What did FromSoftware make before Dark Souls?

Fifteen years of dungeons, robots, haunted houses and card games: the catalogue the Souls games grew out of.

Between King’s Field (1994) and Demon’s Souls (2009), FromSoftware released dozens of games across every platform of three generations. The bench was deep: Echo Night (1998) and Shadow Tower (1998) beside the dungeon line; the PlayStation 2 launch pair Eternal Ring and Evergrace (2000); the GameCube card RPGs Lost Kingdoms I and II, published in the West by Activision; the co-operative oddity The Adventures of Cookie & Cream; Chromehounds for Sega and Enchanted Arms for Ubisoft; the licensed-mecha Another Century’s Episode series with Banpresto; and Ninja Blade (2009) with Microsoft, months before Demon’s Souls changed the company’s story.

It also became a steward of other people’s series: FromSoftware published Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven in 2003 and acquired the Tenchu rights outright in 2004, the licence Sekiro was first conceived under, fifteen years later.

Echo Night (1998) Japanese PlayStation cover — **ECHO NIGHT · 1998** Echo Night (1998), FromSoftware’s first-person ghost story for the PlayStation — one of the pre-Souls experiments, alongside King’s Field and Armored Core, that built the studio.

THE BENCH

Selected, 1998 to 2009

The dungeon-adjacent

Shadow Tower (1998) took King’s Field’s first-person underworld multiplayer-ward; Echo Night put the same mood in a haunted mansion, then a ghost ship and a lunar base. Atmosphere was a department, not a phase.

The experiments

Lost Kingdoms dealt cards instead of swords; Cookie & Cream split one adventure across two cooperating players; Kuon (2004) remains the connoisseur’s horror pick of the whole catalogue.

The work for hire

Chromehounds, Enchanted Arms, Ninja Blade: partner-published, platform-holder-backed productions that kept the studio fluent in every machine of the era, the fluency Demon’s Souls spent.

What did FromSoftware make before Dark Souls?

THE BENCH

THE FIRST WORD