Quintet

~ the last words ~

Companies usually leave a document behind when they die. A bankruptcy filing, or a last page on the website saying thank you to everyone. Quintet left neither. It shipped a Game Boy Advance game in 2002, and then there was nothing, and the website stayed up on its own until somebody finally took it down in March 2008.

Tomoyoshi Miyazaki and Masaya Hashimoto left Nihon Falcom and started Quintet in April 1989. Between them they had made Ys, which by then was already one of the most loved action role playing series in Japan. The name they chose was a count of the jobs it takes to build a game, five of them, which suggests the founders thought of a studio as a set of crafts rather than a chain of command.

Enix published almost everything they made for the next six years. ActRaiser in 1990 was an early Super Famicom game that alternated between a side-scrolling action stage and a top-down section where you played a god rebuilding a civilization, and nothing else on the console was shaped anything like it. Soul Blazer in 1992 and Illusion of Gaia in 1993 kept the rebuilding idea and traded away the platforming. Terranigma in 1995 finished the sequence.

None of this was within reach. Nintendo hardware in Turkey in the early nineties was gray import and expensive, and what actually circulated in quantity was Famicom clones rather than the real machines. I was eleven the year Terranigma shipped. Terranigma never even reached North America, so the English version that exists at all is a European release. If these games arrived in Turkey they arrived years late and as files, which is a different relationship than owning one.

~ the record ~

~ what the games were about ~

There is a thread through the Enix titles that people usually call the creation trilogy, although the games are only loosely connected to each other. You are not really saving a world, you are restarting one. In Soul Blazer you free trapped souls and the town rebuilds itself around you a house at a time as you clear the dungeons underneath it. In Terranigma you resurrect continents and then watch civilizations grow on them at their own pace in the background, whether or not you keep helping.

The writing went places that Nintendo-published games of the period generally did not. Terranigma ends by taking away the thing the player has spent forty hours building toward, and it refuses to soften it. Ask anyone who played it in Europe in 1996 what they remember and the answer is almost always the ending.

~ after the super famicom ~

The Granstream Saga in 1997 moved the studio onto the PlayStation with Sony as publisher, and that is where things start to feel thinner. Two Saturn games in 1998 were self-published, which for a studio of Quintet's standing reads as a signal rather than an ambition. Planet Laika in 1999 was strange enough to still be interesting now, and sold the way a game that strange sells.

By 2001 the output is straight contract work. A budget racing game in the Simple 1500 line for D3 Publisher. A licensed Game Boy Advance title for Koei in 2002 based on a manga, which is the last thing the company ever released. A studio whose name had been on the front of Super Famicom boxes finished at the back of somebody else's.

~ the vanishing ~

There was no closure announcement because there does not appear to have been a closure. The company just stopped. Registration lapsed, the site eventually went, and the staff scattered into other studios without leaving much of a paper trail behind them.

The part with real consequences is Miyazaki. Kamui Fujiwara, who drew the characters for Terranigma, said publicly that the Quintet president had disappeared as far as he knew, and that this was why the rights to reissue those games were tangled. It is the reason a set of well regarded Super Famicom titles has been close to impossible to buy legally for two decades. A company can die quietly and still leave its catalog locked in a drawer that nobody can open.

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