Enix

History

Yasuhiro Fukushima was born on August 18, 1947, in Asahikawa, Hokkaido. After graduating from Nihon University's Department of Architecture in 1970, he spent years travelling before founding a small publication company on September 22, 1975. Its official name was Eidansha Boshu Service Center — a business that published information magazines helping people find public housing apartments. It was unglamorous work: classified listings, real estate information, the bureaucratic connective tissue of urban housing in 1970s Japan. Fukushima had no programming background and no experience in games. What he had was a restless curiosity about where information publishing was heading.

By 1981, Fukushima had concluded that personal computer software represented the next publishing frontier. He renamed a subsidiary Eidansha System and on August 30, 1982, formally rebranded it as Enix Corporation. Rather than building an internal development team — which would have required technical expertise he did not possess — Fukushima devised a different approach: he would find the programmers who already existed and give them a reason to show themselves. In the autumn of 1982, Enix launched its Game & Hobby Program Contest, offering prize money of three million yen — roughly ten times what comparable contests were offering at the time. Approximately three hundred entries arrived.

Two figures who would define Japanese role-playing games came through that contest. Koichi Nakamura, a student programmer, won the excellence award for his puzzle-action game Door Door. Yuji Horii — a features writer at Weekly Shōnen Jump who had taught himself to code in order to enter — won a runner-up prize for Love Match Tennis. Enix invited both men to the AppleFest '83 conference in San Francisco in 1983, where they encountered Wizardry and Ultima, the American RPGs that had recently redefined computerized fantasy. Horii returned with a vision: an RPG that distilled the depth of those games into something a Japanese child could pick up and understand. That vision would take three years to reach a Famicom cartridge.

Dragon Quest launched on May 27, 1986. The design was Horii's — elegant and accessible, reducing the statistical complexity of Western RPGs to a system navigable by children. The programming was Nakamura's, executed through his studio Chunsoft. For artwork and monster design, Horii recruited Akira Toriyama, then in the middle of Dragon Ball's serialization in Weekly Shōnen Jump; the connection ran through the magazine's shared network. For music, the path was stranger still: classical composer and television personality Kōichi Sugiyama had purchased Enix's computer chess game and submitted the enclosed questionnaire card — actually posted by his wife after he hesitated — suggesting that games deserved proper music. An Enix producer tracked down the card's famous sender and offered him the commission. Dragon Quest's score was the result.

By 1988, Dragon Quest had become something Japan had not seen from a video game. Dragon Quest III launched on February 10, 1988, selling approximately one million units on its first day and three million within a week. Queues formed outside stores before dawn; reports of students skipping school triggered approximately three hundred truancy-related arrests near stores. Sales in the first month reached an estimated twenty billion yen. The widespread claim that the Japanese government subsequently banned weekday Dragon Quest launches is a myth — but Enix quietly chose to move subsequent releases to Saturdays and holidays following discussions with Horii and Nintendo, to reduce disruption to school attendance.

Enix never resolved the paradox at its foundation: it had built one of Japan's most successful game brands without ever truly becoming a game developer. Dragon Quest was designed by Horii's Armor Project production company and programmed by Chunsoft, then later Heartbeat and TOSE — Enix provided the publishing platform, the financial backing, and the distribution. The same model extended across its wider catalogue. Quintet, an external studio, created ActRaiser (1990), Soul Blazer (1992), and Illusion of Gaia (1993) under Enix's label. Tri-Ace, founded by former Telenet Japan staff, delivered Star Ocean (1996) and Valkyrie Profile (1999). Enix's value lay not in what it built but in who it found and what conditions it created for them to work.

Parallel to its game publishing, Enix built a significant presence in print. A Dragon Quest four-panel manga anthology released in 1990 sold roughly five million copies by year-end. On March 12, 1991, Enix launched Monthly Shōnen Gangan, a manga magazine aimed at elementary and junior high school readers — entering a market that had not successfully introduced a monthly manga title in over fifteen years. The magazine succeeded, spawning the Gangan Comics book imprint and sister titles including Gangan Wing and Monthly G Fantasy. This manga publishing infrastructure would survive the 2003 merger and expand under Square Enix.

The merger with Square was announced on November 25, 2002, and completed on April 1, 2003. Square had been severely weakened by the failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, an animated film that cost approximately 137 million dollars to produce and earned only around 85 million worldwide. By the time Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts had restored Square's financial position, both companies agreed that combining Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy under one roof was the rational next step for Japanese role-playing games. The surviving legal entity was Enix; the new company took the name Square Enix. Fukushima served as chairman until 2004. The real estate publisher who had run a programming contest in 1982 had, over twenty years, built an accidental empire — and handed it, along with the largest RPG library in Japan, to the merged company that would carry both series into the next generation.