Few companies illustrate the volatility of video game history better than Square. It began as a small software operation attached to an electrical construction business, found its identity through role-playing games, helped move the center of the console industry from Nintendo to Sony, nearly wrecked itself trying to transform computer graphics into cinema, and then merged with the publisher of its greatest Japanese rival.
The company that emerged from those changes, Square Enix, inherited not only Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, but also two very different philosophies about how games should be created and sold. Over the next two decades, it expanded into online worlds, arcades, manga publishing, Western studios, mobile games, merchandise, and some of the largest role-playing productions ever attempted.
There is an important distinction at the beginning of that history. Square traces its operating origins to 1983, when Masafumi Miyamoto began developing computer software within Den-Yu-Sha, while Square Co., Ltd. was formally incorporated in September 1986. Modern Square Enix corporate histories usually begin Square’s official timeline with the 1986 incorporation, while scholarship on the company reaches back to the 1983 software operation. Pasted markdown
Before Square Was a Company
Square did not begin inside Japan’s established toy or electronics industries. Its roots were in Den-Yu-Sha, a company owned by Kuniichi Miyamoto that worked in electrical power-line construction. His son, Masafumi Miyamoto, had different ambitions.
According to Daiji Fujii’s detailed study of Square’s early development, Miyamoto began a computer game software operation within Den-Yu-Sha in Yokohama in October 1983. He was not primarily a programmer. Instead, he saw commercial possibilities in the rapidly developing personal computer market and believed that making better games would eventually require people with different specialized skills.
That idea mattered because early computer games were often created largely by individual programmers who might be responsible for code, graphics, sounds, systems, and design. Miyamoto imagined something closer to a production team.
To find talent, he created a computer salon near Keio University where students could rent time on personal computers. The business also doubled as a recruiting ground. Hisashi Suzuki became involved, and a classified advertisement eventually brought in Hironobu Sakaguchi, then an engineering student with a strong interest in Apple computer adventure games and role-playing games. Fujii argues that this process helped give Square one of its defining characteristics: a division of labor that brought programmers, graphic artists, and writers together at a time when that approach was still unusual in Japanese game development.
Square’s first commercial work came from Japan’s personal computer market. The Death Trap appeared in 1984, and Will followed in 1985. Fujii describes Will as particularly important because its animated graphics attracted attention at a time when static imagery remained common in Japanese computer games.
The small developer was already showing the instinct that would later define much of its history. Square wanted games to look more cinematic, more animated, and more visually ambitious than the hardware seemed to invite.
From Personal Computers to Nintendo
The arrival of Nintendo’s Family Computer, or Famicom, transformed Japan’s game business. At first Nintendo largely controlled the software available for its machine, but the growing console market created opportunities for outside developers.
Square entered that environment while still trying to determine what kind of company it wanted to become. The transition was not immediately successful. It released numerous titles, moved offices, and struggled to establish the sort of dependable hit franchise that could sustain an independent developer.
Meanwhile, another company was demonstrating just how large the Japanese market for role-playing games might become.
Enix released Dragon Quest in 1986. The game took ideas familiar to players of computer RPGs such as Wizardry and Ultima and presented them in a form that worked for the Famicom’s enormous consumer audience. Its success changed expectations throughout the Japanese game industry.
Square paid close attention.
Fujii’s history records former Square executive Hisashi Suzuki remembering how impressed the company was by Enix’s ability to make an enthusiast genre accessible to ordinary consumers. Square’s designers had admired complex computer RPGs, but Dragon Quest demonstrated that accessibility, presentation, characters, and marketing could turn that style of game into a mass-market phenomenon.
Square needed an answer.
Final Fantasy Changes Square’s Future
The answer arrived on December 18, 1987.
Final Fantasy was directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi and programmed in large part through the work of Nasir Gebelli, an Iranian American programmer whose Apple II games were already admired by several Square employees. Hiromichi Tanaka later recalled that Square owner Masafumi Miyamoto had met Gebelli through the Super Software Team and that Square’s developers immediately recognized his name and reputation. Gebelli worked with Sakaguchi, Tanaka, Koichi Ishii, and others during the period that produced The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner, Rad Racer, and then Final Fantasy.
