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Chunsoft

Dragon Quest's developer, then Mystery Dungeon and the sound novel

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A Tokyo developer founded in April 1984 by the programmer Koichi Nakamura and four fellow university students. It programmed the first five Dragon Quest games for Enix, then made its own name with the Mystery Dungeon games, beginning with Torneko's Great Adventure in 1993, and with 'sound novels' such as Kamaitachi no Yoru. In April 2012 it merged with Spike to form Spike Chunsoft.

Chunsoft began as a programming contest prize and a student start-up. Koichi Nakamura won a place in a game-programming contest run by the publisher Enix with a puzzle game, Door Door, and in April 1984, aged 19, set up his own company with four other university students. Two years later Chunsoft programmed Dragon Quest, and it built the first five games of the series. It then made two kinds of game that were very much its own: the Mystery Dungeon games, which made the computer roguelike popular on Japanese consoles, and “sound novels”, stories told in text, pictures and sound in which the reader’s choices change what happens.

Fast facts

  • Founded: 9 April 1984, Tokyo.
  • Founder: Koichi Nakamura, with four fellow students.
  • Developed: Dragon Quest I to V for Enix (1986–1992).
  • Own series: Mystery Dungeon (from Torneko’s Great Adventure, 1993); sound novels (from Otogirisō, 1992).
  • Later: Pokémon Mystery Dungeon (2005); 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (in America, 2010).
  • Ended: merged with Spike in April 2012 to form Spike Chunsoft.

Dragon Quest

Nakamura met Yuji Horii, another winner of the Enix contest, when the two worked on the Famicom version of Horii’s detective game The Portopia Serial Murder Case. Edge’s history of the series says it was Nakamura who proposed to Enix that he would like to make a role-playing game. Horii designed and wrote Dragon Quest, Akira Toriyama drew it, Koichi Sugiyama wrote its music, and Chunsoft programmed it; the company went on to develop the first five games, ending with Dragon Quest V on the Super Famicom in 1992. When Nintendo Power reported a panel of Japanese designers at the 1997 Tokyo Game Show, it introduced Nakamura as “programmer of Dragon Quest”.

Mystery Dungeon

Chunsoft’s first big game of its own borrowed a Dragon Quest character. Torneko’s Great Adventure (Torneko no Daibōken, 1993) gave the series’ chubby merchant Torneko a dungeon of his own, and Super Play reported it as “out now” on the Super Famicom in December 1993. It was a roguelike, built on the rules of the old computer game Rogue, and Super Play said two years later that it had been “a big hit in Japan”. Retro Gamer later called Chunsoft’s series “massively popular, providing an easy introduction to the sub-genre”.

The sequel, Fushigi no Dungeon 2: Fūrai no Shiren (1995), gave the series a hero of Chunsoft’s own, and at a Tokyo show that autumn Super Play noticed a giant model of him, in “a rather fetching upturned-fruit-bowl hat”, beside Chunsoft’s stand. In a 2006 readers’ poll of the hundred best games, reprinted in Edge, it came 48th, Torneko 78th, and a later Mysterious Dungeon game of 2000 86th. Other companies licensed the idea. Edge reported in 1997 that Square’s Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon was “based on Chunsoft’s popular Siren Mystery Dungeon”, with the Final Fantasy bird in the lead. In 2005 Chunsoft made Pokémon Mystery Dungeon for Nintendo, which in Retro Gamer’s words gave the old sub-genre “a cute new spin”. Shiren itself was ported from the Super Famicom to the Nintendo DS in 2006, with a mechanic that let players ask others for help over the wireless link.

Sound novels

Chunsoft’s other line came out of the adventure game. Super Play explained that Otogirisō, “the first sound novel from Chun Soft, premiered on the Super Famicom in March 1992”; a sound novel, the magazine said, was basically an adventure, an “interactive book”. For the second, Kamaitachi no Yoru (1994), Chunsoft commissioned the crime novelist Takemaru Abiko. Its story, as Super Play described it, traps thirteen people snowed in at a small hotel with a murderer, and the reader has to find the killer before becoming the next victim.

