Hudson Soft

Founded: 1973-05-18

Defunct: 2012-03-01

T-series code: T-143

Merged into: Konami

Headquarters:

Midtown Tower, Tokyo Midtown, Japan; Akasaka, Minato, Tokyo, Japan

Hudson Soft Company, Limited (ハドソンソフト) was a Japanese video game developer and publisher headquartered in Tokyo.

Starting life off as a computer game developer, Hudson grew into one of the most recognised video game developers in the world after having success with their Bomberman series. It collaborated with NEC to create the PC Engine console (TurboGrafx-16 in the west) - a direct competitor to Sega and their Sega Mega Drive, thus they released very few games for the 8-bit/16-bit Sega systems despite still producing a large quantity of games for the rival 8-bit/16-bit Nintendo systems. This changed when the TurboGrafx-16 was discontinued and the Sega Saturn arrived, with Hudson establishing itself as one of the most prolific Japanese third party companies of the console. They also produced several games for the Dreamcast and they even collaborated with Sonic Team to produce Sonic Shuffle (which is similar to Nintendo's Mario Party series, of which they produced the first eight games).

They also had a smaller role programming computer software, most notably the standard Human68k operating system for the X68000 line of computers, and hardware, such as the CPU in the TurboGrafx-16 and an assortment of NES controllers.

In April 2005, Konami purchased a majority stock in Hudson. In January 2011, Konami announced that they had made Hudson into a wholly owned subsidiary, taking effect 1 April 2011. Hudson Entertainment, the American division of Hudson, was shut down, canceling all projects and since 2012 all Hudson's intellectual properties are now owned by Konami.