The History of Hudson Soft
Hudson Soft was founded in Sapporo on May 18, 1973 by brothers Yuji and Hiroshi Kudo, as a shop called CQ Hudson selling amateur radio equipment. The name came from the brothers' love of steam locomotives, Hudson being a famous locomotive type. By the late 1970s the shop had moved into personal computer products and game software, and the bee in its logo became one of the most recognized marks in Japanese games.
Three facts frame everything after. Hudson became Nintendo's first third party software maker for the Famicom, and its early Famicom port of Lode Runner sold over a million copies. It then partnered with NEC to design the PC Engine, supplying the chips and the HuCard format while NEC manufactured and sold the machine. And when the end came, it came slowly: Konami bought in during 2001, took control in 2005, took full ownership in 2011, and dissolved the company into Konami Digital Entertainment on March 1, 2012. The catalog, Bomberman, Adventure Island, Bonk, Star Soldier, and the rest, is Konami's now, and the bee still appears on reissues of other people's work.
FROM RADIOS TO THE FAMICOM
Sapporo, 1973 to 1984THE PC ENGINE YEARS
With NEC, 1987 to the mid 1990sIn July 1987 Hudson completed its C62 chip system, and with NEC it launched the PC Engine in Japan on October 30, 1987: the smallest major home console ever sold, running games on credit card sized HuCards. It finished a strong second to the Famicom in Japan. Its American life as the TurboGrafx-16, renamed, enlarged, and late, is documented in the Library's Machines question, and its CD RPG shelf in the PC Engine RPG Gallery. The division of labor, Hudson on silicon and software, NEC on hardware and retail, is the subject of this shelf's question page below.
Hudson kept developing for rival machines throughout, a third party habit it never dropped. Its last hardware chapter, the 32 bit PC-FX of 1994, again built around Hudson silicon and sold only in Japan, failed to repeat the PC Engine's success, and Hudson's center of gravity moved back to software: Mario Party for Nintendo, fighting games like Bloody Roar published for Raizing and Eighting, and a long tail of Bomberman releases, at the late 1990s peak roughly six a year.
THE LONG END
2000 to 2012WHAT IT LEFT BEHIND
The catalog under new ownershipKonami periodically re-releases Hudson's classics, and Bomberman never really stopped: Super Bomberman R launched the Nintendo Switch in 2017, built on Hudson's formula by Hudson's successor. What ended in 2012 was not the games but the company that could make new ones on its own terms, the Sapporo firm that had been, at different moments, a radio shop, Nintendo's first licensee, a console designer, and the host of a national tournament that toured Japan every summer. The questions below take the two ends of that story, the machine it built and the merger that closed it.