Kaga Create

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

~ the eulogy ~

The last game Kaga Create put on sale was Witch Love Diary: Dragon x Caravan for the PlayStation Vita, on 24 December 2015. The company was dissolved seven days later, on 31 December, and said nothing about it until 5 January 2016, when it issued a press release announcing that it had already stopped existing and had begun liquidating its assets. Offers on those assets were invited for the following two months.

Kaga Electronics started its game division on 22 June 1988 under the name Naxat, which is Taxan backwards, Taxan being another brand the parent owned. It published for the PC Engine first and then for nearly everything that came after: the Famicom, Game Boy, Super Famicom, PlayStation, Saturn, Dreamcast, 3DO and the PC-FX.

The corporate shape changed repeatedly. Naxat became Kaga Tech in 1998 while the games kept the Naxat Soft label. A development subsidiary called Digital Gain was set up in October 1999, and when Kaga Electronics reorganized on 1 April 2005 the game software business landed inside it. Digital Gain was renamed Kaga Create on 1 May 2007, so the firm that died in 2015 was legally the 1999 subsidiary wearing the 2007 name. The English language record of the company stops around 2005, which is roughly when the console releases thinned out into Virtual Console reissues of PC Engine games, and it misses the last decade completely.

~ the dossier ~

~ summer carnival ~

Hudson Soft ran the Caravan, a touring competition where players chased high scores on a time limited shooter, and in Japan it was a real phenomenon. Naxat tried to run its own version against it and called it Summer Carnival. It lasted three summers. Spriggan on the PC Engine CD was the 1991 entry. The following year brought two games at once, Recca on the Famicom and Alzadick on PC Engine CD, and then Nexzr Special closed the whole thing out in 1993.

Summer Carnival '92: Recca is the only one anyone still talks about. It was a Famicom shooter built for a competition rather than for a shelf, with a scoring mode designed around a clock, and it pushed the hardware well past what the Famicom was supposed to manage. It is now the game the entire Naxat back catalog gets remembered through, which is an odd fate for a competition cartridge.

~ the taxan years ~

In North America the parent's Taxan brand did the publishing, which is how Naxat's games reached American shelves under a name that was its own name reversed. Taxan put out 8 Eyes and Low G Man on the NES. On the TurboGrafx-16 the ones that landed were Alien Crush and Devil's Crush, two pinball games with horror art and a physics model people still argue about. The PC Engine never shipped in Turkey and the TurboGrafx barely existed outside the United States and Japan, so none of this was ever on a shelf I walked past.

~ the liquidation ~

This was not the first dissolution in the group. In December 2013 Kaga Electronics shut down CyberFront, another of its game subsidiaries, after finding that CyberFront's intellectual property contracts did not hold up and that business partners were denying those rights existed at all. The Japanese releases of Saints Row IV and Europa Universalis IV were canceled as a result, and PlayStation Store sales of CyberFront titles were switched off between 21 and 31 January 2014.

By the time Kaga Create went, its own website was already showing a service terminated notice beside every title. It had shipped mobile games through 2015, the last of them in August, and then the Vita release in December. Kaga Electronics carried on with its other subsidiaries. Agatsuma Entertainment, another small Japanese console publisher, had closed on 11 December 2015, three weeks before Kaga Create did.

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