Square Co. Ltd.

Name: Square Co. Ltd. Established: 1986 Status: Renamed to Square Enix Links: Official site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Co.%2C_Ltd. Submitter: Mats_J Score: 10 points Added: Feb 23 2006

Square Co., Ltd. was a Japanese video game company founded in 1983 by Masafumi Miyamoto and Hironobu Sakaguchi.

Square's first games were released for the Nintendo Family Computer (also known as the "Famicom," and known internationally as the Nintendo Entertainment System) and the Famicom Disk System. Their early games were not very successful, and by 1987 the company was faced with the possibility of bankruptcy. That same year, Square employee Hironobu Sakaguchi was charged with the creation of a game that might well prove to be the company's last. The result was Final Fantasy, a computer role-playing game for the Famicom.

The term Final was picked because he was planning on retiring from the gaming industry and that Final Fantasy was going to be his last game. Final Fantasy did much better than Sakaguchi and Square had hoped, and led to a North American distribution deal with Nintendo of America, who released to market Final Fantasy in the United States in 1990. Due to its success, Hironobu Sakaguchi's plans for retirement ended and he stayed at SquareSoft to develop new Final Fantasy games. It may also be possible that the reason every new Final Fantasy game has a new story, with new characters is because the original Final Fantasy game was created with the belief that a sequel would never be created.

Final Fantasy was followed by a sequel in 1988, marketed exclusively in Japan until Final Fantasy Origins. North American localization was originally planned for the Famicom version of the sequel, but given the age of the game at that point, and the imminent arrival of Nintendo's Super Famicom (known internationally as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System), it was abandoned in favor of the Super Famicom Final Fantasy IV.

Square has also made other widely known games such as Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3, Xenogears, Final Fantasy Tactics, Brave Fencer Musashi, Vagrant Story, and Kingdom Hearts (done in collaboration with Disney Interactive).

Square was merged into Enix, another Japanese video game producer, in 2002 so as to curb development costs and become more competitive as a result of Square's major financial loss with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. In April of 2003, the merger was completed, forming the new company, Square Enix.

Name	System	Genre
Chrono Trigger	SNES	RPG
Final Fantasy II	NES	RPG
Secret of Mana	SNES	RPG
Final Fantasy VIII	PC	RPG
Final Fantasy IV	SNES	RPG
Seiken Densetsu 3	SNES	RPG
Final Fantasy VI	SNES	RPG
Final Fantasy I	NES	RPG
Final Fantasy V	SNES	RPG

Submit a game

You need to be logged in to post comments