ASCII (company)
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| Parent company | Kadokawa Corporation |
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| Status | Folded into ASCII Media Works |
| Founded | 1977 |
| Founder | Kazuhiro Nishi Keiichiro Tsukamoto |
| Successor | ASCII Media Works, Agetec, and Enterbrain |
| Country of origin | Japan |
| Headquarters location | Chiyoda, Tokyo |
| Key people | Kiyoshi Takano, President |
| Publication types | Computer magazines, Video games |
| Number of employees | 197 (as of March 31, 2006) |
| Official website | www |
ASCII Corporation (株式会社アスキー Kabushiki kaisha Asukī?) was a publishing company based in Tokyo, Japan. It became a subsidiary of Kadokawa Group Holdings in 2004, and merged with another Kadokawa subsidiary MediaWorks on April 1, 2008, and became ASCII Media Works. The company published Monthly ASCII as the main publication.
ASCII was founded in 1977 by Kazuhiko Nishi and Keiichiro Tsukamoto. Originally a publisher of a magazine with the same name ASCII, talks between Bill Gates and Nishi led to a creation of Microsoft's first overseas sales office, ASCII Microsoft, in 1979. Nishi was also known for being the creator of the MSX in 1983, an 8-bit standard computer well known in the former USSR and Japan. In 1984, ASCII engaged itself in semiconductor business, followed by a further expansion into commercial online service in 1985 under the brand of ASCII-NET. As the popularity of home video game systems soared in the 1980s, ASCII became active in the development and publishing of software and peripherals for popular consoles such as the Family Computer and Mega Drive. After Microsoft's public stock offering in 1986, ASCII Microsoft was dissolved. At around the same time, the company was also obliged to reform itself as a result of its aggressive diversification in the first half of the 1980s. The company went public in 1989.
ASCII's revenue in its fiscal year ending March 1996 was 56 billion yen, broken down by sectors: Publication (52.5% or 27.0 billion yen), Game entertainment (27.8% or 14.3 billion yen), Systems & semiconductors (10.8% or 6 billion yen) and others. Despite its struggles to remain focused on its core businesses, the company continued to suffer from accumulated debts, until an arrangement was set up that CSK Corporation execute a major investment into ASCII in 1997.
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