Artoon Co., Ltd. (株式会社アートゥーン Kabushiki-Gaisha Ātūn) was a Japanese video game developer established in 1999. It became a subsidiary of

AQ Interactive AQ Interactive, Inc. was a Japanese video game developer and publisher. AQ stands for Artistic Quality. It was the parent company of the developers Artoon, Cavia and feelplus, and most recently the U.S. publisher Xseed Games. AQ Interactive ...

in May 2004 and became a wholly owned subsidiary in June 2005. The team was primarily affiliated in the United States with

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

Xbox Xbox is a video gaming brand created and owned by Microsoft. The brand consists of five video game consoles, as well as applications (games), streaming services, an online service by the name of Xbox network, and the development arm by the ...

and

Xbox 360 The Xbox 360 is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. As the successor to the original Xbox, it is the second console in the Xbox series. It competed with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generati ...

projects, although they had also worked with Hudson Soft and Nintendo on other platforms. Key Artoon personnel include

Yoji Ishii previously known as is a video game development team within the Japanese multinational video game developer Sega. Yu Suzuki, who had previously developed arcade games for Sega including ''Hang-On'' and ''Out Run'', was the first manager of t ...

, Manabu Kusunoki, Hidetoshi Takeshita, Yutaka Sugano, Masamichi Harada,

Takuya Matsumoto Takuya Matsumoto (松本拓也, born February 6, 1989) is a Japanese football player. He is the current goalkeeper of FC Gifu. Club statistics ''Updated to 25 December 2021''.Nippon Sports Kikaku Publishing inc./日本スポーツ企画出版� ...

and

Naoto Ohshima (born February 26, 1964) is a Japanese artist and video game designer, best known for designing Sonic the Hedgehog and Dr. Eggman characters from Sega's '' Sonic the Hedgehog'' franchise. Although Yuji Naka created the original tech demo aroun ...

. When the company formed, it drew personnel and talent from several of Sega's development teams, particularly those which worked on '' Sonic the Hedgehog'' (created by Ōshima), and ''

Panzer Dragoon ''Panzer Dragoon'' is a series of video games by Sega. The first three games were developed in the 1990s by Sega's Team Andromeda for the Sega Saturn. The fourth, ''Panzer Dragoon Orta'' (2002), was developed by Sega's Smilebit team for the X ...

''. The developer had approximately 85 employees. The company's focus was to create original game content for various consoles. Artoon became defunct when the parent company, AQ Interactive, filed for bankruptcy. Artoon was situated in

Yokohama is the second-largest city in Japan by population and the most populous municipality of Japan. It is the capital city and the most populous city in Kanagawa Prefecture, with a 2020 population of 3.8 million. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of T ...

Kanagawa prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located in the Kantō region of Honshu. Kanagawa Prefecture is the second-most populous prefecture of Japan at 9,221,129 (1 April 2022) and third-densest at . Its geographic area of makes it fifth-smallest. Kanag ...

, Japan. A secondary studio was maintained in

Naha is the capital city of Okinawa Prefecture, the southernmost prefecture of Japan. As of 1 June 2019, the city has an estimated population of 317,405 and a population density of 7,939 persons per km2 (20,562 persons per sq. mi.). The total area ...

Okinawa is a prefecture of Japan. Okinawa Prefecture is the southernmost and westernmost prefecture of Japan, has a population of 1,457,162 (as of 2 February 2020) and a geographic area of 2,281 km2 (880 sq mi). Naha is the capital and largest city ...

prefecture, Japan. Artoon, along with

feelplus Feelplus Inc. (株式会社フィールプラス Kabushiki gaisha Fiirupurasu) was a Japanese video game developer and a subsidiary of AQ Interactive. The studio was conceived by Microsoft Game Studios specifically to aid Mistwalker in video game ...

and

Cavia ''Cavia'' is a genus in the subfamily Caviinae that contains the rodents commonly known as guinea pigs or cavies. The best-known species in this genus is the domestic guinea pig, ''Cavia porcellus'', a meat animal in South America and a common ...

, were all absorbed into parent company

Games developed

References

{{Artoon Defunct video game companies of Japan Video game companies established in 1999 Video game companies disestablished in 2010 Video game development companies Japanese companies established in 1999 Japanese companies disestablished in 2010 AQ Interactive