Hudson Soft | Code Like It's 198x

Hudson Soft nearly became a café. In 1973 the brothers Yuji and Hiroshi Kudo wanted to start a business in Sapporo, on the northern island of Hokkaido, and, as Wireframe tells it, were not especially fussy about what it sold. There was already a similar business in the same building, so they opened CQ Hudson instead, a shop dealing mostly in amateur radio equipment. Hudson’s own John Greiner later remembered them selling “telecommunication devices and some art photographs”. The name came from the brothers’ favourite steam locomotive.

Within two years the shop was selling microcomputers, and within ten Hudson was one of the first two companies Nintendo let make games for the Famicom. It went on to create Bomberman, design the chips inside NEC’s PC Engine and make Mario Party for Nintendo, before a bank collapse and a stock-market listing brought it under Konami, which absorbed it in 2012.

Fast facts

Founded: 1973, in Sapporo, by Yuji and Hiroshi Kudo.
First business: CQ Hudson, a shop selling amateur radio equipment.
Known for: Bomberman, Adventure Island, Bonk, the Star Soldier shooters, the Caravan tournaments, Mario Party.
Hardware: designed the chipset of the PC Engine with NEC.
Ended: absorbed into Konami Digital Entertainment on 1 March 2012.

From radio shop to software house

The shop began selling early computers such as NEC’s TK-80, Sharp’s MZ-80K and the Commodore PET. There was little software to run on them, so Hudson wrote its own. “The games we made were tiny,” one of its first employees, Takashi Takebe, recalled in the book Japansoft: An Oral History. “We would include five to ten of them as a bonus with the purchase of a new computer.” Hudson then sold its programs on cassette by mail order through magazine adverts, opened a second office in Tokyo, and ported its programs to the many incompatible Japanese computers of the time. Greiner claimed that Hudson was “the first to publish a PC game in Japan”; Japanese sources date its first packaged game software to 1978.

Edge found in 1995 that Hudson had first made its name with “programming languages and utility software”, and only then turned to games. One of those tools produced its most famous game: the original Bomberman, the magazine said, began in 1980 as a demonstration of the company’s own BASIC compiler, and came out in Japan in a small way as a one-player computer game with a single type of bomb and a single enemy. Wireframe dates the first Bomberman to 1983 and credits the programmer Yuji Tanaka.

British Spectrum owners met Hudson in 1984, when Sinclair published two of its games at £5.95 each. CRASH reviewed both in July 1984, introducing Hudson as “the Japanese company who have been releasing games in Britain”. Stop the Express had the player running along the carriage roofs of a hijacked train. Eric and the Floaters was the Bomberman idea under another name, an underground maze in which Eric lays bombs that go off “about two and a half seconds” later; CRASH gave it 60 per cent, and Your Computer found it “semi-addictive” but “a rather ordinary game”.

The Famicom

Nintendo’s Famicom went on sale in 1983, and Hudson signed up early. With Namco it was one of the first two outside companies licensed to make Famicom games, and its first cartridges appeared in July 1984: the platform game Nuts & Milk and a conversion of Lode Runner. The Famicom Lode Runner added a scrolling view and gave the player a character that later became Bomberman. Hudson also wrote the software for Family BASIC, the keyboard and cartridge that turned the Famicom into a home computer, and converted Nintendo games such as Balloon Fight and Mario Bros. to the NEC PC-8801 and Sharp X1. By the middle of the decade, Wireframe reports, its Famicom versions of Lode Runner and Bomberman had each sold over a million copies.

Hudson made its own stars too. A marketing executive, Toshiyuki Takahashi, became famous as “Takahashi Meijin” (Master Takahashi) for how fast he could press a fire button, and appeared in comics and on television. From 1985 Hudson took him around Japan in the Caravan, a touring tournament in which players competed on one game a year in timed bouts of two to five minutes. The first Caravan game was Star Force, a 1984 shooter from Tehkan (the company later renamed Tecmo), which Hudson had converted for the Famicom. Every Caravan game from 1985 to 1992 except one was a shooter. Hudson’s own Star Soldier (1986) refined Star Force, and many of its sequels were Caravan games with timed “Caravan” score-attack modes built in.

Takahashi also got his own game. Hudson licensed Escape’s arcade game Wonder Boy (the developer later renamed itself Westone), kept its design and put Takahashi in the lead. It came out on the Famicom in 1986 as Takahashi Meijin no Bōken Jima, “Master Takahashi’s Adventure Island”, and reached the West as Adventure Island, with the hero renamed Master Higgins. Sega owned the Wonder Boy name but Westone owned the game, which is how the same design could appear under two companies’ labels. Hudson’s Adventure Island series then went its own way.

The PC Engine

By the mid-1980s Hudson was designing its own graphics chips. Wireframe reports that it first tried to sell one to Nintendo, without success. NEC wanted to enter the console business but, as Retro Gamer put it, “lacked vital industry experience”. In Greiner’s words, Hudson “realised they needed a partner to manufacture and market to a large base. Fortuitous timing landed NEC as a company that was interested in entering the console market.”

The result was the PC Engine, launched in Japan in October 1987. Its chips carried Hudson part numbers: the HuC6280 processor, a 6502 relative with a memory mapper and a six-channel sound generator on the same die, the HuC6270 video controller and the HuC6260 colour encoder. The games came on HuCards the size of a credit card. In December 1988 the machine gained a CD-ROM drive, the first for any games console. The PC Engine ran second to Nintendo in Japan and failed in America as the TurboGrafx-16.

