RED Company

History

RED Company's story begins not in a game studio but in Japanese theatre and entertainment. Oji Hiroi, the company's creative force, was a manga artist and entertainment producer who founded the organization in 1976. In 1987, Hudson Soft approached Hiroi to create a major title for the PC Engine CD-ROM² — the first CD-ROM add-on for a home console — in order to establish the format's potential. Hiroi accepted, and the result was Tengai Makyou: Ziria.

Tengai Makyou: Ziria, released in June 1989, was unlike any RPG that preceded it. Set in a fictional Japan filtered through kabuki theatre, samurai cinema, and absurdist comedy, it made no attempt to imitate the Western-fantasy conventions of Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. The game ran on CD-ROM, which allowed full voice acting for key scenes, animated cutscenes, and a sweeping musical score by Ryuichi Sakamoto — delivered in audio quality no cartridge could approach. It was the first RPG released on CD-ROM, and the first in the genre to feature these production values. The disc format gave Hiroi's theatrical instincts room they had never had before.

Tengai Makyou II: Manjimaru, released in 1992, became the best-selling PC Engine game of all time. The development budget reached approximately ¥500 million — an extraordinary figure for its era — and the ambition matched it. The sequel expanded the cast, the setting, and the voice work, with composer Ryuichi Sakamoto returning for the score. Manjimaru sold through its initial print run rapidly and cemented the Tengai Makyou franchise as the flagship RPG series of the PC Engine CD-ROM². RED Company had produced, with Hudson as publisher, one of the definitive Japanese games of the 16-bit era.

Alongside the Tengai Makyou series, RED Company contributed to several other Hudson PC Engine titles, including the action game Air Zonk (1992) and its predecessor Bonk's Revenge, as well as the shooters Gate of Thunder and Lords of Thunder. These games demonstrated the studio's range across genres, though its most distinctive voice remained in the dramatic, theatrically-inflected RPGs that Hiroi guided.

In the mid-1990s, Hiroi began developing a new concept that would become Sakura Wars — a game that combined theatrical drama with tactical strategy and relationship simulation. Hiroi had conceived the idea around 1990; full development began after Sega's approval in 1994. Sakura Wars (1996), released for the Sega Saturn in partnership with Sega, was a commercial and cultural phenomenon in Japan. It spawned an anime series, stage musicals performed with the actual voice cast, and multiple sequels. The relationship between player and characters that Hiroi had perfected across years of theatrical production found its ideal video game expression here.

By the early 2000s, RED Company had renamed itself Red Entertainment. The Sakura Wars franchise continued through the Saturn and Dreamcast eras, with sequels and spin-offs extending into the PlayStation 2 generation. The live stage productions, in which the game's voice actresses performed as their characters in front of live audiences, blurred the line between game and theatre in a way that had no equivalent in the industry. Red Entertainment's operations wound down in the 2010s, but the creative legacy — particularly Tengai Makyou's transformation of the CD-ROM format's potential and Sakura Wars' fusion of game and performance — remained distinctive long after the company had closed.