backgrounds were 3D as a matter of course, and from August 2001 the rendering moved onto the player's own machine in real time. Somewhere in there the company stopped being a publisher of adult games that used 3D and became a 3D character studio that sold adult games.

That distinction is why the name travels further than the catalog does. The thing ILLUSION actually built, over and over, was a character editor: sliders for a face and a body, plus a file format other people could pull apart. The games were the delivery mechanism.

~ the record ~

~ polygons, early ~

By the 2010s the editors had an audience that had very little to do with the games they shipped inside. Character cards got traded as images with data baked into them. Mods were written by people in languages the company never published in, for releases that were only ever sold in Japan. VR Kanojo in February 2017 was the closest thing to a mainstream hit, enough that a hackathon was built around it that July and a VR sub-brand was announced on the back of it.

Nobody outside Japan was a customer here, in the literal sense: the storefront asked where you were and sold accordingly. The company's position, whenever foreign audiences came up, was that it built for the domestic market under domestic law. Everything that crossed a border after that crossed without it, and ILLUSION spent three decades being known in countries it had no commercial relationship with at all.

~ 2009 ~

On 21 April 2006 ILLUSION released a game whose subject matter was sexual assault. It sold in Japan for three years without any attention outside it. In 2009 a British newspaper piece put it in front of an English-speaking audience, Amazon's UK marketplace pulled the listing, and Amazon Japan followed roughly two months later. In May the campaigning group Equality Now opened an international protest and wrote to the company and to the prime minister, and the UN committee that monitors the women's convention urged Japan to ban the sale of games of that kind.

ILLUSION's answer was that the game was made for Japan and was legal there, which was true and which satisfied nobody. The industry's self-regulating ethics body moved against rape-themed titles among its members, and the reporting on how firm that decision really was got disputed almost immediately. The body had no legal force over anyone who was not a member of it. The company stopped selling the game. It kept selling everything else for another fourteen years.

~ the last morning ~

On 14 July 2023 the company announced on its own social account that all development and all sales would end on 18 August. Its final release, ROOM Girl Paradise, had come out on 28 April. Through the last month the site ran slow under people buying things before they became unbuyable, and on the morning of the 18th domestic sales stopped at ten o'clock, with the Steam titles winding down on their own schedule. Update files stopped being distributed. The account closed.

Two weeks before the end, something odd had happened: the Twitter account that had been ILLUSION's development feed changed its name to ILLGAMES and announced a debut game for 1 September. Fans read the obvious thing into it. On its last day ILLUSION posted that it had no successor company and that people should beware of similar products, naming nobody. In April 2024 a separate VR outfit called ILLUMINATION was founded with the VR Kanojo producer as vice president, and that one said openly that former ILLUSION management had wished it well. Thirty years of character models, and the last public act was a disclaimer.

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