The familiar story that Final Fantasy received its title because it was literally Square’s last possible game has often become more dramatic with repetition. The surviving business history supports a more careful interpretation. Square was under pressure after a series of disappointing releases, and the project was enormously important to the company’s recovery, but its creation was also part of a deliberate attempt to respond to the growing RPG market.
Fujii records a final shipment of roughly 510,000 copies for the first game, a significant result for Square and enough to establish the foundation of a franchise. More importantly, the company began separating Final Fantasy from the many other RPGs inspired by Dragon Quest.
Where Dragon Quest developed the feel of a continuing traditional saga, Square increasingly emphasized spectacle. Battles showed the player’s party on screen. Graphic effects became more elaborate. Music, presentation, character development, and eventually cinematic storytelling grew steadily more important.
The sequel arrived in 1988, followed by Final Fantasy III in 1990. By then Square no longer needed to wonder whether it had found its identity.
It had become an RPG company.
The Super Famicom Golden Age
The transition to Nintendo’s Super Famicom allowed Square’s production philosophy to expand.
Final Fantasy IV appeared in 1991, followed by Final Fantasy V in 1992 and Final Fantasy VI in 1994. Around those games grew a broader library that included Romancing SaGa, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, and other titles that helped define the 16-bit era for role-playing fans.
Square’s concentration on RPG development was becoming unusually intense. Fujii notes that after the first Final Fantasy succeeded, the company focused increasingly on serialized role-playing properties, releasing Final Fantasy installments at a pace that would be unimaginable for modern productions.
The technical growth of the games also changed the internal company. Development teams became larger. Artists, composers, planners, programmers, and scenario designers had increasingly specialized roles. The system Miyamoto had envisioned when Square was still a tiny computer software operation was now becoming standard practice for a company producing some of Japan’s most technically elaborate console games.
Square’s talent pool during this period included Sakaguchi, Nobuo Uematsu, Yoshitaka Amano, Yoshinori Kitase, Tetsuya Nomura, Kazuko Shibuya, Koichi Ishii, and many others whose individual careers would eventually become significant pieces of video game history.
Yet the most consequential decision Square made during the 1990s was not simply what game to create next.
It was which machine should run it.
Leaving Nintendo for PlayStation
For most of Square’s rise, Nintendo hardware had been the company’s home. The relationship seemed natural. Final Fantasy had been born on the Famicom, and Square had flourished on the Super Famicom.
Then came Final Fantasy VII.
The next generation of consoles forced developers to choose between very different technologies. Nintendo continued using cartridges with the Nintendo 64, while Sony’s PlayStation used CD-ROMs. For Square, storage capacity was becoming critical.
Yoshinori Kitase, director of Final Fantasy VII, later explained that the PlayStation’s CD-ROM capacity allowed Square to include a volume of computer-generated movie sequences that would have been impossible for the team to approach in the same way with its earlier technology. Those sequences were not merely decoration. They became part of Square’s attempt to blur the boundary between gameplay and cinematic storytelling.
Sakaguchi also remembered spending roughly a year experimenting with an early Final Fantasy VII prototype before the finished game took shape.
Moving Final Fantasy to PlayStation therefore represented far more than a routine platform change. One of Nintendo’s most important third-party developers was placing its flagship franchise on Sony’s new console.
When Final Fantasy VII arrived in Japan in January 1997, its three-dimensional environments, pre-rendered backgrounds, computer-generated sequences, music, advertising campaign, and enormous production scale made it an international event.
Academic historian Daiji Fujii’s shipment figures show the significance of the PlayStation era for Square. Final Fantasy VII shipped more than three million copies in Japan in the figures he examined, while Final Fantasy VIII exceeded it domestically. The company’s role-playing games were no longer merely successful Japanese software. They had become major international entertainment properties.
