For players who grew up during the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Nintendo years, the name Natsume can evoke several very different kinds of memories. One player might think of the ninjas of Shadow of the Ninja. Another might remember the frantic shooting and science-fiction Western imagery of Wild Guns. Someone else may associate the name almost entirely with planting turnips, raising livestock, getting married, and slowly building a life in Harvest Moon.
All of those associations are legitimate, but they hide one of the more confusing corporate histories in video games.
There was a Japanese Natsume that became known for developing action games and working on titles for other publishers. There was also an American Natsume that grew from a related operation into an independently run publisher, eventually making Harvest Moon and Reel Fishing central to its identity. Over time, those histories separated far enough that treating every game carrying the Natsume name as the work of a single continuous company creates more confusion than clarity.
That distinction has only become more important. The Japanese company eventually became NatsumeAtari and, in January 2026, changed its name again to Winning Entertainment Group. The American Natsume Inc., meanwhile, continues operating under the Natsume name and releasing games of its own.
Understanding Natsume therefore means following two branches of the same early story, one rooted in Japanese game development and another that became an unusual American publisher built around finding overlooked games and cultivating them for Western audiences.
Natsume Begins in Japan
The Japanese company’s official history dates its beginning to October 1987, when Natsume was established in Shinjuku, Tokyo. In May 1988, the company established an American game sales operation in San Francisco, beginning the connection that would eventually produce the separate Natsume Inc. familiar to North American players.
Natsume entered the industry during an especially fertile period for Japanese console development. Nintendo’s Famicom was dominating the home market, the Nintendo Entertainment System was transforming the American industry, and publishers needed studios capable of creating games quickly for increasingly international audiences.
The surviving official catalog of the Japanese company shows Natsume working almost immediately. Its recorded releases include Necropolis for the PC-8801 in 1988 and Touhou Kenbun Roku for the Famicom later that year. During 1989, the name appeared on games including Idol Hakkenden, Dungeon & Magic, and Abadox. By 1990 Natsume was associated with an increasingly recognizable group of action-oriented titles, among them Final Mission, Dragon Fighter, and Yami no Shigotonin Kage, the Japanese game that became Shadow of the Ninja in North America.
Those games helped establish a side of Natsume that can seem almost unrecognizable to players who later knew the company primarily through peaceful simulations. The early Natsume catalog was full of ninjas, spaceships, gunfire, monsters, platforming, and demanding action.
By the end of 1990, Nintendo itself was introducing American players to Natsume as a new name on the NES. Nintendo Power described Shadow of the Ninja as the first offering from the new NES licensee and pointed readers toward S.C.A.T. as another Natsume game on the way. The magazine even noticed a recurring design choice in the company’s early American releases, with male and female heroes fighting side by side in both games.
The Natsume of Shadow of the Ninja and Pocky & Rocky
During the early 1990s, Natsume accumulated a catalog that would eventually earn a much larger reputation among retro-game enthusiasts than the company’s modest size might suggest.
The Japanese corporate catalog records Chaos World in 1991, Kiki Kaikai: Nazo no Kuro Manto in 1992, later released in the West as Pocky & Rocky, and several additional projects built either around Natsume’s own work or licenses belonging to other companies. The records are especially useful because they show why game-company histories must distinguish between development, publishing, licensing, and ownership. Some games carried Natsume copyrights, while others explicitly identified another rights holder and credited Natsume for programming or production.
That complexity is visible in The Ninja Warriors Again. The 1994 Super Famicom release carried Taito’s copyright while stating that the game was programmed by Natsume. Wild Guns, released in Japan later that year, carried Natsume’s own copyright.
The small-team culture behind these games is particularly clear in Shunichi Taniguchi’s retrospective account of Wild Guns. Taniguchi recalled that the project began while the developers were waiting for their next contracted assignment. Management gave them a simple mandate to make something quickly and inexpensively, and the game was completed in roughly five months. Taniguchi handled design and graphics, Toshiyasu Miyabe programmed the game, and Hiroyuki Iwatsuki created its sound, with only a small amount of additional assistance.
The result hardly looked like a disposable project.
Wild Guns blended Western imagery, science fiction machinery, gallery shooting, character movement, and cooperative play into a game that eventually became one of Natsume’s most celebrated 16-bit works. Taniguchi remembered that even the names Clint and Annie came through communication with Natsume’s American office, showing how the Japanese and American sides of the company could influence the same project during this period.
