(also known under its American brand name SquareSoft) was a Japanese video game development studio and publisher. It was founded in 1986 by Masafumi Miyamoto, who spun off part of his father's electronics company Den-Yu-Sha. Among its early employees were Hironobu Sakaguchi, Hiromichi Tanaka, Akitoshi Kawazu, Koichi Ishii, Kazuko Shibuya, Nasir Gebelli and Nobuo Uematsu. After several other projects, all of these employees would work on Final Fantasy, a 1987 game for the Nintendo Entertainment System which would bring commercial and critical success and launch a franchise of the same name. Later notable staff included Yoshinori Kitase, Takashi Tokita, Tetsuya Nomura, Yoko Shimomura and Yasumi Matsuno. Initially developing for PCs, then exclusively for Nintendo systems, Square broke with Nintendo in the 1990s to develop for Sony's in-development PlayStation. Their first PlayStation project, Final Fantasy VII, was a worldwide success, going on to sell ten million units, earning critical acclaim, and boosting the popularity of its genre and platform. Alongside the Final Fantasy series, the company developed or published several other notable series, including SaGa, Mana, Front Mission, Chrono, and Kingdom Hearts. In the early 2000s, the company saw financial troubles due to the commercial failure of the feature film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which ultimately led Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, to withdraw from active game production and leave the company in 2003. Prior to this, a merger had been discussed with Enix, the noted publisher of the Dragon Quest series. Following a delay due to the failure of The Spirits Within, the merger went ahead on April 1, 2003, with the new company taking on the name Square Enix. Square as a developer and publisher has become famous in the gaming industry, with Final Fantasy ranking as one of the best-selling and best-known role-playing video game series of all time. Several of their games have also marked commercial milestones in gaming for various platforms, and continue to be lauded as classics. Many of Square's staff who left the company at various points founded other studios, including Monolith Soft (Xeno), Sacnoth (Shadow Hearts), Mistwalker (Terra Battle) and AlphaDream (Mario & Luigi). History Origins Square was initially established in September 1983 as a software subsidiary of electric power conglomerate Den-Yu-Sha, a company led by Kuniichi Miyamoto. His son Masafumi Miyamoto, then a part-time employee of the Science and Technology Department at Keio University, had little interest in following his