“What ever happened to Quintet?”

What worries you, masters you.

-John Locke

Actraiser. Robotrek. Soul Blazer. Illusion of Gaia/Time. Terranigma. The Granstream Saga. These titles and more won’t be familiar to everyone but for those retro gamers who remember the many powerhouse developers of yesteryear, particularly the 1990s, the name Quintet may encourage a longing, wistful whiff of nostalgia. But a business cannot survive on nostalgia alone.

Sometime shortly after the turn of the millennium, the furnaces at Quintet fell silent. Their developer tools were laid to rest. The final game with the Quintet name attached to it, Inuyasha: The Secret of the Cursed Mask, published by Bandai in 2004, received mixed reviews.

The last official and somewhat cryptic message from Quintet was sent through their website on a bulletin board. In response to impatient comments from fans hungry for more news, a staff member wrote:

現在は外部に提供できる情報がなく、また掲示板は閉鎖する

As we cannot currently release any information, we will close this bulletin board.

6 years later, Quintet’s website went down. It’s now accessible only as an archive.

And then that was it.

What happened? Why did that well dry up? Why did they quit developing games? Why did they exit not with a bang but with a ghost? Like so many old memories, it seems they simply vanished.

Doing some proper sleuthing beyond, like, just Wikipedia, it seems to come down to the fate of one Tomoyoshi Miyazaki…

Miyazaki was the co-founder of Quintet Co., Ltd. alongside Masaya Hashimoto. One of the company’s original developers and directors, Miyazaki’s work with Quintet demonstrated he was a capable and talented designer. He also additionally wrote for early Ys games. However, just like the company he founded, Miyazaki also disappeared seemingly without a trace. At least, not an obvious one.

Clearly, this presents more than a few problems with re-releasing Quintet’s games for modern audiences. Since Quintet’s evaporation, fans have clamored for re-releases. An Actraiser collection would be nice. It’d be cool if they put out the Quintet trilogy for modern consoles. How cool if we got something like Terranigma in North America. Interest abounds.

Even Kamui Fujiwara, art designer on Terranigma, shared previously unseen concept art and illustrations on Twitter @kamuif to commemorate the game’s 25th anniversary.

Perhaps even more spectacular, Japanese fans backed by Fujiwara and composer Miyoko Takaoka took to change.org to create a petition to convince Square Enix to re-release Terranigma. As of the time of this writing, the petition has received 8,284 out of 10,000 signatures since its launch in July 2021.

Here is a translation of the petition:

I want to revive my favorite TV game of over 25 years, “Terranigma” (formerly Enix/Quintet), by distributing it as an archive!

Mr. Kamui Fujiwara, who worked on the art and character design of Terranigma, and Ms. Miyoko Kobayashi, who created many of the divine songs, are cooperating in this project. Let me tell you a little bit about why I, as a fan of the game, decided to join hands with Kamui Fujiwara and Miyoko Kobayashi.

“Terranigma” was released on October 20, 1995 by the former Enix Corporation (produced by Quintet Co., Ltd.), with a magnificent story based on “Genesis”, an overwhelming world view created by Kamui Fujiwara, the art and character designer, and sound creators Miyoko Kobayashi and Masanori Hikiji. The many divine songs created by sound creators Miyoko Kobayashi and Masanori Hikiji further colored the world view and captivated many players. Even now, people are eagerly waiting for ports and remakes.

I am one of those people who were fascinated by “Terranigma”. While many masterpieces called “retro games” that have been on the market for more than 20 years are being ported or remade one after another, all the users who have played “Terranigma” say that it is strange that the title, which was praised as a “divine game” and a “super masterpiece”, has not been ported or remade for a long time. It’s just not right. It is difficult to play on the current Super Nintendo Entertainment System (software is not available, the backup function of the game software is weakened, and saved data is easily lost, etc.). I am afraid that it will be a great loss for Japan’s game cultural assets if it is not passed on to future generations. This is because “Terranigma” is a work that taught me many important and precious things to live by.

I have been holding an event called “Hero Resurrection Festival” on Twitter (Twitter) (HP) every year on October 20 since the 20th anniversary of the release of “Terranigma” with the faint hope that it might reach the production side if we raise excitement about it. The content of the event is to have fans connect with each other and tweet their thoughts on Terranigma and memories of playing the game with hashtags. And for the 20th anniversary, we collaborated with Miyoko Kobayashi and released the “Creation 20th Anniversary Video”. And last year, for the 25th anniversary, we collaborated with Miyoko Kobayashi for the first time in five years and released the “25th Anniversary of Terranigma” video. After watching this video, Kamui Fujiwara stood up and generously showed the original setting pictures and high-resolution remade key visuals of “Terranigma” on Twitter, which excited the fans on Twitter. At that time, Miyoko Kobayashi and Kamui Fujiwara contacted me personally, and they drew me in, inspiring me to do what I could for the true revival of “The Creation”. Miyoko Kobayashi started to compose a new song to accompany the picture. I, Kisato, am playing a role to support their activities and get the fans excited.