That era would later become the foundation for another chapter of Natsume history, when the developers behind several of these games returned decades later to rebuild them for modern hardware.
The American Natsume Takes a Different Path
While Japanese Natsume was building games, the American operation was undergoing a transformation of its own.
There is a small chronological wrinkle in Natsume’s own accounts. The Japanese corporate timeline records the American Natsume operation as established in San Francisco in May 1988, while the current Natsume Inc. website says the company began publishing interactive games in 1990 in Burlingame, California. These statements do not necessarily contradict each other. One describes the establishment of the American operation, while the other dates the beginning of its publishing activity.
The more consequential change came in the middle of the 1990s.
Yasuhiro “Hiro” Maekawa later recalled that he took over the American company in 1994, when it had only five employees. The operation was reorganized in 1995, and Maekawa described restarting it as essentially a one-man business with a new model. Instead of trying to maintain the expensive and complicated practice of selling games directly to individual retailers, he shifted Natsume toward selling through distribution partners.
This was not merely a change in logistics. It helped create the Natsume Inc. that followed.
Maekawa explained in 2008 that the American operation had once been a subsidiary of the Japanese company but was by then operating independently. In another detailed interview in 2014, he made the distinction even more explicit, saying Natsume Inc. was not a subsidiary of Natsume Co., Ltd. and made its own decisions about which developers and games it would work with.
The companies remained connected by history, relationships, and the Natsume name, but their businesses were no longer interchangeable.
That fact explains much of what happened next.
A Farming Game Almost Nobody Wanted
In 1996 Hiro Maekawa encountered the game that would redefine Natsume Inc.
According to Maekawa, a director at Pack-In-Video introduced him to a Japanese Super Famicom farming simulation produced by Yasuhiro Wada. There was little precedent for selling such a game in North America. Instead of swords, shooting, racing, or traditional role-playing combat, the player tended crops, raised animals, formed relationships, and followed the rhythms of rural life.
Maekawa remembered showing the idea to business associates and receiving overwhelmingly negative reactions. They considered the repetitive work of planting, watering, feeding animals, and maintaining a farm too dull for American players. Bringing the game to the United States, they told him, would be a mistake.
Maekawa reached the opposite conclusion.
He believed the game’s peaceful atmosphere and unusual subject gave it a market precisely because other games were not doing the same thing. He also reasoned that a country with such a large agricultural tradition might have room for a farming game. The decision fit the business philosophy Natsume would later describe as niche marketing, finding an underserved category and patiently trying to grow it instead of competing in already crowded genres.
The Japanese title was Bokujo Monogatari, but Natsume needed an English name.
Maekawa remembered considering dozens of possibilities before settling on Harvest Moon. It was not a direct translation of the Japanese title. It was a Western brand created for the localized release, and it would eventually become one of the most recognizable names in simulation gaming.
The first North American Harvest Moon arrived for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in June 1997.
The timing was unusual. The Nintendo 64 and PlayStation were already moving console gaming into a new generation, yet Natsume was releasing an unconventional farming simulation on an aging 16-bit system. What looked like a collection of commercial disadvantages eventually became the foundation of the company’s identity.
Harvest Moon Changes Natsume
The success of Harvest Moon did more than give Natsume a popular series. It showed the company what kind of publisher it could be.
Instead of trying to match larger publishers release for release, Natsume increasingly built its reputation around games that could serve audiences ignored by the industry’s biggest trends. Maekawa later described the strategy as finding unusual or niche titles that had the potential to become something larger if Natsume invested enough patience in them. Harvest Moon was the clearest example.
The series expanded rapidly beyond its original SNES release. New entries appeared on Nintendo and Sony hardware, while farming, relationships, marriage, festivals, livestock, and the passage of seasons created a recognizable structure that could be adapted from game to game.
Natsume also developed another enduring niche around fishing.
The original North American Reel Fishing was released for PlayStation in October 1997, only months after the first Harvest Moon. Natsume later described the game as part of PlayStation’s Greatest Hits line, and the franchise continued across a long succession of systems. More than twenty-five years later, the company was still publishing new Reel Fishing games.
Together, Harvest Moon and Reel Fishing reshaped the public image of the American Natsume. A name once attached to ninjas and shooters increasingly represented quiet, family-oriented games about rural life, nature, fishing, relationships, and long-term progression.
