Enix

Enix Corporation, 「株式会社エニックス」 in Japanese, was a Japanese video game publisher that produced video games, anime and manga. The company is famous for publishing the Dragon Quest series. It is now merged with Square as part of Square Enix.

Overview
Enix is the company that released Dragon Quest. The origin of the name is said to be a combination of ENIAC, which is said to be one of the world's first computers, and Phoenix. The company started out by publishing a magazine that listed vacancies in public housing, and also did trading company work and robot sushi. In 1982, the company entered the PC game publisher business. Since the company did not have a game development division, Yukinobu Senda and his colleagues outsourced developers from the Game Hobby Program Contest that they held. The winners of the first contest were Yuji Horii and Koichi Nakamura. Yuji Horii won the contest with his game Love Match Tennis and it would go on to become Enix's first PC video game release. Enix would then go on to outsource development of its games to developers like Chunsoft, who developed many of the early Dragon Quest games, and would establish strong foundations in the video game industry. Dragon Quest went on to sell 1.5 million copies and became Enix's most profitable franchise. After that, the company began publishing books related to Dragon Quest, such as the Dragon Quest 4-Koma manga anthology series. Enix soon started publishing manga in its own magazine Monthly Shōnen Gangan.

In the present day, Enix has teamed up with Square, which was a rival company to Enix, to become Square Enix, but for some time after the merger, games such as Dragon Quest, which were developed by the former Enix, were still outsourced. The idea of the merge first arose in June 2001, where Enix expressed interest in partnering with Square and Namco, but instead invested in Game Arts to help publish the Grandia series.

Enix's financial reports were hurt by the delay of both Dragon Quest VII in 1999 and Dragon Quest Monsters 2 in 2001. However, Square were doing much worse after the box office failure of their film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. This was around the time that Enix were considering merging with Square but, after the failure of the Final Fantasy film, Enix were hesistant to go ahead with the merger. The merger was announced on November 26, 2002, and then became Square Enix on April 1, 2003 with Enix being the surviving company.

Other works
Other works from Enix (as a developer and/or publisher) include the following games and series:
 * Door Door
 * The Portopia Serial Murder Case
 * ActRaiser
 * Soul Blazer
 * Dungeon Land
 * Just Breed
 * E.V.O.: Search for Eden
 * The 7th Saga
 * Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen
 * Jyutei Senki
 * See more...