Konami

Japan · Founded 1969 · 1980s

A jukebox repair business from Osaka that became one of the most consistently excellent publishers of the 8- and 16-bit eras — and whose earnings went from $10 million to $300 million in four years.

Konami was founded in 1969 by Kagemasa Kōzuki in Toyonaka, Osaka, as a jukebox rental and repair business. Four years later it became Konami Industry Co., Ltd. and turned to manufacturing arcade amusement machines, finding success with Scramble, Super Cobra, and — decisively — Frogger in 1981, which made it an international name. What followed was one of the great runs in the history of the medium. Konami arrived on the Famicom and NES and proceeded to publish an implausible density of classics: Gradius, Castlevania, Contra, Metal Gear, Life Force, Blades of Steel, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games. The company's technical work was frequently ahead of the field — its cartridges shipped custom chips like the VRC6 that expanded the NES's sound hardware beyond what Nintendo's own games could produce — and its sense of arcade pacing translated to home hardware better than almost anyone else's. The financial result speaks for itself: earnings grew from roughly $10 million in 1987 to $300 million in 1991. Konami went on to produce Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, Suikoden, Tokimeki Memorial and the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game empire, and remains one of the very few Japanese publishers to have been continuously significant from the arcade era to the present.