8-Bit History - Episode 4 - Why Did Hudson Soft Die?

How did Hudson Soft die?

By: Jose R Cordero Ladner (Joey 6'1'')

Hudson Soft was a very popular video game company. They released a lot of games during the 80s and up to 2012. The company had its headquarters in the Midtown Tower in Tokyo, and they also had an office in Sapporo.

The company was founded in 1973 and it dealt with personal computer products at first. However, it soon expanded to publishing video games, creating mobile content and recording music. They did become a videogame publisher and they are the ones that published series like Bonk, Bomberman, Adventure Island, Bloody Roar and so on. They also made the TurboGrafx-16 alongside NEC, and they completed against SNK, Sega and Nintendo that also had consoles at the time.

They were a second party developer, but at the same time they were constantly trying to adjust the way they created consoles and published games. Not a lot of people know this, but Hudson Soft had a great relationship with Konami. They did end up getting hit by the collapse of the main bank they had at that time, Hokkaido Takushoku.

When they tried to find some new financing alternatives, they decided that the best thing they could do was to enter the stock market for the first time. This brought in Konami that purchased around 5.6 million shares from them. In those terms, Hudson ended up acquiring the Konami Sapporo division, and they renamed it Hudson Studio at that time.

In 2005, things became clear that Hudson did end up being a part of Konami when they still allowed Hudson to stay as a video game publisher, but Konami worked close with them all the time.

It was in 2011 when Hudson Soft turned into a wholly owned Konami subsidiary. The California subsidiary ended up being liquidated during this process, a very important thing to keep in mind in this regard.

It was on March 1 2012 when Hudson Soft creased to exist. They merged with Konami Entertainment, and their music business was absorbed into KME Corporation.Yet despite all of that, Konami still uses their brand name to share stuff online and stuff like that. It makes a lot of sense, because they are the ones that still own the brand name in the first place. However, since 2014 the Hudson website was retired, and now you can’t find any mention of Hudson Soft anywhere unless it’s a part of Konami, and that’s from many years ago.

As you can see, Hudson Soft is one of those companies that died because they became a part of a larger corporation. And that’s ok. All you can see there is that it does matter how a company manages itself, because situations such as this one can appear out of nowhere. And you really need to be in control, otherwise you can end up dealing with various issues all the time. That’s why Hudson Softdied, because they ended up selling to a larger company that ended up not having any use for their brand anymore. Which is a shame, because they were a great publisher!

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy3DkIKjT90&t=111s