Hudson Soft Company, Ltd.
Overview
Hudson Soft Company is Sapporo's biggest games developer and one of Japan's oldest for home platforms. In the 80s, Hudson was well-known for its shoot'em-ups, for which it arranged tournaments called "carnivals" each year. Albeit a strong supporter of Nintendo's Famicom, Hudson went on to develop the PC Engine together with NEC. In the early 90s, the
Bomberman games became a big hit, and have been developed as Hudson's main property for various platforms since then. In later years, the company has once more had strong bonds to
Nintendo, developing a long series of titles in the
Mario franchise.
By 2005 54 percent of the company was owned by the Japanese games company
Konami. In January 2011 Konami took a 100 percent stake and it closed the US publishing division
Hudson Entertainment in February 2011.
Trivia
Hudson Soft was the very first third-party developer and publisher for the Nintendo Famicom (NES). They produced the game programming system
Family Basic, which was published by Nintendo in June 1984, and soon after published the first Famicom games not produced by Nintendo,
Nuts & Milk and
Lode Runner, in July 1984.
Interestingly, Hudson also produced the very last licensed release for the Famicom as well,
Takahashi Meijin no Bōkenjima IV.
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