for: Enix, Spain

The was a Japanese company that produced video games, Anime and manga. The company was founded by Yasuhiro Fukushima on September 22, 1975 as and renamed Enix in 1982. The name is a play on the words "Phoenix", a mythical bird that is reborn from its own ashes, and "ENIAC", the world's first digital computer.

Enix is perhaps best known for publishing the Dragon Quest series of console role-playing games. The company merged with Square Co. in 2003 to become Square Enix.

History

Enix began its foray into the gaming market in 1982 by holding a personal computer game programming contest. One of the winners was Love Match Tennis, created by Yuuji Horii. It would go to become one of the company's first PC releases. Another winner was the puzzle game Door Door by Koichi Nakamura, which would become one of the company's better known home computer titles. The game was subsequently ported to the Nintendo Famicom, but never saw any form of release outside of Japan. Nakamura would stay onboard as one Enix's key programmers.

Over the next few years, Enix published several video games for various Japanese home computer systems. Rather than developing games within its own company, Enix would continue to outsource the production of its games to other developers through the use of royalties. Enix is perhaps most famous for publishing the Dragon Quest series of console games (released as Dragon Warrior in North America until 2005) developed by Chunsoft. Key members of the developer's staff consisted of director Koichi Nakamura, writer Yuuji Horii, artist Akira Toriyama, and composer Koichi Sugiyama, among others. The first game in the Famicom-based RPG series was released in 1986. The game would eventually sell 1.5 million copies in Japan and establish the company's most profitable franchise.

In 1991, Enix registered its stock with the Japan Securities Dealers Association, later known as JASDAQ. Enix soon began publishing manga from its shonen magazine Monthly Shōnen Gangan. The company established ties with more video game developers and would go on to publish several games for fourth, fifth, and sixth generation game consoles. Despite the announcement that Enix's long-time competitor Square Co., Ltd. would develop exclusively for Sony PlayStation, Enix announced in January of 1997 that it would release games for both Nintendo and Sony consoles. This caused a significant rise in stock for both Enix and Sony. By November 1999, Enix was listed in the Tokyo Stock Exchange's 1st section, indicating it as a "large company."

Merger with Square

In June 2001, Enix expressed interest in partnering with both Square and Namco in online ventures to deal with mounting development costs. That same month, Enix invested in the company Game Arts, acquiring ¥99.2 billion worth of stock shares in order to publish the latter's Grandia series. Despite Enix's profound advertisement of Dragon Quest VII in 1999, the game was delayed numerous times. The game's sales were ultimately good, but its success did not contribute to the fiscal year 1999, cutting the company's previous profit-to-sales ratio in half and dropping its stock value by 40% in the early 2000. Enix was further hurt by a delay of Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 in Japan in 2001, dropping its first-half 2001 fiscal year profit by 89.71%.