Hudson was the machine’s most important publisher. It converted Irem’s R-Type, published Red Company’s caveman platformer Bonk (PC Genjin, 1989), made the shooter Soldier Blade (1992) and brought Bomberman to the PC Engine. The PC Engine’s multitap, which let five joypads plug into one console, turned Bomberman into a party game. “We were really lucky that the PC Engine had a multitap,” Hudson’s director of research and development, Shinichi Nakamoto, told Edge. “Without it, the PC Engine version would have been merely a reproduction, and would probably soon have been forgotten.”

Hudson kept pushing the player count. Hi-Ten Bomberman, made for the 1993 Caravan, ran on Hudson’s own hardware and an early high-definition television and took ten players at once. Edge, visiting Sapporo for its February 1995 issue, called it “arguably the best multiplayer game in the world”. Ten-player battles reached homes with Saturn Bomberman (1996) on Sega’s Saturn.

Sapporo in the 1990s

Edge found Hudson “not your average Japanese videogames outfit”, with interests “as diverse as television and movie production and coin-op museums”. Its research centre on the outskirts of Sapporo had a miniature railway that staff could ride around the building, and its bee logo was an amateur radio joke. The radio call sign for Hokkaido is JA8, and in Japanese the word for eight, hachi, also means bee.

The PC Engine’s successor went less well. NEC’s PC-FX came out in Japan on 9 December 1994. Hudson’s PC-FX team made the anime fighting game Battle Heat, released alongside it, and the adventure Team Innocent, but Edge reported that NEC wanted the machine’s software built around anime, so games like Bomberman would not appear on it. Wireframe reports that the PC-FX sold only 400,000 before it was dropped in 1998. Hudson kept working for Nintendo: it developed Mario Party for the Nintendo 64, a board game of four-player mini-games. Edge gave it seven out of ten in March 1999, finding it thin alone but saying that “as a console multiplayer experience there is little that can claim to be its equal”. Hudson went on to make a whole series of sequels.

Konami

The late 1990s hit Hudson hard. Its main bank, Hokkaido Takushoku, failed in November 1997, and Hudson’s finances suffered with it. The company raised money by listing on the stock market in 2000, which, Wireframe notes, left it open to a takeover. In 2001 Konami bought about 5.6 million Hudson shares. In November 2004, facing a forecast loss of ¥7.3 billion, Hiroshi Kudo resigned as president, taking responsibility for the losses; Konami then held 38 per cent. Konami took a majority in 2005, made Hudson a wholly owned subsidiary in April 2011 and merged it into Konami Digital Entertainment on 1 March 2012.

Konami kept the games. Super Bomberman R revived the series in 2017, the year the bee logo came down from Hudson’s old headquarters, and in 2020 Konami released the PC Engine Mini, a small replica console with the games built in.

Sources

Wireframe issue 53, July 2021, pp. 84–89, “Developer Profile: Hudson Soft”: CQ Hudson and the café; the TK-80, MZ-80K and PET; Takashi Takebe quoting Japansoft: An Oral History; tape sales and the Tokyo office; Bomberman in 1983 and Yuji Tanaka; Eric and the Floaters; the Famicom licence, Nuts & Milk, Family BASIC and the Nintendo conversions; the million-selling Famicom games; Takahashi Meijin; the graphics chip offered to Nintendo; the Caravan and Star Force; Star Soldier, Bonk, Soldier Blade and Lode Runner; the railway and the bee logo; the PC-FX’s sales; the bank, the listing and Konami’s 5.6 million shares; Super Bomberman R, the PC Engine Mini and the logo’s removal in 2017.
Retro Gamer issue 40, 2007, p. 43, “Retroinspection: PC Engine”: John Greiner of Hudson on the Kudo brothers, the first business, the train and the NEC partnership.
Retro Gamer issue 40, 2007, p. 49: PC Kid/Bonk’s Adventure “published by: Hudson”, “created by: Red/Atlus”.
Edge issue 17, February 1995, pp. 46–49: Hudson’s Sapporo headquarters; its early tools; the first Bomberman; Shinichi Nakamoto on the multitap; Hi-Ten Bomberman; the PC-FX and Team Innocent.
CRASH issue 6, July 1984, p. 49 (Stop the Express) and p. 54 (Eric and the Floaters, 60%): published by Sinclair at £5.95, author Hudson Soft.
Your Computer, July 1984, p. 57: Eric and the Floaters and Driller Tanks.
Hyper issue 140, June 2005, pp. 86–89: Wonder Boy, Escape and Westone; Hudson’s licence for Adventure Island; Takahashi Meijin and the Caravan.
Sega Retro, “Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima” and “Wonder Boy” (web, secondary): the Famicom release in 1986 and Westone’s contract with Hudson. https://segaretro.org/Wonder_Boy
Computer and Video Games issue 189, August 1997, p. 74: Saturn Bomberman’s ten-player mode.
Edge issue 69, March 1999, pp. 64–65: Mario Party review (developer Hudson, publisher Nintendo).
Edge issue 127, September 2003, pp. 71–78: the PC Engine’s launch and CD-ROM drive (as cited in the PC Engine entry).
Japanese Wikipedia, “ハドソン” (web, secondary): the incorporation date; the first shop’s stock; the first packaged game software in 1978; the first Famicom games in July 1984; the failure of Hokkaido Takushoku Bank on 17 November 1997; the listing in December 2000; Konami’s shareholdings from August 2001 to April 2011; the merger on 1 March 2012. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ハドソン
“Hudson Co-Founder Steps Down”, Gamasutra (now Game Developer), 11 November 2004 (web, secondary): Hiroshi Kudo’s resignation, the forecast loss and Konami’s 38 per cent. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/hudson-co-founder-steps-down
Nintendo World Report, “Hudson Soft Being Absorbed by Konami”, 18 January 2012 (web, secondary). http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/29000/hudson-soft-being-absorbed-by-konami