Capcom | Code Like It's 198x

Capcom’s first arcade video game, Vulgus, came out in 1984, during a slump that The Games Machine later called “an acute downturn”. Within eighteen months it had released 1942, Commando and Ghosts ’n Goblins, and by 1986 British players were buying official home versions of the last two. In 1991 Street Fighter II sold so well, in arcades and then at home, that Capcom spent much of the next five years releasing new editions of it.

Fast facts

Founder: Kenzo Tsujimoto.
Origins: Capcom dates itself from I.R.M. Corporation, set up in Matsubara, Osaka, in May 1979 to make electronic game machines. A subsidiary, Japan Capsule Computer Co., followed in 1981, and a sales company called Capcom in June 1983. They merged under the Capcom name in January 1989.
Name: from “Capsule Computers”.
First arcade video game: Vulgus (May 1984).
Early hits: 1942 (1984), Commando and Ghosts ’n Goblins (both 1985).
Console games: a Nintendo licensee from the Famicom’s early years; Mega Man (1987).
Biggest hit of the period: Street Fighter II (1991).
In Britain: licensed to Elite in the mid-1980s, then to U.S. Gold’s GO! label from late 1987.
Later series: Resident Evil (1996), Devil May Cry (2001), Monster Hunter (2004).
Today: Kenzo Tsujimoto is chairman and chief executive; his son Haruhiro has been president since 2007.

Capsule computers

Capcom’s own history begins in May 1979 with I.R.M. Corporation, a company in Matsubara, Osaka, with capital of 10 million yen, set up to develop and sell game machines. In 1981 it formed a subsidiary, Japan Capsule Computer Co., and in June 1983 a separate company named Capcom to sell software. The Games Machine dated Capcom from that June 1983 company, “founded … by Kenzo Tsujimoto”, while 3DO Magazine in 1996 and Edge in 2002 both gave 1979. The two dates describe the same business at different stages. The One, in 1990, spelled out the name: “it stands for CAPsule COMputers.”

Tsujimoto was not new to the business. ACE described him in 1991 as “a veteran of the Japanese video game industry and founder of Irem”, the company behind R-Type. Public sources differ over how Irem and I.R.M. were related.

The first products were not video games. Capcom lists a medal machine, Little League, in July 1983, and Vulgus as its first arcade video game in May 1984. 1942, a vertically scrolling shoot-’em-up, followed that December, and it was, in Edge’s words, the game “that made the company’s name”. Commando came in May 1985 and Ghosts ’n Goblins in September. By 1988 Capcom had more than 200 development staff and an office in Sunnyvale, California, and The Games Machine reported projected sales of $71.4 million.

Nintendo’s early licensee

Capcom was one of the handful of companies Nintendo first allowed to make their own Famicom cartridges, alongside Taito, Konami, Bandai, Namco and Hudson. David Sheff, in Game Over, records that none of the companies that followed would get the same right “for many years”. Nintendo Power put the number differently in 1993, calling Capcom one of “the four original Nintendo licensees”. Capcom’s first home game was a Famicom 1942, in December 1985, and conversions of Ghosts ’n Goblins and Commando followed in 1986. Mega Man (Rockman in Japan), written for the Famicom, appeared in December 1987.

By 1993 Nintendo Power was telling its readers that, of Nintendo’s 70 licensees, “Capcom consistently leads the pack”, with 500 designers, “more than any other licensee”.

How Capcom reached Britain

Capcom did not sell to British players directly in the 1980s. It licensed its coin-ops, first to one firm and then to another.

Elite Systems had them first. Commando arrived for Christmas 1985. Your Computer noted that it was “developed with the aid of Capcom to create the closest possible duplication of the original arcade game” and so had “the cachet of being the official version”. That counted for something: Commando, The Games Machine noted later, was “cloned time after time”. It was, Computer and Video Games reported, “the number one game at Christmas”. By March 1986 CRASH was describing Ghosts and Goblins as Elite continuing “their series of Capcom arcade conversions”. When the Spectrum version arrived that summer, CRASH gave it 95%: “a genuine first rate copy of the arcade game”. Elite converted 1942 as well.

