FromSoftware

History

Naotoshi Zin founded FromSoftware in Tokyo on November 1, 1986, to write business applications. It moved into games with the arrival of Sony's PlayStation, and its first release, King's Field (1994), was a slow, dark, first-person First-Person Dungeon Crawlers ('Blobbers') in the tradition of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord and Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss. Sequels followed, along with the mecha series Armored Core (1997), which became its steadiest franchise for more than a decade, and dozens of other titles across genres.

The turn came with Demon's Souls (2009), directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, who had joined the studio in 2004 and taken over a troubled project. Published by Sony for the PlayStation 3, it was a modest seller in Japan but found a devoted audience abroad. Its spiritual successor, Dark Souls (2011), was a breakout worldwide. In April 2014 the publisher Kadokawa announced it would buy FromSoftware from its shareholder Transcosmos, and Miyazaki was promoted to company president the following month.

Under Miyazaki the studio made Bloodborne (2015), Dark Souls III (2016), Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019) and then Elden Ring (2022), which won Game of the Year at The Game Awards and sold 30 million copies by April 2025. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon (2023), the expansion Shadow of the Erdtree (2024) and the cooperative spin-off Elden Ring Nightreign (2025) followed. In August 2022 a Tencent subsidiary and Sony Interactive Entertainment took minority stakes of 16.25% and 14.09%; in January 2025 Sony also took a 10% stake in Kadokawa itself, becoming its largest single shareholder. In April 2025 FromSoftware announced The Duskbloods for the Nintendo Switch 2.

Notable work

Demon's Souls and Dark Souls built their reputation on precise, punishing combat, but their deeper innovation was design by withholding. Worlds are dense, interlocking and barely explained; story is scattered in item descriptions; death costs you your currency unless you can return to reclaim it; and other players appear only as ghosts, bloodstains and cryptic messages left on the floor. Lordran's shortcuts and bonfires made a single castle feel as deep as a megadungeon.

Elden Ring opened the formula into an Open-World RPGs, the Lands Between, with a mythology written with George R. R. Martin. Its fallen demigods, rotting dragons and mad knights draw openly on Dark Fantasy and on the melancholy of manga such as Berserk, which Miyazaki has cited as an influence.

Legacy

FromSoftware gave its name to a genre. The Soulslikes, a term used for games that borrow its stamina-based combat, checkpoint bonfires and lost-on-death economy, now spans independent 2D platformers and big-budget action games. Its players built one of gaming's most inventive communities, trading lore theories and devising Challenge Runs, Speedruns & the Souls Community, from no-hit runs to games finished on dance pads.

The studio also changed what "hard" meant. Where early computer RPGs were difficult through obscurity and Permadeath, From made difficulty fair, legible and shared, turning each boss into a story players tell one another.