Riding high on the success of dozens of Nintendo 8-bit cartridges and nearly as many arcade games, the Konami of 1992 was a near-invincible Japanese titan in the video game market. Coming from this company, a promise of support for new hardware was not only a blessing but, more vitally, a guarantee of success. As Capcom's Street Fighter II changed popular definitions of innovation and game depth, however, Konami found itself in a world forever altered by the proverbial apple from the Tree of Knowledge; once it was proven that successful arcade games did not have to be mindless walk-and-punch romps, selling beat-em-ups was futile.
As 1991 brought Street Fighter II, 1992 Sega's Virtua Racing, and 1993 Ridge Racer from Namco and Virtua Fighter from Sega, we saw the arrivals of the fighting and 3-D simulation genres that people came to expect from video games. Konami became a follower rather than a leader in these trends. 1994 and 1995 yielded Konami's first-ever operating losses, culminating in a 1995 $4 loss per share of its publicly traded Japanese stock. Yet by mid-1995 the company had re-thought its strategy for game development, and had opted to focus on racing, fighting, and sports, genres it had traditionally eschewed in favor of beat-em-up and shooting games. The decision was made to re-enter the sports game market immediately, while developing the tools internally to conquer both racing and fighting game markets later on.
While Konami is clearly quite diversified, it is its arcade and home video game history that we are primarily concerned with, and this retrospective will therefore confine itself to those topics. Indeed, Konami computer games have been published for 8-, 16- and 32-bit PCs but, more often than not, these titles have been conversions of arcade games or titles also ported to home game consoles. We now begin with a general look at the company's early origins and follow Konami through the years as it blooms into a household name for video game players world wide.
Now let's start out at the beginning
