Jaleco

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

~ the eulogy ~

The company was incorporated on 3 October 1974 by Yoshiaki Kanazawa under the name Japan Leisure Co., Ltd. It did not make games. It made the equipment that arcade centers and amusement parks were built out of, and for years it also turned out aquarium fittings under a separate brand called JAQNO. The word Jaleco is just the first syllables of the original name stacked together, and it did not become the company name until March 1983.

The decade after that is the one the name survives on. Exerion came out in 1983 and was licensed to Taito for American distribution. City Connection followed in 1985, a car that drives along a scrolling road painting it white, which is a strange idea for an arcade game and is the reason the studio holding the rights today is named after it. Ninja JaJaMaru-kun landed the same year on the Famicom. Bases Loaded arrived in 1987, developed alongside TOSE, and became the baseball series that most American NES owners met the company through. Underneath all of it Jaleco kept doing the unglamorous work, building cabinets for other developers and turning out crane machines.

The ownership history after 2000 reads like a receipt. PCCW in Hong Kong bought it in November 2000 and renamed it PCCW Japan. The arcade division, the part the company had been founded to serve, was closed in April 2001. The Jaleco name came back in 2002. PCCW sold the whole thing to a fund called Sandringham Fund SPC in August 2005, and in July 2006 the games were pushed down into a subsidiary while the parent turned into a holding company.

The arcade layer never existed in Turkey the way it existed in Japan. There were coin machines in shopping passages and at the seaside, but no industry standing behind them, and nobody in Ankara was ordering a cabinet from a manufacturer in Tokyo. The room full of paying strangers did arrive here eventually, about fifteen years late and running on PCs. From 2002 to 2005 the internet cafe was that same building doing that same job, except what you fed it was an hourly rate instead of a coin. Jaleco spent its first decade selling the furniture for a business model that Turkey only ever received in the other form.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

What Jaleco had in the eighties was range rather than a franchise. It could ship a scrolling shooter and a mahjong game in the same year without either of them feeling like a side project, which was normal for a Japanese publisher of that size and is almost unimaginable now. The Idol Janshi Suchie-Pai mahjong line ran for years and was popular enough in Japan to outlive most of the action catalog.

The weakness sat in the same place as the strength. Nothing in the catalog was big enough to carry the company through a bad decade, and the arcade business that funded everything else went into permanent decline in Japan through the nineties. A publisher with one Mario is safe. A publisher with forty things people liked is not.

~ what really happened ~

In January 2009 Jaleco Holding sold the video game division to a company called Game Yarou. The price was one yen. Game Yarou also took on about seven hundred million yen of liabilities, which is what the one yen actually means: the games were worth less than the debt attached to them, and the sale was a way of handing over the debt with a receipt.

The holding company renamed itself Encom Holdings in April 2009 and was dissolved on 13 May 2013. Game Yarou filed for bankruptcy on 21 May 2014. At that point there was no entity left anywhere holding the name, which is the cleanest definition of dead a company gets.

~ what it became ~

In 2014 the catalog was picked up by a small Japanese publisher that named itself City Connection Co., Ltd. after the 1985 game. It has spent the years since doing exactly what a rights holder does: reissues, compilations, arcade collections on the Switch, licensing deals for individual titles.

So the games are all still buyable and the company that made them has been gone for over a decade. That gap is worth naming, because it is the ordinary fate now. A name in a store front is not evidence of anything surviving. It only means somebody bought a list.

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