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FromSoftware

From business software to King's Field, Armored Core, Dark Souls and Elden Ring

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FromSoftware was founded in Tokyo in 1986 and made business software before its first game, King's Field, came out for Sony's new PlayStation in Japan in 1994. For the next fifteen years it was best known for the mech series Armored Core. Demon's Souls (2009) and Dark Souls (2011), directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, made its name around the world. Kadokawa bought the company in 2014, Miyazaki became its president the same year, and Elden Ring (2022) had sold more than 30 million copies by 2025.

For most of its first 25 years FromSoftware was a steady, unglamorous Japanese developer. It started out making business software, launched a gloomy first-person role-playing game with Sony’s PlayStation, and spent the next decade and a half turning out mech games. Then Sony producer Takeshi Kajii asked it for a dark fantasy action game, and one of its Armored Core directors, Hidetaka Miyazaki, made Demon’s Souls. The difficult, wordless games that followed made FromSoftware one of the best-known studios in the world, and its name became shorthand for a whole style of game.

Fast facts

  • Founded: 1 November 1986, in Tokyo, by Naotoshi Jin (also written Zin).
  • First game: King’s Field (1994), for the PlayStation in Japan.
  • Series: King’s Field, Armored Core, Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring.
  • President: Hidetaka Miyazaki, since 2014.
  • Owners: Kadokawa since 2014, with minority stakes held by Tencent and Sony since 2022.

King’s Field and the PlayStation

FromSoftware was founded on 1 November 1986 and, Wireframe wrote in 2019, spent almost a decade on productivity software before it made a game. Its first, King’s Field, was ready when Sony’s PlayStation went on sale in Japan in December 1994. Edge’s report from the launch listed it, at ¥6,300, among the handful of PlayStation games already in the shops. It was a first-person role-playing game, and Wireframe remembered it as “smothered in darkness and riddled with difficult moments to overcome”, with a 3D world and a stamina bar players always had to watch. It was released only in Japan, and Wireframe judged that it “set the template for most of the studio’s output for the next quarter-century”. Its founder told the magazine Game Hihyou in 1999 that he had not been trying to write a grand story: “Our goal in that game was not to create some grand or deeply satisfying story.”

Armored Core

After two King’s Field sequels came Armored Core (1997), a PlayStation game about building and fighting in giant robots. Sony published it in America, where Edge gave it seven out of ten and called it a “copycat” of Sega’s Virtual-On that made “a much deeper game of it”. The difference was the workshop: “Completing missions brings cash, with which new weapons, legs, boosters, etc, can be bought.” Wireframe thought the customisation carried an idea that lasted: “the player was free to approach a situation how they wanted to.”

Armored Core sequels kept coming for the next two decades. Around them FromSoftware tried almost everything: the Dreamcast robot game Frame Gride (1999), the cheerful co-operative Kuri Kuri Mix (2000), the card-battling Lost Kingdoms (2002) for the GameCube, and Metal Wolf Chaos (2004), in which the President of the United States fights his own Vice President from inside a mech suit. Wireframe picked out two that pointed ahead: Otogi: Myth of Demons (2002), with “difficult melee combat in a series of dark environments”, and Shadow Tower Abyss (2003), in which the player collected the souls of fallen enemies to level up.

Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls

The turn came from Sony. Takeshi Kajii, a producer at Sony Computer Entertainment, approached FromSoftware to “rediscover a lost breed of action game”, he told Edge in 2010: “I’ve always loved the dark fantasy genre, from Wizardry right through to King’s Field.” Hidetaka Miyazaki took the project. “I’d worked exclusively on Armored Core titles in my role at From Software,” he said, “but I’d always wanted to make a dark fantasy game that drew on the Fighting Fantasy series of books.” At first the team planned for death to erase the player’s save file. They dropped that, but kept a game in which the player was expected to die, learn and try again.

Demon’s Souls came out on the PlayStation 3 in 2009. Its first showing at the Tokyo Game Show had been “nothing short of a disaster”, Kajii said, and it sold slowly at first, but word of mouth carried it past 100,000 copies and then around the world. Miyazaki followed it with Dark Souls (2011) for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, which FromSoftware published itself in Japan and Namco Bandai Games published in America and Europe. He told Edge in 2011 that the team was “trying to make the most difficult game that it is possible to make, which at the same time can be conquered by those who persevere”. Wireframe called Dark Souls the game with which the studio broke through “in a big way”. By 2020 the Dark Souls series had sold more than 27 million copies.

The magazines took the games’ names for the style: Wireframe wrote of “the Soulsborne sub-genre” and of “Soulslike” games by other studios. Writing in Wireframe in 2022, Andrew J. Dickinson called it “the genre they created, and still rule over”. The action RPG entry follows how that style grew out of older games.

Kadokawa and Miyazaki

In April 2014 the Japanese publisher Kadokawa announced that it was buying 80 per cent of FromSoftware from its previous owner, Transcosmos; the sale closed on 21 May. Miyazaki was made president the same year. As president he went on directing: Bloodborne (2015), Dark Souls III (2016) and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019), whose combat, Wireframe wrote, “demanded players get off the back foot and firmly onto the front”. Other directors took on Dark Souls II (2014).

Elden Ring

In June 2019 FromSoftware announced Elden Ring, an open-world fantasy game on which Miyazaki worked with George R. R. Martin, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire. It came out in February 2022, published by Bandai Namco. Wireframe gave it 95 per cent, calling it “a towering achievement”, and its reviewer, 65 hours in, was still finding new places: “It is big. It is also, gobsmackingly, as intricately designed as anything the Dark Souls developer has made before.” By April 2025 it had sold more than 30 million copies. An expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, followed in 2024, and a co-operative spin-off, Elden Ring Nightreign, in 2025.

In August 2022 FromSoftware sold new shares to Sony Interactive Entertainment and to Sixjoy Hong Kong, a subsidiary of Tencent, which left Kadokawa with 69.66 per cent. The company said the money would let it invest more in its own games and expand around the world. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon came out in 2023, and The Duskbloods, a multiplayer game for Nintendo’s Switch 2, was announced for 2026.

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