Telenet Japan

~ the eulogy ~

Renovation was the name on the box in America. Telenet Japan was the name on the company that made what was inside it, and those two words never met a customer in the same sentence. That is the whole problem with writing this obituary: a lot of people played these games and almost none of them could have told you whose they were.

The company started in October 1983 under Kazuyuki Fukushima, early enough to have shipped for Japanese home computers before the Famicom had finished eating the market. It grew by making studios instead of departments. Wolf Team appeared in 1986 with Laser Soft alongside it, and Riot followed in 1991. There was also a California operation called Renovation Products to handle the west. Each one had its own logo and its own release schedule.

Valis is the series people name first. An action platformer about a schoolgirl handed a sword by another world, it ran from 1986 through the whole PC Engine and Mega Drive generation, and the anime cutscenes on the CD versions were doing something in 1992 that most cartridge games could not afford. Cosmic Fantasy was the other one, four role-playing games that made it to America in a form that confused everybody who bought them.

None of this reached me. Consoles of that generation arrived in Turkey unevenly and mostly secondhand, and what I actually played came later and came on a PC. The years when Telenet mattered were the years I was in primary school in a country where the games shelf, if there was one, held whatever a distributor had been able to get hold of.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it became ~

The most valuable thing Telenet ever produced was not a game. Wolf Team was folded back into the parent in 1993 during a restructure, and the group that came out the other side included the programmer Yoshiharu Gotanda and the composer Motoi Sakuraba. They were working on Tales of Phantasia at the time, with Namco paying for it.

That job went badly enough at the management level that the core of the team walked out in 1995 and started tri-Ace. Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile came out of that walk. What stayed behind at Wolf Team kept making Tales games until 2003, when the remains were transferred into a Namco subsidiary and the name went away. Two of the longest running role-playing franchises in Japan trace back through a studio inside a company that no longer exists.

~ the unraveling ~

The American arm was the first thing to go wrong. Renovation Products had been the route into a market Telenet could not otherwise reach, and when it stopped working the company lost its distribution and its foreign revenue in the same move. Publishing under other people's labels had always meant the recognition went somewhere else, and by the late nineties there was nothing left in the west that carried the Telenet name at all.

The thing that actually killed it was pachinko. Telenet moved into writing software for pachinko machines, which is where a lot of Japanese game companies went looking for money in that decade, and the debt came out of that side rather than out of the games. By 2007 it stood at a billion yen. The company stopped operating in late September and the closure was official on 25 October.

~ the inheritance ~

Sunsoft bought Telenet's entire software library in December 2009. The catalog then moved again, to City Connection, and in January 2020 Edia took it on. Valis has been reissued more than once since, in collections that have to explain to buyers what Telenet Japan was before they can sell them a game from it.

The company is a useful shape to look at because it worked the way a lot of the industry worked and left almost no name recognition for it. Telenet built studios and let each of them brand itself, then shipped abroad under a label that was neither. Everything it made is remembered under some other word.

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