Natsume formalized that identity through its “Make Everyone Happy” company mission and its emphasis on family entertainment.
The Important Truth About Harvest Moon
For many years, Western players understandably assumed that Natsume was simply the company that made Harvest Moon.
The actual arrangement was more complicated.
The Japanese farming series known as Bokujo Monogatari was developed in Japan through the corporate lineage that eventually became part of Marvelous. Natsume Inc. localized and published many of those games in North America under the Harvest Moon name, helping build that Western brand over many years.
This meant the Japanese game series and the English-language brand name were closely associated but were not the same piece of intellectual property.
The distinction became impossible to ignore in the 2010s.
Natsume’s own legal material identifies Harvest Moon as a registered trademark of Natsume Inc. At the same time, Marvelous controlled the underlying Bokujo Monogatari series whose games Western players had known for years as Harvest Moon.
As long as Marvelous and Natsume worked together, most consumers had little reason to care about the difference. Once the partnership ended, that difference changed the history of both franchises.
The Split That Created Story of Seasons
In 2014, Marvelous USA’s XSEED Games announced Story of Seasons for Nintendo 3DS.
Marvelous described it as a new beginning for Bokujo Monogatari, developed by the veteran team behind the long-running series. In other words, the Japanese series Western players had known through Natsume’s Harvest Moon releases was continuing, but it would no longer use the Harvest Moon name in North America.
Natsume kept the Harvest Moon brand.
Hiro Maekawa later gave Natsume’s account of the separation, saying Marvelous had informed the company that it would no longer license Bokujo Monogatari to Natsume and intended to publish the series under another Western name. Natsume responded by developing its own farming games under the Harvest Moon trademark.
From that point forward, two distinct lines existed.
Story of Seasons continued the Japanese Bokujo Monogatari development lineage under Marvelous and XSEED. Harvest Moon continued as Natsume’s brand, now attached to games developed independently of the old Japanese series.
This is why statements such as “Harvest Moon changed its name to Story of Seasons” are only partly correct. The older Japanese series continued as Story of Seasons in the West, but Natsume did not stop using Harvest Moon. Instead, the familiar Western name became attached to a new branch of games.
The confusion was immediate. When Natsume announced Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley for Nintendo 3DS in June 2014, contemporary reporting had to explain that it was being developed internally by Natsume and was completely separate from Marvelous and XSEED’s newly announced Story of Seasons.
Building a New Harvest Moon
Natsume’s first major attempt to define the independent future of its most famous brand was Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley.
The company established development operations in Tokyo and began creating its own interpretation of the farming series. Maekawa described the decision as an opportunity to apply nearly two decades of experience with the Western Harvest Moon audience to a game Natsume could develop itself.
Producer Taka Maekawa later revealed that The Lost Valley had carried the development code name “Back to Basics.” The phrase captured Natsume’s attempt to identify what it believed the essential parts of Harvest Moon were while also changing features such as world customization and the tool system.
The new era did not erase the distinction between the two farming franchises. If anything, every additional game made that separation clearer. Marvelous continued Story of Seasons, while Natsume released its own Harvest Moon titles such as Skytree Village, Light of Hope, One World, The Winds of Anthos, and others.
By 2026, Natsume Inc. was preparing Harvest Moon: Echoes of Teradea for Nintendo Switch 2, Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, demonstrating that the American company had carried the independent Harvest Moon line well beyond the 2014 split.
Natsume’s Old Action Games Return
While the American Natsume was building a new future for Harvest Moon, the Japanese side of the old Natsume story began rediscovering its past.
One of the clearest examples came with Wild Guns Reloaded. In 2016, Natsume Inc. and NatsumeAtari announced the game as a partnership, an arrangement that itself demonstrated that the two companies were distinct organizations rather than regional offices of a single corporation. Hiro Maekawa represented Natsume Inc., while NatsumeAtari CEO Takashi Matsumoto spoke for the Japanese company.
More importantly for game history, members of the original Wild Guns team returned.
The small group that had created the SNES game in the 1990s was given an opportunity to revisit its work using modern hardware, producing an expanded version rather than simply reproducing the original game. The project became part of a broader revival associated with Tengo Project, through which veterans of Natsume’s old development teams revisited several 16-bit titles.
