Imageepoch

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

~ the last words ~

In April 2015 Gematsu reported something that reads oddly in a games news feed. Yoshiteru Sato of Idea Factory had said publicly that he could not get hold of Ryoei Mikage, the head of Imageepoch, and that nobody else seemed able to either. Mikage's Twitter account had been quiet for months. The report did not say the company was in trouble. It reported only that nobody could reach its founder.

The next month supplied the paperwork. On 7 May the Tokyo District Court issued a decision opening bankruptcy proceedings against Imageepoch Inc. and against Smile Online Game, a small related company with the same representative. Teikoku Databank, which exists to publish exactly this, carried the notice on Wednesday 13 May under the flat headline that a credit agency uses for the end of a business: two companies in game development receive a decision to commence bankruptcy proceedings, liabilities of 1.103 billion yen.

Most of the English coverage dates the death to the 13th, because that is the day the news became readable. The court decision is six days earlier.

~ the record ~

~ the boom years ~

Imageepoch had been trading since 2004 and was incorporated in June 2005, out of an office in Bunkyo. It grew fast on handheld role-playing games at a moment when the Nintendo DS had an enormous installed base and a visible appetite for exactly that: Luminous Arc in 2007, then two sequels, then Sands of Destruction, then 7th Dragon in 2009. Later came Fate/Extra on the PSP, Black Rock Shooter: The Game, Criminal Girls, and Time and Eternity. By January 2009 the studio had more than 120 people in it.

~ the disappearance ~

The Teikoku filing tells the financial half of the story in two numbers. In the year to September 2011 Imageepoch booked revenue of about 1.751 billion yen. In the year to September 2013 that figure was about 410 million. The agency's explanation is the unglamorous one: the cash required to develop games had become a weight, and the sales needed to carry it did not arrive.

The same document contains the line that does the most damage. By November 2014 the company had substantially ceased operations. That is six months before the court decision and a full five months before anyone in the press noticed that its founder had gone quiet. A studio can stop existing well before it is declared to have stopped.

~ what the filing says ~

Imageepoch owed roughly 1.1 billion yen to about 43 creditors. Smile Online Game, which had only been incorporated in June 2013, owed about 3 million yen to 5 creditors and failed as a direct consequence of the parent. The trustee appointed was the attorney Takeshi Nakano of the Toranomon law office, claims had to be filed by 4 June, and a meeting to report on the state of the assets was set for ten in the morning on 30 July.

Those dates are the part the games press leaves out. The asset meeting fell twelve weeks to the day after the court decision.

~ the game that shipped anyway ~

Stella Glow was already finished. Sega held the publishing rights and put it on sale in Japan on 4 June 2015, twenty-eight days after the court opened proceedings against the studio that built it, and Atlus brought it to North America later that year. It was Imageepoch's last completed game, and the company credited on the box was by then in the hands of a trustee. A successor called Mikage LLC is recorded at the same founder's name.

Japanese handheld role-playing games of this exact vintage never really crossed into Turkey, where almost nobody I knew owned a DS and the role-playing habit ran through PC imports instead, so I know this catalog as a list rather than as a memory.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »