Company Profile… Lovedelic

As promised, here is the first of several Company Profiles. For this first edition, I’m starting with the seed of everything this blog celebrates - Lovedelic. Please note - more information will be added to this page as and when I learn more about the company.
ORIGIN
Founded some time around the mid-Nineties (1995 is my educated guess), Lovedelic was an independent software development group based in Tokyo, Japan. Its founding members hailed mostly from Squaresoft, where it is assumed they had grown tired of working on franchises and felt the need to work on more original and unique titles.

Founding members included Kenichi Nishi, who had worked on Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG, and Akira Ueda, who worked on Final Fantasy IV and Secret Of Mana.

GAMES
Lovedelic made only three games in its short lifespan but each was rich in imagination and artistic vision. They were, in order of release:

MOON: REMIX RPG ADVENTURE (PlayStation, 1997)

An RPG in which a boy in the real world is transported into the world of the 16-bit RPG he’s been playing at home. Once inside the world he finds that his character is not the hero he once imagined. The villagers resent him for being self-absorbed and taking all their items and money while the monsters he’s slain were actually innocent creatures. The boy must spend the rest of the adventure attemtping to put right his wrongs by pleasing the villagers and trying to bring the dead monsters back to life.

UFO: A DAY IN THE LIFE (PlayStation, 1999)

A timed adventure game in which a group of government agents seek out a clan of aliens hiding in an apartment block. NOTE: UFO is the most enigmatic of Lovedelic’s games and I know very little about it. Over the coming months I will be playing through the game to find out exactly what it’s all about. Expect this description to change dramatically as a consequence.

L.O.L: LACK OF LOVE (Dreamcast, 2000)

By far the most interesting and best-loved of Lovedelic’s games. Lack Of Love puts you in control of a single-cell organism that must help other creatures around it in order to acquire their genetic code and evolve into larger, greater creatures. Along the way you find that a robot has landed on your planet and is terraforming it in preperation for colonisation. The great thing about Lack Of Love is that no dialogue or text is ever used, so it can easily be played by anybody, no matter what language they use.

LEGACY
Lovedelic dissolved soon after the release of Lack Of Love, presumably because none of their games sold particularly well. None of their three published games were ever released outside of Japan, which almost certainly harmed the finances of the company. Nevertheless, many of Lovedelic’s greatest talents moved on to form brand new developers of their own and continued to create original and innovative games under new names. We’ll be detailing those developers and their achievements in future Company Profiles.