Square Enix

Square Enix was forged in April 2003 from the merger of two rival giants: Square, founded in 1986 by Masafumi Miyamoto and famous for Final Fantasy, and Enix, the 1975 publisher behind Dragon Quest. The union was driven partly by desperation. Square's lavish 2001 film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within had bombed catastrophically, and joining forces with the cash-rich Enix restored stability while uniting the two most iconic franchises in Japanese role-playing under a single banner.

The combined company inherited an unmatched pedigree. Final Fantasy had redefined the genre with cinematic ambition, from the airships of VI to the polygonal melodrama of VII, while Dragon Quest remained a near-sacred national ritual in Japan, its release dates rumored to influence school attendance. To these Square Enix added Kingdom Hearts, the improbable and wildly successful crossover with Disney, plus long-running series like Star Ocean, Mana, and later Nier and Octopath Traveler.

Its peak years brought both triumph and turbulence. Final Fantasy XI and later XIV proved the company could run massive online worlds, though XIV's disastrous 2010 launch was so broken it had to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch as A Realm Reborn, becoming one of gaming's greatest redemption stories. The single-player line grew troubled, with Final Fantasy XV and VII Remake each spending the better part of a decade in development.

The company expanded aggressively, acquiring Taito in 2005 and the Western studios Eidos, Crystal Dynamics, and IO Interactive in 2009, bringing Tomb Raider, Hitman, and Deus Ex into the fold. That Western gamble largely failed to pay off, and in 2022 Square Enix sold the entire Eidos group to Embracer for a startlingly low sum, refocusing on its Japanese core and, controversially, on blockchain and AI experiments.

Today Square Enix remains one of the world's most important publishers, a keeper of franchises woven into the cultural memory of millions. It is a company perpetually caught between its towering legacy and its struggle to modernize, still capable of masterpieces and misfires in equal measure, and still the definitive name in the genre it helped invent.