Softnica

Logo.

Softnica (ソフトニカ) previously named Pax Softnica (パックスソフトニカ), Pax Softonica, and Imagesoft (イマージュソフト), is a Japanese video game developer. The company was founded in the early 1980s as Imagesoft which developed games for home computers, including erotica. The company was bought by Pax Electronica in October 1983 and later renamed to Pax Softonica. Through the late 1980s to the early 2000s, they were contracted to develop games for Nintendo. Around 2009, they rebranded themselves simply as Softnica and continued to develop video game assets, primarily for the Chinese market, but failed to secure any major game contracts. After that, the company's main web page turned into a personal blog for the company's president. The last entry was in 2016, then, in 2018, the site went offline saying it would be back up later that year. When that date was missed, it said it would be back up in 2020, and nothing has changed since. As far as I can tell, the company is defunct.

Personal

I learned about Softnica while researching the developers of some of the older Nintendo games I like. It was interesting to see that a lot of early Nintendo games were actually out-sourced to a variety of developers like Tose, Irem, and Ikegami Tsushinki, and frequently never credited.