Square had also helped Sony prove that the PlayStation could become the home of the Japanese role-playing game.
Square Goes Global
Success created a new problem. Square had to become an international company rather than simply a Japanese developer whose games were exported.
Its official corporate history records the establishment of Square Soft, Inc. in 1989, Square L.A. in 1995, and Square Europe in 1998. Square also experimented with new distribution structures and overseas partnerships as its games became increasingly expensive and globally important.
One of the most interesting arrangements began in 1998 with Electronic Arts.
Electronic Arts’ own Securities and Exchange Commission filings provide unusually detailed evidence of how the partnership worked. In North America, Square Electronic Arts handled Square’s publishing operations, with Square owning 70 percent and EA owning 30 percent. In Japan, the ownership arrangement was reversed for Electronic Arts Square, with EA holding 70 percent and Square 30 percent.
The arrangement gave each company access to expertise and distribution in the other’s home territory. It also reflected Square’s growing confidence that its future depended on markets far beyond Japan.
The partnership lasted until the Square Enix merger period. The joint venture agreements expired on March 31, 2003, EA’s North American distribution of Square products ended that June, and the companies bought out one another’s interests in the respective ventures.
By then, however, Square had survived a much more dangerous experiment.
The Movie That Nearly Broke Square
The cinematic ambitions that had shaped Square’s games eventually encouraged the company to attempt cinema itself.
Square established a major computer graphics production operation in Hawaii and poured resources into Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Released in 2001, the film attempted something extraordinarily difficult for the period: a feature-length science-fiction movie built around realistically rendered computer-generated human characters.
Technologically, the film was ambitious. Financially, it was disastrous.
The Los Angeles Times reported in October 2001 that Square was abandoning the movie business after The Spirits Within performed poorly at the box office. The newspaper reported a production investment of about $115 million and said Square expected roughly $83 million in losses associated with the film.
This was the danger hidden inside Square’s long-standing pursuit of spectacle. The same willingness to spend heavily on technology that had made Final Fantasy VII remarkable could become catastrophic when the audience did not follow.
Square’s game business still possessed enormously valuable properties. Final Fantasy X had arrived on PlayStation 2 in 2001, and Kingdom Hearts, created through a collaboration with Disney, followed in 2002. Square also entered the MMORPG business with Final Fantasy XI in May 2002. The company’s official history identifies it as Square’s first MMORPG and its entry into the online game market.
Still, the film loss had badly weakened the company.
Sony’s Investment in Square
In October 2001, Sony Computer Entertainment invested approximately ¥14.9 billion in Square by purchasing newly issued shares.
Sony’s own SEC filing states that the investment gave Sony approximately 19 percent of Square’s outstanding shares. The stated purpose was to improve Square’s game software development and production capabilities, particularly given the importance of Square’s titles to the PlayStation and PlayStation 2.
Contemporary Japanese reporting placed the move against the background of Square’s financial difficulties. The Japan Times reported the transaction as an 18.6 percent stake worth about ¥14.9 billion.
Square survived.
But its experience with The Spirits Within helped demonstrate how exposed even a famous game developer could become when the cost of ambitious productions rose faster than the company’s ability to absorb failure.
The answer would ultimately involve the company that had inspired Square to create Final Fantasy in the first place.
Square Meets Enix
Enix had followed a very different path.
Its corporate ancestry stretched back to Yasuhiro Fukushima’s Eidansha Boshu Service Center, founded in 1975. The Enix name was adopted in 1982. Unlike Square, which developed much of its software through large internal production teams, Enix became famous for operating more heavily as a publisher coordinating outside creative talent and developers.
Its defining franchise was Dragon Quest.
For years, Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy represented the twin pillars of Japanese console RPGs. The two series competed for consumers while their parent companies developed distinct business structures.
By 2002, those rivals were preparing to become one.
On November 26, 2002, Square and Enix announced plans to merge. Contemporary reporting described the goal as strengthening development capabilities and stabilizing earnings in an industry where increasingly expensive games could make company results depend heavily on the timing and success of individual releases. The Japan Times noted both Enix’s dependable profitability and Square’s recent losses from its film venture.