The licence then moved to U.S. Gold, through its three-month-old GO! label, in November 1987. According to The Games Machine, the deal cost GO! £1.2 million for ten Capcom arcade games. Your Sinclair reported it in February 1988: “US Gold (or rather its offshoot, Go!) has signed a huge deal with Jap arcadesters Capcom, so expect to see a number of brainblending koin-op konversions.”

The contract had a catch, which The Games Machine explained in two articles in 1988. Capcom had its own home-computer versions made in America, and GO! took those first. The first two, Side Arms and Gun Smoke, disappointed. GO! “didn’t release the Commodore Gun Smoke in the end”. Its product manager, David Baxter, then used GO!’s option to commission British versions instead. In the magazine’s June 1988 review of Bionic Commandos:

“Capcom do their own C64 conversions, but GO! prefer to redesign for the UK market.”

The Commodore 64 Bionic Commandos was written by Software Creations, and The Games Machine gave it 86%. For Street Fighter, GO! commissioned the Manchester house Tiertex to make a Commodore version with large sprites and scrolling backgrounds, while the American version “looked more like Yie Ar Kung Fu”. GO! released both on one cassette. After that, GO! wrote the British versions and released them in America as well. By June 1989 U.S. Gold had sold more than a quarter of a million copies of its first five Capcom games.

The CP System

In 1988, as 3DO Magazine later put it, Capcom’s research division “revolutionised the arcades”. The Games Machine reported in June 1989 that it had spent two and a half years and £5.5 million developing a “super chip” that compressed “the power of ten normal arcade circuit boards into two microchips”, so that operators could change games in a cabinet more easily. The result was the CP System, a standard board on which each new game ran. Forgotten Worlds was the first. Strider, Ghouls ’n Ghosts, UN Squadron and Final Fight followed, and so did Street Fighter II. In 1993 a second board, CPS II, made its debut with Super Street Fighter II.

Street Fighter II

The first Street Fighter, in 1987, was remembered mainly for its deluxe cabinet, whose “massive rubber punch buttons” hit harder the harder you hit them. Otherwise, Computer and Video Games thought, it was “a fairly run-of-the-mill one-on-one beat ’em up”. The sequel, which Capcom dates to March 1991, was reviewed by the same magazine that June as “a beat ’em up classic”. You chose “one of eight fighters” and travelled the world fighting the other seven. Sinclair User warned that the controls took getting used to: “a joystick plus six (count ’em) fire buttons”.

The home versions sold in large numbers. Nintendo Power reported that the Super NES cartridge sold 1.5 million copies in America in its first six months, and that in Britain it was being packed with the console. By April 1994 Edge was calling it Capcom’s “ten million selling Street Fighter II”. The home-computer versions did well too. U.S. Gold’s Amiga conversion sold more than 40,000 copies before Christmas 1992, CU Amiga reported, and ST Format put the Atari ST version at 22,000.

Capcom kept revising the game rather than replacing it, in what 3DO Magazine called in 1996 “an almost endless series of updates”. Edge explained why in 1994: when “you’ve got a proven formula” like Street Fighter II, “making wholesale changes is far too risky”. Champion Edition, Turbo and Super Street Fighter II followed.

Later games

Capcom’s later series began on home consoles. Resident Evil (Biohazard in Japan) appeared on the PlayStation in March 1996, and Devil May Cry on the PlayStation 2 in August 2001.

Capcom’s own history describes Resident Evil as “a long selling title which had record breaking sales, and established the genre of survival horror”, and Hideki Kamiya’s Devil May Cry as “a mega-hit”. The fourth Resident Evil took years to find. When Edge visited Hiroyuki Kobayashi’s team at Production Studio 4 in Osaka early in 2005, it was told that the finished game was “actually the fourth version”: the studio had built and dropped others, including the “fog” version shown at E3 in 2003, and had used its GameCube remakes of the earlier games to learn the hardware. Villagers who spoke only Spanish were, the team said, the idea of Shinji Mikami, so that the player would face “a language they could not understand”.

