NEC Avenue

~ the obituary ~

NECアベニュー株式会社 was a record company. The Japanese article leads with that and it is the right order: a レコード会社 in the NEC group that also developed and sold video software and game software. The office was in Chiyoda-ku in Tokyo and later moved out to Takatsu-ku in Kawasaki. Distribution ran through Nagaoka Trading and then through Nippon Columbia.

The catalog was idol pop and new music with film and game scores alongside it. Joe Hisaishi recorded for the label. So did Junko Yagami and Shinji Harada, and later Monday Michiru and Nobukazu Takemura. On the video side it handled anime: Sol Bianca, the Riki-Oh OAV, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms feature on laserdisc and VHS, and the Download OAV, all of which the Anime News Network encyclopedia credits to it independently of any wiki.

One correction worth making early, because almost every retelling gets it wrong. NEC Avenue was not a subsidiary of NEC Home Electronics. Home Electronics was the arm that built the PC Engine hardware and it published its own titles for the thing; the two were siblings under NEC, and NEC Retro states it outright. Both of them later put a division into the same merger, and that shared merger is probably where the confusion started.

~ the case file ~

~ ten percent of the business ~

Edge's July 1994 issue is cited for two numbers: fifty employees, and video games running at roughly a tenth of the business. That ratio describes the company better than its release list does: a record label with a games sideline, filed in every retrospective as a games company.

What a sideline, though. Around sixty titles for the PC Engine and its CD-ROM², including the home conversions of Space Harrier, Fantasy Zone, OutRun and After Burner II, plus Super Darius, Download, Puyo Puyo CD, Strider Hiryū and the Dragon Knight sequels. It built controllers too: the Avenue Pad 3 in 1991 and the six-button Avenue Pad 6 in 1993, though that pair is recorded only on a fan wiki and carries no citation there either.

The PC Engine never had a Turkish release in any form, and neither did a single one of these discs. That is a flat fact about distribution rather than a complaint; Japan got a CD-ROM games console in 1988 and most of the world got the news about it later and secondhand. The Sega arcade originals these discs were converting traveled far better than the discs did, and the PC Engine versions stayed unknown to me for another twenty years.

~ what went into interchannel ~

On 2 October 1995 NEC founded NEC Interchannel in Minato-ku. Its own corporate history, archived from the company website, lists the three pieces it was assembled from: NEC's Personal Software Division CD-ROM department, the CD-ROM software department of NEC Home Electronics' Optical Media Products Division, and the Game Software Division of NEC Avenue. One leg of three.

NEC Avenue did not become Interchannel and was not absorbed by it. It carried on as a separate company with its production and promotion section and no game division, and the rest leaked out over the following years: music software tied to consumer games moved across in October 1997, and in March 1998 Interchannel bought all of NEC Avenue Music Publishing, a subsidiary. By then the parent had been hollowed out from the inside by its own corporate family.

~ three dates and no citation ~

English Wikipedia says the company was dissolved on 29 January 1999. Japanese Wikipedia says it halted all activity in 1998 and that liquidation was completed on 21 January 1999. NEC Retro says 1998 and leaves it there. None of the three carries a reference, and the edit histories show why. The English date has been sitting in the infobox since the article's first real version in June 2021, added with no edit summary, and the Japanese date was dropped in by a single editor in May 2015 over a sentence that had previously said only that activity was suspended.

The two precise-looking dates also cannot both be right, and not for a reason of taste. Under Japanese company law 解散 opens liquidation and 清算結了 closes it, so a dissolution has to come first. English has the dissolution falling eight days after the Japanese source has the liquidation finished. On top of that, the English claim is cited to two archived pages from a music-release site, and one of them is a 2004 listing whose only mention of the company is a production credit, with no 1999 date anywhere on it. A company that spent twelve years putting dates on record sleeves does not have one of its own.

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