BANDAI

Bandai was founded in Japan on July 5, 1950, in Tokyo, as Bandai-ya by Naoharu Yamashina. At the beginning it was not a video game company, and it could not have been one. Its world was post-war Japanese toy manufacturing, with metal toys, children’s products and a growing focus on industrial quality. In 1961 it became Bandai Co., Ltd., and during the 1960s it found one of its defining directions: toys based on television characters and animation. Licences such as Astro Boy, followed by many other Japanese series, turned Bandai into a company deeply connected to Japanese pop culture.

Its relationship with video games came later, but it followed the same logic. Bandai did not enter the industry only as a software publisher. It entered as a company able to bring characters, toys, models and television brands into the interactive market. During the 1980s and 1990s it published many games based on anime, manga and tokusatsu properties, especially on Famicom, Super Famicom, Game Boy, Mega Drive, PlayStation and Saturn. Dragon Ball, Gundam, Saint Seiya, Sailor Moon, Ultraman, Kamen Rider and Super Sentai became regular parts of its catalogue. Not all of these games were remarkable in design terms, but they clearly showed a different industrial model from that of pure game publishers. For Bandai, video games were a natural extension of already powerful fictional worlds.

Its place in hardware history is also tied to ambitious and not always successful experiments. Bandai was involved with machines such as the Playdia, a multimedia console released in Japan in 1994, and especially the WonderSwan, a handheld launched in 1999 and designed with the contribution of Gunpei Yokoi and his Koto Laboratory. WonderSwan, WonderSwan Color and SwanCrystal found a meaningful niche in Japan thanks to their low price, battery life and licences such as Final Fantasy, Digimon and Gundam, although they could not truly challenge Nintendo’s global dominance of the handheld market.

During the 1990s Bandai also reinforced its role in children’s and youth entertainment through phenomena such as Power Rangers, Digimon and, above all, Tamagotchi, which showed how well the company could turn a simple idea into a mass cultural product. In video games, Digimon World, Dragon Ball Z, Gundam titles and many anime-based releases made Bandai a familiar name for console players, especially in Japan and later in Europe.

In 2005 Bandai integrated with Namco to form Bandai Namco Holdings, with the group’s game operations reorganized between 2005 and 2006. From that point on, the Bandai name remained mainly associated with toys, model kits, character business and licensed products, while the video game side gradually moved under Bandai Namco Games, later Bandai Namco Entertainment. Its legacy, however, is clear. Few companies have represented the meeting point between Japanese pop culture and commercial video games as strongly as Bandai, bringing generations of robots, heroes, digital monsters and anime characters onto consoles.