unrelated to the joke but i'd pay money to know what from software developed from 1986 to 1994 when it was selling business software before going "you know what we should try making an rpg"
i haven't found a single website that doesn't dismiss the first eight years of one of the most influential video games companies' history as more than a funny footnote. i want a book on that period. i want to know exactly what they were making and what pushed them to turn from business spreadsheets to build spreadsheets
I was wondering about this, so I looked it up. Seems like they were making mainframe or otherwise internal business software; this 2011 interview with Toshifumi Nabeshima specifically mentions that they were working on agriculture industrial pig feed management software: https://gigazine.net/news/20110825_nabeshima_interview/
This blog post from someone tracking down the citation recommends people read this 1996 book which apparently contains slightly more detail about what From Soft were doing at the time - this is when half the company was doing business software, and the other half was doing games.
Just gonna copy/paste the script from PlayStation Experiment 2 in here. Above information is correct, but there's a few more little bits I scraped up.
Naotoshi Zin founded FromSoftware in Tokyo on November 1st, 1986 using an insurance windfall received after a motorcycle accident that left him in the hospital for four months. The company originally developed business applications, but FromSoftware’s early work isn’t anything like a primitive word processor you can boot up in a PC-98 emulator. In an August 2011 interview with Armored Core V producer Toshifumi Nabeshima from Japanese website Gigazine, he mentions that the company developed software for the Japanese Farmers Association that managed pig feed. While not a particularly glamorous background for what would eventually become one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful video game developers in the world, it evidently was lucrative enough for the company to bankroll its game development ambitions.
FromSoftware’s early days and the development of King’s Field are poorly documented outside of Takashi Takayanagi’s Game Sensen Chou Ijou: Nintendo vs. Sony, an obscure book that is apparently largely the ramblings of an early PlayStation otaku. But it also just happens to contain a wealth of untranslated information about FromSoftware’s journey from pig feed software merchants to game developers. While the book is long out-of-print and does not appear to have been digitally preserved, a few key facts have made their way out through Japanese Wikipedia, most notably that the company initially made an aborted attempt at creating a 3D action game for computers before a successful pitch to Sony led to a team of around a dozen people developing King’s Field for the PlayStation in a six month timeframe.
There’s some more tidbits in an interview in the December 1998 issue of Gamers’ Republic. The three interview subjects, Shinichiro Nishida, Yasuyoshi Karasawa, and the aforementioned Nabeshima, reveal at least one key, if unsurprising, influence on King’s Field: The classic Sir-Tech series of dungeon crawlers, Wizardry, which were popular in Japan among the more hardcore role-playing fanatics. The most amusing bit of trivia? King’s Field was named after a golf club a team member visited while in the UK. Located in Linlithgow, Scotland, Kingsfield Golf & Leisure is still in business as of 2024.
Plugging the video again because the King's Field segment in full is like an hour...