Clover Studio

In 2004 the producer Atsushi Inaba set up Clover Studio inside Capcom, with the aim, as Edge put it, “to inject new life into the publisher’s line-up”. Okami, directed by Kamiya, won Edge’s 2006 award for visual design, and the magazine called it “a fitting eulogy for Clover’s creative powerhouse”, because by then the studio was gone. Clover, Edge reported, “closed its doors on October 12” 2006, “after being dissolved by parent company Capcom”, apparently a casualty of “internal restructuring”. The rights to its games, Okami and the Mikami brawler God Hand among them, went back to Capcom. Inaba and Kamiya did not.

In October 2007 Inaba, Kamiya and Mikami’s company, Seeds, merged with another to form Platinum Games, which Edge later described as “made up of veterans of Capcom’s shortlived Production Studio 4 and Clover Studios”.

Inafune and the West

Keiji Inafune had joined Capcom as an artist, “fresh out of college” when he worked on Mega Man, Wireframe recalled. By the 2000s he was, in Edge’s words, the man who had “spearheaded the overseas strategy of Capcom since the early years of the millennium”. Capcom’s Xbox 360 games Dead Rising (August 2006) and Lost Planet (December 2006) each sold more than a million copies, and after Blue Castle Games in Vancouver made Dead Rising 2, Capcom bought the studio in 2010 and renamed it Capcom Vancouver.

Inafune said aloud what his strategy assumed. At the Tokyo Game Show in September 2009 the head of Capcom’s research and development gave his verdict on the show: “Japan is over. We’re done. Our games industry is finished.” Edge noted that “his comments were universally supported during discussions we had with other Capcom staff”. In 2010 he was promoted to global head of production, but the post was, Edge wrote, “short-lived”: later that year he left to set up his own studio, Comcept. He gave his reason in an interview with the Japanese site 4Gamer, in a fan translation reported by Siliconera: “I was the head of development. That means I was actually at the top of Capcom. I couldn’t go any higher. So it was best for me to just be a salaryman, not doing anything new so as to avoid failing, not doing anything outstanding, quietly dealing with what I was told. Because if I did anything brashly and failed, I would no longer be in that position.” Wireframe recorded that several Mega Man projects were cancelled around the time he left. Capcom kept sending series west. In 2013 Edge judged that “for years Capcom has been outsourcing development to the west … And for years it has failed”, before praising Ninja Theory’s DmC: Devil May Cry as the exception.

Monster Hunter

Monster Hunter began as a modest online game for the PlayStation 2 in 2004. It won the grand award at that year’s CESA Game Awards, and Edge reported that the players signing on to hunt online “proved lucrative” for KDDI, the Japanese broadband provider that ran Capcom’s PS2 matchmaking. Its producer, Ryozo Tsujimoto, son of Kenzo, told Edge in 2009 that the team “would feel happy if we sold something like 300,000 copies of the first version”. “It was not a smash hit at first, but sales weren’t bad so we were left alone, working in our own little corner.”

The PlayStation Portable made it a craze. In 2007 Edge reported that the PS2 and PSP versions had sold more than 3.7 million copies between them, and that Monster Hunter Portable 2nd had “shifted a million copies by itself and is widely considered the saviour of the PSP in Japan”. It was the first Japanese PSP game to ship a million. Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, released in Japan in December 2010 (Monster Hunter Freedom 3 in Capcom’s English listings), reached four million faster than any other PSP game, and Media Create’s Japanese chart put its sales at 4,429,577 by the spring of 2011. On the Nintendo 3DS, Monster Hunter 4 sold more than four million in 2013.

Outside Japan the series stayed small. “It took us no less than five years to arrive at where we now stand in Japan,” Tsujimoto told Edge in 2009, and overseas sales were “in the range of a few hundred thousand copies”.

