What is FromSoftware?

A Tokyo business-software company that bet on a dungeon, and became the most imitated game studio in the world.

FromSoftware was founded in Tokyo on November 1, 1986 by Naotoshi Zin, to make business applications. Its first video game, King’s Field, arrived for the PlayStation in 1994 and sold well enough at home to change the company’s business entirely. For fifteen years it was a respected specialist, mecha in Armored Core, dungeons in King’s Field and Shadow Tower, oddities for every console going. Then Demon’s Souls (2009) and Dark Souls (2011) turned its house style into a genre with a name: the Soulslike.

Today the studio is majority-owned by Kadokawa Corporation (about 70 percent, with Sony Interactive Entertainment and Tencent’s Sixjoy holding minority stakes), employs a little over 450 people, and is run by the man who directed most of the games on this shelf: president and representative director Hidetaka Miyazaki, in the chair since 2014. It still self-publishes in Japan and partners abroad, Sony, Bandai Namco, Activision, Sega, Capcom have all carried its games west.

THE STUDIO FromSoftware’s wordmark. The Tokyo studio, founded in 1986 as a business-software company, became, game by game, the defining action-RPG house of its era.

THE SHAPE OF THE COMPANY

1986 to now

1986 · Business software first

FromSoftware spent its first eight years making productivity applications. Games were the pivot, not the plan, a fact worth remembering whenever its later single-mindedness is described as destiny.

1994 · King’s Field

The first game was a first-person dungeon crawler for the brand-new PlayStation: fully 3D, slow, dark, and difficult. Almost every later FromSoftware instinct is already in it.

2014 · Kadokawa and a new president

Kadokawa bought the company in spring 2014; weeks later Miyazaki, a decade into a second career, became its president. Zin stayed on as an advisor.

456 people, two cities

Headquarters are in Tokyo, with a Fukuoka studio opened in 2016 to build CGI assets. By May 2025 the company reported 456 employees, small, by the standards of the hits it releases.

THE SHELF

Where to go from here

The origins

King’s Field and Demon’s Souls have their own pages in this archive: the 1994 dungeon that started it, and the 2009 “failure” that restarted everything.

The trilogies and the one-offs

Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring and Armored Core each get a run of pages here: design, publishing, box art, and the art books that document them.

What is FromSoftware?

THE SHAPE OF THE COMPANY

THE SHELF

THE FIRST WORD