Square Co., Ltd.
From FFTogether
History
In September 1983, Square was founded by Masafumi Miyamoto. Masafumi Miyamoto started Square right after he graduated from Waseda, a Japanese top university. Back in those days Square was still a division of Den-Yu-Sha, a power line construction company owned by Miyamoto's father.
When Miyamoto started Square it was still common for a game to be entirely developed by a single programmer. Though Miyamoto believed that it would be way more efficient to let both story writers, graphic designers and programmers work together. With this idea in mind Miyamoto started recruiting employee's to work on there first game. Among these employee's where Hironobu Sakaguchi and Hiromichi Tanaka, who both dropped out of university to work for Square. There first two games where The Death Trap and Will: The Death Trap II. While originally reluctance to develop for video game consoles, Square eventually entered the Nintendo Famicom market in December 1985 by porting Thexder.
All this time Square was still a division of Den-Yu-Sha, but at Septermber 1986, three years after it was founded, Square officially became an independent company under the name Square Co., Ltd. During this time Sakaguchi became a full-time employee as the Director of Planning and Development. However things didn't go well after that. While they still made some small successes with games as 3-D WorldRunner and Rad Racer, Square simply didn't made enough money to keep themselves running.
With only enough resources available for one last game it was Sakaguchi's tasks to create one last game. Being convinced this would be his last game he ironically named it Final Fantasy. With 400,000 copies sold, the game became the start of Square's most successful franchise.
Besides Final Fantasy Square is also known for other great games including, Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, the Mana series, Xenogears, Parasite Eve 1 & 2, Brave Fencer Musashi, Romancing Saga. Square also made Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (under the guidence of Shigeru Miyamoto) and created the Kingdom Hearts series (in collaboration with Disney Interactive Studios).
Since 2000 Square and Enix have been in consideration to merge with each other, however the financial failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within made Enix hesitating delaying the merge. On April 1 2003, the two companies still merged together to form Square Enix.
Subsidiaries and related corporations
Squaresoft - Between 1992 and 2003 Square Co., Ltd. also used Squaresoft as a brand name. This lead many to incorrectly refer squaresoft to the entire organisation, but the corporate name has always remained Square Co., Ltd. until the merge with Enix.
The Game Designers Studio, Inc. - The Game Designers Studio was a shell corporation founded by Square to create video games for the Nintendo GameCube. At that time Square had an exclusive deal with Sony Computer Entertainment to create games only for the Playstation consoles. In order to evade that deal Square setted up The Game Designers Studio, but only took 49% of the shares, the other 51% of the shares whent to Akitoshi Kawazu, who became head of the new company. Because Square merged with Enix during the production of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles the Game Designers Studio only released one game. After Crystal Chronicles was released the newly formed Square Enix acquired all 100% of Games Designers Studio. The studio was then renamed SQEX Corporation an became a subsidiary to Square Enix.
