Square Co., Ltd. (also known under its international brand name SquareSoft) was a Japanese video game development studio and publisher. It was founded in 1986 by Masafumi Miyamoto, who spun off part of his father's electronics company Den-Yu-Sha. Among its early employees were designers Hironobu Sakaguchi, Hiromichi Tanaka, Akitoshi Kawazu and Koichi Ishii, artist Kazuko Shibuya, programmer Nasir Gebelli, and composer Nobuo Uematsu. Initially focusing on action games, the team saw popular success with Final Fantasy in 1987. A role-playing video game, it became the first in a franchise of the same name. Later notable staff included directors Yoshinori Kitase and Takashi Tokita, designer and writer Yasumi Matsuno, artists Tetsuya Nomura and Yusuke Naora, and composers Yoko Shimomura and Masashi Hamauzu. Initially developing for PCs, then exclusively for Nintendo systems, Square broke with Nintendo in the 1990s to develop for Sony's in-development PlayStation. Their first PlayStation project, Final Fantasy VII, was a worldwide critical and commercial success, attributed with boosting the popularity of its genre and platform. Alongside the Final Fantasy series, the company developed and published several other notable series, including SaGa, Mana, Front Mission, Chrono, and Kingdom Hearts. Over the years, many staff left to found studios such as Monolith Soft (Xeno), Sacnoth (Shadow Hearts), Mistwalker (Terra Battle), and AlphaDream (Mario & Luigi). In 2001, the company saw financial troubles due to the commercial failure of the feature film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which ultimately led Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, to withdraw from active game production and leave the company in 2003. The film's failure disrupted merger discussions with Enix, publisher of the Dragon Quest series. Following the success of Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts, negotiations resumed and the merger went ahead on April 1, 2003.