I would like to see the game ported and remade, but first I would like to see it archived.

If we can achieve that, and if we can produce “results”, then there may be a next step. The first thing you can do for the revival of the game is to participate in the signature campaign. And for those of you who loved “Terranigma” and don’t know about this call, can you please help us? Thank you very much for your cooperation.

With so much interest, surely games like Terranigma will see the light of day again? Perhaps with a fresh coat of paint? Optimism is healthy, but it is possible there are other issues holding back re-releases of Quintet games.

The boring business-ey questions are what hinder the fan’s dream that every retro game ever gets a re-release for modern systems. Who possesses the rights to the Quintet IPs? Who owns and could make distribution decisions for the likes Illusion of Time or the Actraiser games? Enix, the publisher of many of Quintet’s games? Nintendo, the producer of the hardware many of those games appeared on?

That information likely isn’t available to the public, but if it’s Miyazaki and Hashimoto, then the future looks bleak.

Artist Kamui Fujiwara said in an interview with Nintendo Life:

I don’t know about the director, Mr. Tomoyoshi Miyazaki, because he seems to have disappeared. Probably, the reason why the game has not been remade nor got subsequently sold is because Mr. Miyazaki cannot be contacted.

In Szczepaniak’s Untold History of Japanese Video Game Developers, interviewees who worked with the two missing men attempted to fill in the gaps when the author of the book was unable to contact Quintet’s co-founders.

Actraiser composer Yuzu Koshiro said:

I only know about it at a rumour level. So I think the information I have is basically the same as what you have. But I don’t really think it’s something that I would like to put in a book. I don’t know if it’s true or not. The company Quintet was shut down five years ago, and after that Hashimoto-san actually worked at Ancient for a while. But recently he left for his own reasons. In terms of Miyazaki-san, I really do not know what happened to him. I’ve heard rumours, but I don’t know if they’re true or not.

Director and designer Kouji Yokota said:

There is a magazine called Famitsu, and they would organise a new year’s party every year. About five years ago, at that party, I saw him and said hello, and greeted him, and that was the last time I saw him(Miyazaki). What I heard was that he was doing business with someone who is not related to the games industry. So I was under the impression he was no longer in the games industry, but I didn’t get to ask further details.

…

I have some contacts from those years, but the only information I can get is that we’re not sure what happened to them. But had they been involved in some kind of trouble, I’m quite sure that would appear in the media, or it would be covered in newspapers or something. But the fact that we haven’t come across any news about them, whether good or bad, means they are probably doing fine.

As the old adage goes: “no news is good news”.

We agree. We also hope that the co-founders of Quintet are doing fine.

There is more to Miyazaki’s story (and likely Hashimoto’s) than is publicly available… Records exist that indicate Miyazaki moved on from Quintet to Shade to Giga Factory, which he founded in 2008, plus Overtex Group and some sort of online credit card clearance company called Kessai that collapsed with its clients’ money. That, in addition to alleged bankruptcies of previous organizations, might have contributed to Miyazaki’s disappearance.

Along the way, he did manage to re-edit Actraiser for the Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console, but since then…?

You’ll bump into rumors and attestations that he was arrested, that he became a farmer, that he retired from gaming and the limelight, etc. etc. It’s difficult to tell in the Information Age when so much potential misinformation thrives. Additionally, there’s the language barrier which makes securing maximum information challenging.

Tomoyoshi Mizayaki with Yuji Horii, the father of Dragon Quest.

It can be frustrating to think about some of our favorite games sinking deeper into the past out of public memory, particularly when retro collecting has become as expensive as it is for certain games and systems. Preservation is a passionate subject in gaming today. Demand for re-releases of classic Squaresoft, Nintendo, Quintet games and more remains steadfast, but perhaps it comes down to one man who at this point in his life cannot be found.

Maybe he doesn’t wish to be found.

Fans of Quintet and Quintet’s work have their grievances to deal with, but without knowing exactly what happened to Tomoyoshi Miyazaki, perhaps the best we can do is respect his silence and honor someone’s wishes in terms of Quintet’s closing, regardless of how exactly he has decided to move on from gaming. We may never get the re-releases of the games that we’d like to see again (I hope that we do!), but perhaps that’s because real life can truly be rough. It has its ups and downs, sometimes with the creators of these games.

@yuzokorshiro put out this photograph of (left to right) Miyazaki, Hashimoto, Koshiro himself, and Koshiro’s sister. The photograph was taken after the release of Actraiser. Koshiro suggests it was snapped in 1991.

(update: Actraiser Renaissance was released shortly after this article was first published, underscoring the fact that Actraiser is the one game to receive re-releases as mentioned)

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage or Mage Cast.