Xtalsoft

~ the eulogy ~

One game. Out of a catalog of roughly thirty titles released between 1982 and 1990, exactly one Xtalsoft game was ever published outside Japan: Babylon, an action RPG for the PC-8801, which came out in the United States as Curse of Babylon. Everything else stayed on Japanese machines in Japanese, and a fan translation of Aspic: Curse of the Snakelord finally appeared in 2023, thirty-seven years after the original.

The company was established in 1982 and worked mainly in role-playing games at a point when Japanese home computers were barely large enough to hold one. Its platform list reads like a census of the early Japanese PC market: PC-8801 and PC-8801mkIISR, PC-6001 and PC-6001mkII, PC-9801, the Sharp X1 and MZ-700 and MZ-2000 and MZ-2500, the Fujitsu FM-7 and FM77AV, MSX2, the Hitachi S1. Two series carried it: Mugen no Shinzou, which started in 1984 and reached a third installment in 1990, and Crimson, which started in 1987 and also got to three. Fantasian arrived in 1985 and LIZARD, the same year as the first Mugen no Shinzou, is the title the Japanese article lists first.

The name is "crystal software" with crystal abbreviated to a single X, which English writing does as a matter of jargon, and for the first years it was written out with an apostrophe as X'TAL SOFT. In Japanese it stayed クリスタルソフト throughout.

~ the dossier ~

~ the disk original group ~

In July 1986 Xtalsoft joined the Disk Original Group, a publishing cooperative for Famicom Disk System titles headed by Square, which gave computer software houses a route onto Nintendo's rewritable disk format. Xtalsoft's contribution was Sword of Kalin, released through DOG on 2 October 1987.

That is the only time the company's work reached a console audience, and it marks where Xtalsoft stood in the industry: inside Square's consortium, without the weight to publish on Nintendo hardware alone. The computer catalog kept going in parallel, with Advanced Fantasian in December 1988 and Crimson II in March 1989.

~ absorbed, not closed ~

At the start of the 1990s Xtalsoft was in management difficulty. On 1 October 1990 T&E Soft absorbed it and turned it into T&E Soft's Osaka development department, so the team carried on and kept shipping under the new parent's name, including Sword World PC in November 1992. The English and the Japanese articles agree on the merger date to the day, which for a company this size is unusual.

The people scattered outward from there over the following years. Kazunari Tomi went to Nihon Falcom and then Studio Alex and is at Gainax now. Chihiro Fujioka went through Square Enix and became head of development at AlphaDream, which filed for bankruptcy in October 2019. The intellectual property went the other way and ended up consolidated: every Xtalsoft title is now owned by D4 Enterprise, which deals in re-releases of old Japanese computer software.

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