Ninja Warriors returned as The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors. Pocky & Rocky returned through Pocky & Rocky Reshrined. Shadow of the Ninja eventually received its own modern reworking.
The Japanese company’s official catalog makes the continuity visible. The same record that preserves the original 1990 Kage and 1994 Wild Guns also lists modern projects such as Wild Guns Reloaded, The Ninja Warriors Once Again, and the 2024 rebirth of Shadow of the Ninja.
For a company whose early development history was often hidden behind publishers, licenses, and regional title changes, these revivals helped make the people behind those games more visible.
From Natsume to NatsumeAtari
The Japanese Natsume itself had already undergone a major corporate transformation.
Atari Inc., a Japanese company unrelated to the famous American Atari brand lineage familiar to many Western players, was established in Osaka in 2002 as a developer of pachinko and pachislot entertainment. In October 2013, the Japanese Natsume and Atari businesses were integrated to form NatsumeAtari Inc.
The resulting company worked across both consumer video games and amusement-machine development.
The timing can easily add another layer of confusion to Natsume history. By 2013, Natsume Inc. in the United States was already independently operated. Therefore, NatsumeAtari was not simply a renamed version of the American Harvest Moon publisher. It belonged to the Japanese branch of the old Natsume family tree.
This is why a 2016 announcement could describe Natsume Inc. and NatsumeAtari Inc. as partners on Wild Guns Reloaded. They shared a history and continued to cooperate, but they were not the same corporate entity.
Winning Entertainment Group and the End of the Japanese Natsume Name
In 2026, the Japanese side of that history changed names once again.
NatsumeAtari announced that, effective January 1, 2026, it would become Winning Entertainment Group Inc. The company explained that Natsume had originated in 1987, Atari in 2002, and the two had merged in 2013. The new name was intended to reflect a broader ambition to operate as a global entertainment company rather than remain tied to its older corporate identities.
That decision created an unusual historical outcome.
The original Japanese corporate lineage no longer carries the Natsume name, yet Natsume Inc. in California still does.
As of 2026, the American company continues releasing Harvest Moon, Reel Fishing, and other games, while Winning Entertainment Group represents the corporate descendant of the Japanese developer founded in 1987.
The name survived, but on a different branch of the family tree.
Why Natsume’s History Is So Easy to Misunderstand
Natsume is a useful example of why the history of video games cannot always be reconstructed from the logo printed on a box.
A company can develop a game without publishing it. A publisher can build an enormously successful brand around a game created somewhere else. A trademark can belong to one company while the original series behind it belongs to another. Regional offices can become independent companies. Old development teams can survive corporate mergers and later return to games they created decades earlier.
All of those things happened somewhere in Natsume’s history.
The Natsume behind the Famicom and Super Famicom games of the late 1980s and early 1990s belongs primarily to the Japanese development lineage that ultimately became NatsumeAtari and then Winning Entertainment Group. The Natsume that transformed an obscure farming simulation into the Western Harvest Moon brand developed into the independently operated American Natsume Inc.
Their histories overlap, but they should not be collapsed into one.
That distinction also makes the company’s broader story more interesting. The Japanese side developed a reputation for remarkably polished action games created by small teams, including titles that later became cult classics. The American side survived by embracing niches that larger publishers doubted, then spent years nurturing Harvest Moon and Reel Fishing instead of chasing the industry’s biggest genres.
Both approaches produced games that outlived the circumstances in which they were created.
The Legacy of Natsume
Few game companies have a history in which Shadow of the Ninja, Pocky & Rocky, Wild Guns, Harvest Moon, and Reel Fishing can all legitimately appear, yet mean such different things depending on the year and the corporate branch being discussed.
Natsume’s earliest Japanese developers worked within the fast-moving world of late Famicom and 16-bit contract development, sometimes creating entire games with remarkably small teams. Their work eventually became valuable enough to revive decades later for players who had come to regard titles such as Wild Guns as classics.
Across the Pacific, Hiro Maekawa rebuilt a tiny publishing operation around a different proposition. Instead of asking what kind of game was already popular, Natsume Inc. increasingly asked what kind of audience was not being served. That philosophy helped turn a farming simulation many people believed Americans would reject into Harvest Moon, one of the names most closely associated with the growth of life and farming simulations in the West.
