HAL Laboratory

HAL Laboratory Inc.
Native name
 株式会社ハル研究所
Haru Kenkyūjo
Kabushiki gaisha
Industry Video games
Founded February 21, 1980 (1980-02-21)
Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan[1]
Founder Hiroji Iwasaki
Headquarters Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo[1], Japan
Number of locations
 2
Key people
 Masayoshi Tanimura (Chairman & CEO)
Satoshi Mitsuhara
(President & COO)
Products Kirby series
Mother series
Super Smash Bros. series
Number of employees
 149 (as of June 2015)[2]
Subsidiaries Warpstar Inc.

HAL Laboratory, Inc. (Japanese: 株式会社ハル研究所 Hepburn: Kabushiki Gaisha Haru Kenkyūjo) is a Japanese developer that was founded on February 21, 1980 that is closely affiliated with Nintendo. It is headquartered in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo.[1] HAL was named as such because "each letter put them one step ahead of IBM".[3] The company is most famous for its character Kirby, the eponymous protagonist of the series of games; the Mother series (otherwise known as EarthBound); and the Super Smash Bros. series.

HAL Laboratory started off making games for the MSX system and the Commodore VIC-20.[4]

In many of its games during the early to mid-1990s it used the name HALKEN, derived from their Japanese name. Some of its early titles were also released as HAL America, a North American subsidiary of the company led by Yash Terakura.[5] Hal owns 50% of Warpstar, Inc., the production company that created the Kirby: Right Back at Ya! anime series.

List of games developed

Nintendo Systems

Home Console

Family Computer Disk System
Nintendo Entertainment System
Super NES
Nintendo 64
GameCube
Wii
Wii U

Handheld

Game Boy
Game Boy Color
Game Boy Advance
Nintendo DS
Nintendo 3DS

Other Systems

Commodore VIC-20

Commodore MAX Machine[8]/Commodore 64

Coleco Vision

MSX

MSX2

Windows

References

[9]

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Thursday, February 11, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.