In 1975, Yasuhiro Fukushima founded a small publishing company in Tokyo called Eidansha Boshu Service Center. It printed tabloid magazines advertising vacant public housing properties. That was the business. An architect by education, he had pivoted to real estate information distribution, hoping to build a chain of regional offices. The plan did not work. The chain attempt failed within a year.
Rather than close, Fukushima looked for something new. By 1982, he had heard of a new term — personal computer software. He knew almost nothing about programming. He did not have engineers. What he had was experience running contests and recruiting people. So in 1982, he renamed his company Enix, a portmanteau of the mythical phoenix and the early computer ENIAC, and launched something unusual: a programming contest with prize money totaling ¥3 million. It was an invitation to strangers. Anyone could enter. The company would publish the winners' work.
Three hundred sixteen programs arrived. The grand prize went to Kazuo Morita for a war strategy simulation called Morita's Battlefield. The runner-up prize went to a high school student named Koichi Nakamura for a puzzle game called Door Door. Nakamura was seventeen. He received ¥500,000. His game sold over two hundred thousand copies when Enix published it in early 1983. It was one of the first successful original titles for the Japanese PC market.
The contest was repeated. Among the entrants in the second round was a freelance writer named Yuji Horii, who had submitted a tennis game. Horii did not win, but Enix kept in touch. A few years later, when Fukushima wanted someone to design a console role-playing game for the Famicom, he called Horii. Enix also contacted Nakamura, who had since formed a small company called Chunsoft, and hired him to program it. For the character designs, they approached Akira Toriyama, an already famous manga artist. For the music, composer Koichi Sugiyama. None of these people were Enix employees. They were contractors.
In May 1986, Dragon Quest was released for the Famicom. It sold over two million copies. More importantly, it defined a template for console RPGs in Japan: menu-driven combat, turn-based structure, and a narrative framed as a journey. The game was developed entirely by outsiders working under contract. Enix itself had no internal development studio. It never built one.
This was the company's entire model: find people who could make games, pay them royalties, publish and market the finished product. It was a new structure at the time. Most game companies in the 1980s built in-house teams. Square, for instance, employed its own developers and designers. Enix did the opposite. It acted as a talent scout, a financier, and a publisher — but not as a creator. The creative work was done by external studios, freelance designers, and independent developers bound only by contract.
The model succeeded. Dragon Quest became a franchise. By 1988, Dragon Quest III launched on a weekday morning and drew lines of over a million people across Japan. Enix went on to publish Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile, and dozens of other titles, all developed externally. The company remained lean, with relatively few full-time employees compared to its catalog size. It could afford to take risks on new creators because it did not carry the fixed cost of a large development staff.
In April 2003, Enix merged with Square, its former competitor and a company that had operated on the opposite philosophy — one that owned its developers, built large internal teams, and controlled the creative process directly. The merged entity became Square Enix. Fukushima, the founder who had started with vacant apartment listings, became chairman.
The company that never made its own games had published some of the most influential titles in Japanese gaming history. It did so not by hiring the best talent, but by creating the structure to discover it — by opening the door to people who would not have been hired otherwise, and then stepping back to let them build.