The History of Treasure

The founding story is documented, not legend. In 1991, programmer Masato Maegawa and colleagues at Konami began planning an original action game in sessions that started, in the Gunstar record, at coffee shops. The team had worked on Konami arcade and Super NES games including The Simpsons (1991), Bucky O'Hare (1992), Super Castlevania IV (1991), Contra III: The Alien Wars (1992), and Axelay (1992). Their original concept was pitched to Konami and rejected; the Gunstar account records that they were told it would not sell.

The stated frustration was specific. Maegawa and his team felt Konami, as a large company, had grown reliant on sequels to established franchises, naming the Castlevania and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, and on arcade conversions. They believed consumers wanted original games. In 1992 they left Konami and founded Treasure to finish the game Konami would not take.

Treasure was founded on June 19, 1992, based in Tokyo, with Maegawa as president. The company name came from wanting to be a treasure to the industry. Around the founding the company had just over ten people; by the first games the staff was around 18, most of them ex-Konami programmers. That smallness stayed deliberate for decades: around 20 to 30 people through the 2000s, 16 by 2011, and fewer than 10 by 2022.

The structure matched the size. Treasure has no rigid hierarchy and no assigned lead designers in the usual sense: a project leader may draft a plan, but design is done collaboratively between programmers and artists. Maegawa's stated philosophy, in his own summary, is simply to create the games the team wants to make, and the company has never treated sales as the first concern.

Most of the founding staff had made Super NES games at Konami, yet they chose the Sega Genesis for their original game because its Motorola 68000 processor was, in their judgment, necessary for the visuals and gameplay they wanted. Sega at first refused them: no track record, no approval. Instead Sega contracted them to make McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure (1993). Several months into that job, approval for their own game arrived, and the staff split into two teams working on both games in parallel.

McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure was finished first. Treasure held it back and released Gunstar Heroes first, because their debut had to be an original game. That single decision is the studio in miniature, and licensed work funding original work became its lasting business pattern.

The verdict of the record is unusually consistent. USgamer called Treasure one of Japan's pioneering indie developers; 1UP.com in 2005 called it one of Japan's most famous independent development houses, releasing some of the most finely crafted, creative, and offbeat action games ever made. Retro Gamer's summary is the honest counterweight: critically acclaimed yet commercially unsuccessful. Low sales plus a loyal following is exactly why original copies of games like Radiant Silvergun climbed on the secondary market.