The sound novels mattered a great deal in Japan. In the same 2006 poll, Kamaitachi no Yoru came 90th, and Chunsoft’s Sega Saturn adventure Machi (1998) came fifth, behind only Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy VII, Dragon Quest III and Dragon Quest VIII.

English-speaking players met Chunsoft’s storytelling in 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors on the Nintendo DS, published in America by Aksys Games in 2010. Nine strangers wake on a ship and have nine hours to escape through numbered doors. Edge called it “more interactive novel than full-blown adventure title”, liked its locked-room puzzles and the way its choices “have tangible impact” on the story, but found the interactions “spaced shockingly far apart”, and gave it 6 out of 10.

Spike Chunsoft

Chunsoft also tried other things. In 2005 it sold its online GameCube role-playing game Homeland only through its own website, a choice Edge described as “a constrictive caveat”. On 1 April 2012 Chunsoft merged with another Tokyo developer, Spike, and the combined company took the name Spike Chunsoft. Under that name it went on making story games, among them AI: The Somnium Files (2019), a detective adventure. In 2019 Nakamura and other early staff gathered for the company’s 35th anniversary, where one of them, Kazuya Asano, put its early games down to a studio where “there was no one to stop us”.

Sources

  • Edge issue 217, August 2010, pp. 62–67, “The story of Dragon Quest”: Nakamura, Enix contest winner and founder of Chunsoft, “developer of the first five Dragon Quests”; his proposal to make a role-playing game; Portopia.
  • Retro Gamer Videogames Hardware Handbook, volume 2 (2010), p. 80: Nakamura’s Door Door in Enix’s competition; Chunsoft founded when he was 19.
  • Famitsu, report of Chunsoft’s 35th anniversary talk show, 26 April 2019 (web, secondary): founding on 9 April 1984 by Nakamura and four other students; Kazuya Asano’s “there was no one to stop us”. https://www.famitsu.com/news/201904/26175258.html
  • Nintendo Power issue 97, June 1997, p. 84: Tokyo Game Show panel, “Koichi Nakamura of Chun Soft (programmer of Dragon Quest)”.
  • Super Play issue 14, December 1993, p. 16: Torneko, Chun Soft, “out now”; “the chubby, cheerful merchant from Dragon Quest”.
  • Super Play issue 15, January 1994, p. 17: Otogirisō, “the first sound novel from Chun Soft”, March 1992; Kamaitachi no Yoru, Takemaru Abiko and its story.
  • Super Play issue 37, November 1995, p. 25: Torneko “a big hit in Japan”; Fushigi no Dungeon 2 and the model of its hero at Chunsoft’s stand.
  • Edge issue 51, November 1997, p. 11: Square’s Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon, “based on Chunsoft’s popular Siren Mystery Dungeon”.
  • Edge issue 162, May 2006, pp. 24–25: a Japanese readers’ poll of the top 100 games (Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy VII, Dragon Quest III and Dragon Quest VIII in the top four; Machi 5th, Mysterious Dungeon 2 48th, Torneko Mysterious Dungeon 78th, Mysterious Dungeon 2 (2000) 86th, Kamaitachi no Yoru 90th).
  • Retro Gamer issue 119, October 2013, p. 99: roguelike panel (Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team, 2005, “a cute new spin”; Chunsoft’s series “massively popular”; Shiren the Wanderer, Super Famicom and DS).
  • Edge issue 149, May 2005, pp. 30–31: Homeland (publisher Chunsoft), sold only through Chunsoft’s website.
  • Edge issue 224, February 2011, p. 102: 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors review (Aksys Games, developer Chunsoft; 6/10).
  • Sega Retro, “Chunsoft” and “Spike” (web, secondary): the founding date; Machi (Saturn, 1998); the 2012 merger with Spike. https://segaretro.org/Chunsoft https://segaretro.org/Spike
  • Wireframe issue 25, October 2019, p. 64: AI: The Somnium Files review (developer Spike Chunsoft).

See also

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