Nihon Bussan

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Nihon Bussan
Company name	Nihon Bussan (日本物産) Nichibutsu SPHINX
Type	Jukebox rental company (1970-1975) Game company (1975-2001) Galgame company (1983-2009) Model yacht company (1996-????)
Founded	March 1970
Headquarters	Kita-ku, Osaka, Japan
Related Companies	Nichibutsu U.S.A., Nichibutsu U.K., Nichibutsu Europe

Nihon Bussan (日本物産) was a Japanese game company. Nichibutsu is a brand of Nihon Bussan, SPHINX is an adult game brand of Nihon Bussan. It had its offices in Tenjinbashi, Kita-ku, Osaka. In 2009, the company ended its operations.

The company's slogan was Frontier Spirit of Amusement.

Introduction

In October 1970, Sueji Torii founded Nihon Bussan at the age of 23 in Osaka, however, the name has since been used for their home console games, so the Nichibutsu name is used for arcades. This is similar to Namco's use of "Namco" for arcade games and "Namcot" for home console games, respectively, back in the day. In 1978, when Taito's game Space Invaders swept the market, Nihon Bussan was also involved in the production of arcade games, and in 1978~1979, they published their first arcade game: Moon Base / Moon Alien.

Moon Base was a bootleg version of Space Invaders, as a result, they were sued by Taito. And Moon Alien was a pirated version of Bomb Bee, and Namco sued them as well. At the time, the market was flooded with Space Invaders clones, even famous companies like Namco, Irem and Konami weren't the exception. Nihon Bussan learned from the lawsuits their two works received, subsequently, they stopped following trends blindly. The team of producers headed by Shigeki Fujiwara was not satisfied with the old-fashioned, one-dimensional world of shoot'em ups, instead, they reached out to a wider world, seeking greater space for development. In 1980, Nihon Bussan released two arcade games back-to-back, immediately pushing the developer into the forefront ranks of the arcade industry. These were Moon Cresta and Crazy Climber. The first introduced the concept of triple-engine combinations and firepower enhancements based on Space Invaders, arguably the founder of the "power-up" system that later became the soul of traditional 2D shoot'em ups, the latter was extremely creative in using two joysticks to control the left and right hands to accomplish the climbing maneuver. In one fell swoop, it broke the arcade's traditional inherent "joystick + buttons" area.