Street Fighter IV

For eight years after Street Fighter EX3 Capcom made no new Street Fighter, the longest gap in the series’ history. Retro Gamer credited the producer Yoshinori Ono with pushing for a new game. Street Fighter IV drew its fighters with polygons instead of sprites. It reached arcades in 2008, and the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in February 2009. By 2013, Edge reported, it had sold “over six million copies” in its many versions and “breathed new life into a genre that had spent the best part of a decade on life support”. Street Fighter V followed in 2016 and Street Fighter 6 in June 2023.

The RE Engine

Resident Evil 7 biohazard, in January 2017, was the first game on Capcom’s new in-house engine, the RE Engine. Capcom then used the engine to rebuild its own past. The remake of Resident Evil 2, in January 2019, was, Wireframe wrote, “the excellent Resident Evil 2 remake”, and Devil May Cry 5, two months later, was “another great showcase” for the engine. A remade Resident Evil 4 followed in March 2023. By June 2026 the Resident Evil 2 remake had sold 19.7 million copies, more than any other game in the series, and Resident Evil Requiem, released in February 2026, had sold 8 million. Capcom counted the whole series at 213 million.

Monster Hunter: World

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, in 2015, was the first in the series to ship a million copies outside Japan. Monster Hunter: World, released in January 2018 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, went far beyond that. In August 2018 it became the first Capcom game to ship ten million units, and by June 2026 it had sold 22.4 million, the highest figure on Capcom’s list of its million-sellers. Monster Hunter Rise, for the Switch, sold five million in its first week in 2021; Wireframe called it “more fun, action-packed, and accessible than ever”. Monster Hunter Wilds passed ten million within its first month in 2025. By June 2026 Capcom counted the series at 131 million, against 60 million for Street Fighter.

Capcom today

Kenzo Tsujimoto, president from 1983, is still Capcom’s chairman and chief executive. His son Haruhiro has been president since July 2007, and another son, Ryozo, the Monster Hunter producer, became the director in charge of its development divisions in 2025. In May 2026 Capcom reported record profits for the ninth year running.