The merger was approved by shareholders on February 13, 2003, and completed on April 1.
Square Enix’s 2004 annual report records the formation of the new company and the issuance of more than 51 million shares to Square shareholders. The final exchange ratio was 0.85 Enix shares for each Square share.
There is a corporate-history oddity here that can confuse modern readers. Square Enix Holdings today lists its establishment date as September 22, 1975 because the corporate lineage runs through the Enix side of the merger, even though Square itself began operating in 1983 and became an independent corporation in 1986.
The name, however, acknowledged both legacies.
Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest now belonged under one roof.
Building Square Enix
The merger created a company with an extraordinary library of intellectual property, but Square Enix did not stop with the two RPG franchises that made the combination famous.
In 2005, it moved to acquire Taito, one of the foundational names in Japanese arcade history and the creator of Space Invaders. Contemporary reporting placed the value of the proposed acquisition at approximately ¥67 billion. Taito also gave Square Enix a substantial arcade operation and additional experience in mobile entertainment.
Square Enix’s official corporate timeline records Taito becoming a consolidated subsidiary in September 2005 and a wholly owned subsidiary in March 2006.
Four years later, the company made an even more dramatic move overseas.
In 2009, Square Enix acquired Eidos, adding major Western studios and franchises to the group. The acquisition brought properties associated with Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Thief, and other series into a company still best known for Japanese RPGs. Square Enix’s corporate records document completion of the Eidos acquisition in April 2009.
For a time, Square Enix looked increasingly like a global entertainment conglomerate rather than a Japanese RPG publisher.
That scale brought new challenges.
Final Fantasy XIV and the Cost of Failure
One of the most revealing episodes in modern Square Enix history began with the original version of Final Fantasy XIV.
The MMORPG launched in 2010 with enormous expectations. Square Enix itself later acknowledged that the release had gone badly.
In the company’s 2011 shareholder report, management described the launch as a stumble, apologized for weaknesses in the development organization, and admitted that the game had damaged both earnings and the Final Fantasy brand. Instead of shutting it down, Square Enix reorganized the team and committed itself to rebuilding the project.
This decision produced one of the more remarkable recovery stories in game development.
The existing game was improved while a fundamentally redesigned version was created. Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn launched in August 2013.
The result was dramatically different. By late 2013, Square Enix reported approximately 1.45 million units sold and more than 600,000 paying users, already above the peak subscriber level of Final Fantasy XI according to the company’s briefing.
By 2014, Square Enix was describing its three major MMOs, Final Fantasy XIV, Dragon Quest X, and Final Fantasy XI, as a stable revenue base approaching one million paying subscribers combined.
The lesson contrasted sharply with the aftermath of The Spirits Within. In 2001, Square had responded to a failed film by abandoning its movie business. A decade later, Square Enix responded to a failed online game by rebuilding the game itself.
Both decisions shaped the company that followed.
Retreat from the Western Studio Empire
The Eidos acquisition had given Square Enix a major Western development presence, but maintaining several studios capable of producing expensive blockbuster games created the same fundamental challenge that had followed Square for decades: ambition required enormous amounts of capital.
In May 2022, Square Enix announced an agreement to sell Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montréal, Square Enix Montréal, and a group of intellectual properties to Sweden’s Embracer Group for $300 million. The transaction included franchises such as Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Thief, and Legacy of Kain.
Square Enix management later explained that the studios had made substantial contributions since the Eidos acquisition but that the cost of their major projects risked consuming resources the group wanted to allocate elsewhere. The company described the sale as part of an effort to create a more focused development portfolio.
Another restructuring followed in 2023 when Luminous Productions, the studio behind Forspoken and technology descended from Final Fantasy XV development, was absorbed into Square Enix. The company said the merger was intended to combine Luminous’s AAA development and engine expertise with Square Enix’s broader development organization.
Once again, the company was reorganizing around the cost and complexity of creating large games.
