Jaleco

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Jaleco (TYO: [7954] ) was founded as Japan Leisure Corporation on October 3rd 1974. In 1982, the company started developing and manufacturing arcade video games; as a result Japan Leisure Corporation shortened its name to Jaleco the same year. Jaleco was a video game company whose focus lay in arcade titles, as well as titles for the NES and other popular computer and video game consoles of the 1980s and 1990s, most notably the Bases Loaded series and Carrier. The U.S. arm of Jaleco was Jaleco USA based near Chicago.

By the year 2000, Jaleco, still active in the development of arcade and console video games, hadn't produced any hit title in years and was in a struggling state. Its American division Jaleco USA had already left the arcade industry in 1993. Then on November 1, 2000, Jaleco was acquired by Hong-Kong company PCCW. Jaleco was renamed PCCW Japan, thus giving the PCCW Group a foothold in Japan. PCCW heavily restructured the company, shutting down Jaleco's arcade division and other non-profitable departments in order to focus on video game for consoles of the sixth generation era. PCCW Japan itself acquired on April 2001 the VR-1 Group which included VR-1 Entertainment, a U.S developer of massively multiplayer online role playing games, in order to bring a more global focus to its current and future software endeavors. On October 2002, PCCW Japan merged Jaleco USA and VR-1 Entertainment to form Jaleco Entertainment, its new U.S division that would be based in Buffalo, New York instead of Illinois. PCCW Japan reverted its name back to Jaleco in 2004.

Jaleco is today a highly active publisher of video games for Microsoft's Xbox, PC games, and Sony's PlayStation 2. It holds a top 10 publisher slot moving into 2004. Jaleco is the official subsdiairy of the whole PCCW Group in Japan which includes many activities unrelated to videogaming such as music, web application and mobile phone content. Jaleco's Japanese video game division is a mixture of employees from the former Jaleco and the VR-1 Group.

Video games

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