Sources

Capcom, “Corporate History”, Capcom investor relations (web, secondary): I.R.M. Corporation (May 1979), Japan Capsule Computer (1981), the 1983 Capcom company and the 1989 merger; release dates of Little League, Vulgus, 1942, Commando, Ghosts ’n Goblins, the Famicom 1942, Ghosts ’n Goblins and Commando, Street Fighter, Mega Man, Final Fight, Street Fighter II, Resident Evil and Devil May Cry. https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/company/history.html
The Games Machine issue 9, August 1988, pp. 90–91: Richard Eddy, “Capcom Countdown” (the GO! deal, the American conversions, Gun Smoke, David Baxter, Bionic Commando, the two Commodore Street Fighters) and “The History of Capcom” (June 1983, Tsujimoto, 200 staff, $71.4 million, Sunnyvale, Commando’s clones, the Elite conversions of 1942 and Ghosts and Goblins).
The Games Machine issue 7, June 1988, p. 67: Bionic Commandos review (Commodore 64, 86%; Software Creations).
The Games Machine issue 19, June 1989, p. 24: Capcom and U.S. Gold (the “super chip”, £5.5 million, Forgotten Worlds, a quarter of a million sales).
3DO Magazine issue 12, July 1996: “Capcom History” (founded 1979 by Kenzo Tsujimoto; the CP System in 1988; the Street Fighter II updates).
Edge issue 108, March 2002, p. 77: company profile (“Formed: 1979”; 1942 “made the company’s name”).
The One issue 17, February 1990: A–Z entry (“it stands for CAPsule COMputers”).
ACE issue 46, July 1991: Tsujimoto as “founder of Irem”.
David Sheff, Game Over (GamePress edition, 1999): the first Famicom licensees.
Nintendo Power issue 46, March 1993, p. 92: Capcom as one of “the four original Nintendo licensees” and its 500 designers; Super NES Street Fighter II sales and the UK console bundle.
Your Computer, January 1986: Commando review.
Computer and Video Games issue 53, March 1986, p. 14: Elite and Commando.
CRASH issue 26, March 1986: Ghosts and Goblins preview; issue 30, July 1986: Ghosts and Goblins review, 95%.
Your Sinclair issue 26, February 1988: news of the GO! deal.
ACE issue 26, November 1989: games on the CP System Board. Edge issue 7, April 1994: the CPS and CPS II boards; Street Fighter II as a ten-million seller. The Games Machine (Italy) issue 105, February 1998: Street Fighter II among the CPS-1 games.
Computer and Video Games issue 115, June 1991: Street Fighter and Street Fighter 2 in the arcades.
Sinclair User issue 112, June 1991: Street Fighter II arcade review.
CU Amiga, March 1993: Amiga Street Fighter 2 sales. ST Format issue 49, August 1993: Atari ST sales.
Edge issue 12, September 1994: why Capcom revised Street Fighter II instead of replacing it.
Capcom, “Corporate History” (web, secondary): Resident Evil and Devil May Cry descriptions; the 2004 CESA award for Monster Hunter; Dead Rising and Lost Planet sales; Monster Hunter Freedom 2 as the first Japanese PSP game to ship a million; the Vancouver acquisitions of 2010; Monster Hunter Freedom 3, Monster Hunter 4 and Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate; Monster Hunter: World as Capcom’s first ten-million seller; Monster Hunter Rise and Wilds. https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/company/history.html
Capcom, “Platinum Titles” and “Game Series Sales” (web, secondary), figures as of 30 June 2026: release dates and sales of Street Fighter IV, V and 6, Resident Evil 7, the Resident Evil 2 and 4 remakes, Resident Evil Requiem, Devil May Cry 5 and Monster Hunter: World; series totals. https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/business/million.html and https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/business/salesdata.html
Capcom, “Management Team” (web, secondary): the posts held by Kenzo, Haruhiro and Ryozo Tsujimoto. https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/company/officer01.html
Capcom press release, 13 May 2026 (web, secondary): record profits for the ninth consecutive year. https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/2026
Edge issue 137, June 2004: Monster Hunter’s online players and KDDI.
Edge issue 146, February 2005: visit to Production Studio 4 and Resident Evil 4.
Edge issue 169, December 2006: the closure of Clover Studio; Okami and God Hand reviews. Edge issue 171, January 2007: the 2006 Edge Awards.
Edge issue 178, August 2007: Monster Hunter sales and the PSP.
Edge issue 208, December 2009: Inafune at the Tokyo Game Show; interview with Ryozo Tsujimoto.
Edge issue 213, April 2010: Ryozo Tsujimoto as Kenzo Tsujimoto’s son.
Edge issue 228, June 2011: Media Create Japanese sales chart (Monster Hunter Portable 3rd).
Edge issue 246, November 2012: studio profile of Platinum Games.
Edge issue 250, February 2013: DmC: Devil May Cry review and “Post Script” (Capcom’s western studios, Blue Castle).
Edge issue 251, March 2013: profile of Seth Killian (Street Fighter IV’s sales and effect on the genre).
Edge issue 263, February 2014: Inafune’s promotion and departure to found Comcept.
Kris, “Keiji Inafune On Japanese Developers And Why He Left Capcom”, Siliconera, 1 November 2010 (web, secondary): Inafune’s own words on leaving, from his interview with 4Gamer, in a translation first posted on the NeoGAF forum. https://www.siliconera.com/keiji-inafune-on-japanese-developers-and-why-he-left-capcom/
Retro Gamer issue 44, 2007: Street Fighter IV announced, using polygons. Retro Gamer issue 107, October 2012: Street Fighter IV and Yoshinori Ono.
Wireframe issue 2, November 2018: Mega Man, Inafune’s start and departure.
Wireframe issue 8, February 2019: Devil May Cry 5 and the RE Engine.
Wireframe issue 50, April 2021: Monster Hunter Rise review.