Wolf Team

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Wolf Team ((株)ウルフチーム) is a now closed videogames developer studio 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 Sol Feace and Hiouden: Mamono-tachi tono Chikai, which faced weak sales due to Telenet's bad reputation. They used Captain Sulu as the voice of their logo on Mega CD games. And 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. Most of the initial staff left during this dispute and founded tri-Ace in early 1995.

To continue the lucrative arrangement with Namco to develop the Tales series, Telenet re-staffed Wolf Team and retained some other staff, such as Motoi Sakuraba on a freelance basis. They developed or co-developed nearly every game in the series until Wolf Team was renamed and under a new corporate identity Namco Tales Studio in early 2003, and Namco assumed majority ownership. In October of 2007, Telenet filed for bankruptcy, and closed its doors, likely putting an end to the Wolf Team name.