The 2014 separation between Harvest Moon and Bokujo Monogatari complicated that legacy, but it also revealed how much of Natsume’s value had come from localization, marketing, branding, and long-term cultivation rather than development alone. Marvelous continued the original Japanese series as Story of Seasons. Natsume continued the name it had built in the West and began making a different line of Harvest Moon games.
Then the older Japanese Natsume legacy came back into view through Wild Guns Reloaded, Pocky & Rocky Reshrined, The Ninja Saviors, and Shadow of the Ninja Reborn, connecting modern players to developers whose work stretched back to the company’s first years.
By 2026, even the corporate name in Japan had changed, but the history underneath it remained.
Natsume’s story is therefore not simply the history of one company. It is the history of a name that traveled from Tokyo to California, divided into two independent paths, became attached to some of the most distinctive action and simulation games of its eras, and ultimately survived in forms that its founders in 1987 could scarcely have predicted.
Sources & Further Reading
Winning Entertainment Group Inc. “Company History and Corporate Profile.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.winning-ent.co.jp/english/
Winning Entertainment Group Inc. “Notice of Company Name Change.” January 1, 2026. https://www.winning-ent.co.jp/english/
NatsumeAtari Inc. “Company Profile.” Corporate profile PDF. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.natsumeatari.co.jp/assets/media/Natsumeatari.pdf
Natsume Inc. “Welcome to Natsume’s Universe of Serious Fun!” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.natsume.com/welcome/
Maekawa, Yasuhiro “Hiro.” “Natsume Interview: Harvesting Success.” Interview by DFC Intelligence. DFC Dossier, August 28, 2014. https://www.dfcint.com/dossier/natsume-interview-harvest-moon-success/
Sheffield, Brandon. “Q&A: Natsume Inc. President Maekawa on Expanding Past Harvest Moon.” Game Developer, November 10, 2008. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/q-a-natsume-inc-president-maekawa-on-expanding-past-i-harvest-moon-i-
Siliconera. “First Harvest, a Look Back at the Harvest Moon Series with the President of Natsume.” August 19, 2008. https://www.siliconera.com/first-harvest-a-look-back-at-the-harvest-moon-series-with-the-president-of-natsume/
Siliconera. “Harvest Moon and Beyond, What’s Next for Natsume?” March 18, 2015. https://www.siliconera.com/harvest-moon-beyond-whats-next-natsume/
Marvelous USA. “XSEED Games Tells a STORY OF SEASONS on Nintendo 3DS.” May 28, 2014. https://marvelous-usa.com/2014/05/28/xseed-games-tells-a-story-of-seasons-on-nintendo-3ds/
XSEED Games. “STORY OF SEASONS – Localization Blog #1, GO!” October 2, 2014. https://www.xseedgames.com/2014/10/02/story-of-seasons-localization-blog-1-go/
Marvelous USA. “XSEED Games Ushers in Spring with the Release of STORY OF SEASONS for Nintendo 3DS.” March 31, 2015. https://marvelous-usa.com/2015/03/31/xseed-games-ushers-in-spring-with-the-release-of-story-of-seasons-on-nintendo-3ds/
Marvelous USA. “Story of Seasons.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://marvelous-usa.com/games/story-of-seasons/
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Natsume Inc. and NatsumeAtari Inc. “Natsume Inc. and NatsumeAtari Inc. Partner on Wild Guns: Reloaded.” May 12, 2016. https://www.natsume.com/news/news_pdffiles/pid_204_May122016_WGReloaded_Announced.pdf
Taniguchi, Shunichi. “Wild Guns: 2013 Developer Interview.” Originally published in STG Gameside, no. 8. Translated by Shmuplations. https://shmuplations.com/wildguns/
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Nintendo Power. No. 18, November–December 1990. Contemporary coverage of Shadow of the Ninja and Natsume’s entry into NES publishing. https://fliphtml5.com/zrdmcs/fqfx/99/
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Nintendo Life. “Natsume Announces Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley for a 2014 Release on 3DS.” June 3, 2014. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/06/natsume_announces_harvest_moon_the_lost_valley_for_a_2014_release_on_3ds
Engadget. “Don’t Call the New Harvest Moon Game ‘Harvest Moon.’” May 28, 2014. https://www.engadget.com/2014-05-28-dont-call-the-new-harvest-moon-game-harvest-moon.html