Wolf Team
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Wolf Team ((株)ウルフチーム) was founded in 1986 as part of Telenet Japan and was originally headed by Masahiro Akishino. Wolfteam became independent from Telenet in 1987, was reintegrated in 1990 and got merged with another Telenet subsidiary called Lasersoft, then was completely absorbed in an internal restructuring at Telenet in 1993 at which point most of the staff left together with Akishino.
The remaining staff were the then-very-young programmer Yoshiharu Gotanda, designer Masaki Norimoto, director Joe Asanuma, graphic artist Yoshiaki Inagaki, sound composer Motoi Sakuraba, and sound effect designer Ryota Furuya. Wolfteam went on to create games such as Hiouden: Mamono-tachi tono Chikai, which faced weak sales due to Telenet's bad reputation. For Tale Phantasia, a game concept by Gotanda, they looked for an outside publisher with a better reputation.[citation needed]. After approaching Enix, Telenet struck a contract with Namco.
Namco, however, insisted upon many changes to the game, including renaming the title to Tales of Phantasia. The conflict over these changes pushed the game's release from 1994 into late 1995. The initial staff left during this dispute and founded tri-Ace in early 1995.
The Tales series continued to be developed by Telenet with involvement of many former Wolfteam members while reusing the Wolfteam name until the dedicated joint company Namco Tales Studio was founded in early 2003.