Square Enix in 2026
The Square Enix of 2026 remains much larger and more diversified than the Square that produced Final Fantasy in 1987.
Square Enix Holdings lists Takashi Kiryu as president and representative director. For the fiscal year ending March 31, 2026, the group reported ¥297.6 billion in net sales and 4,290 employees. Its businesses included digital entertainment, amusement, publishing, and merchandising, meaning that the company now stretches from console games and MMORPGs to manga, arcades, merchandise, and licensing.
Yet its modern strategy sounds strikingly familiar when compared with crises from earlier decades.
Under the medium-term plan titled “Square Enix Reboots and Awakens,” management has emphasized moving from quantity toward quality, concentrating development resources on stronger projects, improving profitability, and broadening the platforms on which its games appear.
That multiplatform emphasis represents another historical shift. Square once helped transform the industry by taking Final Fantasy VII away from Nintendo hardware and making it one of PlayStation’s defining games. Modern Square Enix is moving in the opposite strategic direction, seeking wider audiences across several platforms rather than tying important releases as closely to a single console ecosystem.
The technology changes. The underlying question does not.
How much should a game company risk to create something large enough to matter?
Why the History of Square Enix Matters
Square’s history can be read as a series of enormous bets.
Masafumi Miyamoto bet that games would eventually require specialized teams rather than solitary programmers. Hironobu Sakaguchi and his colleagues bet that Square could build its future around role-playing games. The company bet on Sony’s CD-ROM technology when Nintendo had been its longtime platform partner. It bet that Final Fantasy VII could combine games and cinematic presentation on an unprecedented scale.
Sometimes those risks changed the industry.
Sometimes they nearly destroyed the company.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within demonstrated the danger of assuming technological ambition would automatically create commercial success. The troubled first version of Final Fantasy XIV showed the same danger in another era, but its reconstruction also demonstrated Square Enix’s capacity to recover.
The 2003 merger may be the most fitting event of all. Dragon Quest had helped convince Square that a mass-market Japanese RPG could exist. Square responded with Final Fantasy. The companies spent years as rivals, developed sharply different approaches to producing games, and eventually united when the economics of the industry made scale increasingly valuable.
What began in a small Yokohama software operation inside an electrical construction company became one of the most recognizable names in world gaming.
That transformation explains why the Square name still carries unusual historical weight. Square was not merely the company that made Final Fantasy. It was one of the businesses that demonstrated how Japanese video games could grow from small teams working within severe technical limitations into global productions involving hundreds of specialists, enormous budgets, cinematic storytelling, persistent online worlds, and intellectual properties capable of surviving across generations.
Square Enix inherited that history, along with its central contradiction.
The company has always been at its most influential when it was willing to take risks. Its greatest challenge has always been surviving them.
Sources & Further Reading
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Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. “Corporate Profile.” Accessed October 12, 2026. https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/company/outline.html
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Square Enix Co., Ltd. Annual Report 2004. Tokyo: Square Enix Co., Ltd., 2004. https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/library/pdf/ar_2004en.pdf
Square Enix Co., Ltd. Annual Report 2005. Tokyo: Square Enix Co., Ltd., 2005. https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/library/pdf/ar_2005en.pdf
Square Enix Co., Ltd. Annual Report 2006. Tokyo: Square Enix Co., Ltd., 2006. https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/library/pdf/ar_2006en.pdf
Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. Annual Report 2010. Tokyo: Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd., 2010. https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/library/pdf/ar_2010en.pdf
Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. Annual Report 2011. Tokyo: Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd., 2011. https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/library/pdf/ar_2011en.pdf
Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. Annual Report 2012. Tokyo: Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd., 2012. https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/library/pdf/ar_2012en.pdf
Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. Annual Report 2025. Tokyo: Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd., 2025. https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/library/pdf/ar_2025en.pdf
Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. “2011 To Our Shareholders.” 2011. https://web.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/policy/message2011_1.html
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Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. “2022 To Our Shareholders.” 2022. https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/policy/message2022_4.html
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