Sacnoth

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nautilus
legal form Aruze subsidiary
founding April 30, 1997 (as Sacnoth)
resolution 2007
Reason for dissolution Closure by the parent company
Seat JapanJapan Japan
management Matsuzo Itakura ( CEO )
Branch Software development

Sacnoth , operating under the company name Nautilus from 2000 , was a Japanese development studio for video games. It was founded on April 30, 1997 by Hiroki Kikuta , who along with other employees at the time left Square , and was financially supported by SNK .

Company history

The original goal of the company was to further develop the RPG genre , which Square no longer believed at the time. In addition to smaller publications for SNK's handheld Neo Geo Pocket Color such as Dive Alert and Faselei! , the first major development was a role-playing game for the PlayStation called Koudelka , which combined elements of survival horror with those of SRPG games. However, the game was badly received by the critics and players, which was also due to the end of the life cycle of the Playstation and the decreasing interest of the players, so that Kikuta drew his conclusions from this financial failure and resigned.

In the coming year 2000, after the bankruptcy of SNK, the company Aruze , a manufacturer of Japanese gaming machines such as Pachinko , took over the management and renamed Sacnoth Nautilus. As CEO was Matsuzo Itakura used, who held a leading position at the design of Koudelka. His goal was to return to the classic understanding of role-playing games, and to introduce the innovations that were necessary from his point of view in a manageable manner and in smaller steps.

Just one year later, the result of this new direction was presented in 2001, when Shadow Hearts was published for the PlayStation 2 as the last game under the developer name Sacnoth. Although designed as the starting point of a new series, it still largely refers to Koudelka, but places much more emphasis on the SRPG part of the game. An important new element typical of the following games was the judgment ring, a method of maintaining the player's attention even during normal actions during the game by introducing a controllable random element. In the following two games in this series, Shadow Hearts: Covenant , which also appeared on PS2 in 2004, and Shadow Hearts: From the New World , which was the company's last game to appear in 2006, this control element became a typical recognition feature, and in a variety of ways used.

After key members of the studio had already been fired and no more games in the series were to appear, Aruze officially announced the dissolution of the development studio at the end of the first quarter of 2007.

Well-known games of the studio

Web links