When Namco met Bandai

Busi­ness Week has an arti­cle about an inter­est­ing merger of two video game com­pa­nies. Bandai bought Namco in Sep­tem­ber 2005, and Namco Bandai became the 3rd largest video game cop­many in Japan.Here’s another arti­cle: http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4252&Itemid=2

In the early years of the indus­try, Namco was best known for the Pac-Man, Galax­ian and Frog­ger arcade games, as well as their use of the num­ber 765 as a cor­po­rate sym­bol. In the PlaySta­tion era, Namco found suc­cess with Tekken and Soul Calibur.

Bandai devel­oped sev­eral pop­u­lar series, as well as the Mobile Suit Gun­dam, Power Rangers and Cow­boy Bebop mul­ti­me­dia franchises.

Both com­pa­nies each struck licens­ing deals to put their games on home video game sys­tems. I used to play the Atari 2600 ver­sion of Pac-Man. It was tol­er­a­ble, but at least I could save my quarters.

Both com­pa­nies had strong rela­tion­ships with the Sony PlaySta­tion groups. Namco Bandai has devel­oped two games for the PlaySta­tion 3 launch, new ver­sions of Mobile Suit Gun­dam and Ridge Racer. This is amaz­ing, con­sid­er­ing that the PS3 is a brand new con­sole that was launched at dif­fer­ent dates in Japan and the United States.

The com­pany has also set up soft­ware devel­op­ment teams in the US, while main­tain­ing its devel­op­ment offices in Korea and Japan. The US office focuses on port­ing older Namco and Bandai games to mobile phones. Rere­leas­ing old intel­lec­tual prop­erty (IP) is a com­mon busi­ness model in publishing.

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