Presentation

Today, the name FromSoftware almost immediately brings to mind a bonfire, an oversized health bar, a door you hesitate to open and that little voice whispering that maybe you should have spent your souls before finding out what was waiting on the other side.

But FromSoftware did not begin with Dark Souls.

The studio did not even begin in video games.

Founded on November 1, 1986 in Tokyo, the company initially developed business software. It was not until 1994, with the arrival of the original PlayStation, that it entered the video game market with King’s Field, a first-person 3D RPG. Three years later, Armored Core established another long-running branch of the studio’s identity, this time built around mechs, customization and mechanical combat.

That history matters because it puts FromSoftware back into perspective.

The studio is not simply “the company that invented Souls games.”

Long before that expression existed, it was already building labyrinthine, hostile, strange and deliberately quiet 3D worlds, where understanding the space was part of playing the game.

Then Demon’s Souls arrived in 2009.

And several ideas that had existed for years suddenly began to converge.

Difficulty.

Discovery.

Loss.

Risk.

Mystery.

And above all, one fairly unusual conviction: the player does not need everything explained to them in order to want to keep going.

History

1986: long before the Souls games

FromSoftware was founded in 1986 in Tokyo’s Sasazuka district to develop application software for businesses.

The shift toward video games did not come until 1994, when the company seized the opportunity created by the launch of the original PlayStation.

Its first title, King’s Field, was a fully 3D real-time RPG. It already contained several elements that would feel much more familiar years later: cautious exploration, oppressive environments, demanding progression and the sensation of being abandoned in a world that was not particularly concerned with your comfort.

In 1997, Armored Core opened another path.

Giant robots.

Parts to assemble.

Statistics.

Compromises.

A machine you build almost as much as you pilot.

The series became one of FromSoftware’s major constants long before Demon’s Souls appeared.

A studio much harder to summarize than it seems

The following years reveal a FromSoftware far more eclectic than its modern image might suggest.

The studio worked across different consoles, developed RPGs, mech games and action titles, and collaborated with several publishers. It moved onto Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox, PSP, Nintendo DS and later Xbox 360. It also worked with franchises such as Tenchu and took part in various collaborative productions.

FromSoftware searches.

Experiments.

Builds.

Not everything becomes an institution.

And that is precisely what makes what comes next so interesting.

2009: Demon’s Souls brings the pieces together

In 2009, FromSoftware developed Demon’s Souls for PlayStation 3 in collaboration with Sony.

The game did not appear out of nowhere.

It carried ideas already visible across several of the studio’s earlier productions: a fascination with labyrinthine spaces, dark worlds, strange creatures, barely explained systems and progression where observation matters almost as much as reflexes.

But something aligned particularly well.

Under the direction of Hidetaka Miyazaki, Demon’s Souls turned failure into a central part of the experience.

Dying was no longer simply a punishment.

Death became information.

You discover a trap.

Understand a movement.

Memorize a route.

Come back.

And sometimes, a fairly rare miracle in this kind of place, you survive.

Miyazaki would later explain that the goal was not to reserve these games for the most skilled players, but to make learning through failure and the resulting sense of accomplishment central to the experience.

Dark Souls: a philosophy becomes a reference point

In 2011, Dark Souls carried several principles from Demon’s Souls into a new universe.

It was not a direct sequel.

It was closer to the consolidation of a way of designing games.

Difficulty remained important, but Miyazaki was already emphasizing an essential distinction: the goal was not simply to make the game harder, but to give the player enough freedom to understand, devise a strategy and ultimately overcome that difficulty.

The world itself became part of that learning process.

A staircase leads back to somewhere familiar.

A locked door suddenly becomes a shortcut.

An enemy glimpsed several hours earlier finally makes sense.

Space stops being scenery organized around the player.

It becomes something the player must learn to read.

Dark Souls eventually grew far beyond the boundaries of a single franchise. The term souls-like gradually became a way of describing an entire family of games influenced by its approach to progression, combat, death and exploration.

FromSoftware had not merely found a formula.

The studio had helped create a new vocabulary for talking about game design.

Bloodborne and Sekiro: changing without losing the accent

The temptation could have been simple: make Dark Souls again and again.

Instead, FromSoftware chose to shift its own rules.

With Bloodborne in 2015, the studio accelerated combat and encouraged a more aggressive approach inside a far more visceral Gothic world.

With Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in 2019, it sharply reduced the emphasis on character builds in favor of a combat system built around rhythm, posture and sword duels. Vertical movement and the grappling hook also changed the way levels could be explored.

The structure changes.

The mechanics change.

But certain instincts remain recognizable.

Observe.

Understand.

Try.

Fail.

Try again differently.

Elden Ring: opening the doors

Then came Elden Ring in 2022.

FromSoftware did not abandon the principles developed through the Souls games.

It gave them space.

A lot of space.

The open world allowed players to bypass a difficult encounter, return later, explore somewhere else, discover new equipment or simply follow another instinct. Miyazaki explained that one of the project’s major challenges was precisely to preserve the studio’s style of play while greatly expanding freedom of exploration and progression.

It was an important evolution.

Difficulty remained.

But the world stopped saying quite so often:

“Go this way.”

And began saying:

“Find your own path.”

The result brought FromSoftware to an audience on an entirely new scale and turned Elden Ring into one of the greatest commercial successes in the studio’s history. The game surpassed 20 million units distributed by 2023, while its Shadow of the Erdtree expansion passed five million units only days after its 2024 release.

Growing without standing still

That growth did not erase Armored Core.

In 2023, FromSoftware returned to its long-running mech series with Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, more than twenty-five years after the franchise began.

At the same time, the studio continued exploring other forms.

Elden Ring Nightreign arrived in 2025 with a greater emphasis on cooperative, session-based play, while The Duskbloods, announced for Nintendo Switch 2, continues that movement toward different multiplayer experiences.

FromSoftware has therefore become much larger.

But it remains difficult to contain entirely within the word “Souls.”

And that is probably a good thing.

What sets it apart

Difficulty is not the point

FromSoftware is so closely associated with difficulty that it sometimes obscures everything else.

Yet Miyazaki’s statements on the subject have remained remarkably consistent: making a game difficult simply for the pleasure of punishing the player is not the goal.

The core of the system is closer to a loop:

observe → try → fail → understand → progress.

Difficulty gives weight to learning.

A victory earned after repeated failure does not feel the same as one handed over immediately.

The player does not simply become stronger because a number increases.

They often become better because they know something they did not know ten minutes earlier.

Miyazaki has described this philosophy as an attempt to encourage players to overcome adversity, study the game and learn from their mistakes, while avoiding failure that feels arbitrarily unfair.

FromSoftware does not only ask the character to progress. It asks the player to progress with them.

Worlds that refuse to do the work for us

The same trust appears in the storytelling.

The studio’s modern games rarely explain their worlds directly.

A piece of history may be hidden in:

  • an item description;
  • the architecture of a place;
  • a character’s name;
  • a piece of armor;
  • a few lines of dialogue;
  • the position of a corpse;
  • or something the game may never fully confirm.

Miyazaki himself has described this approach as fragmented storytelling, influenced by his childhood and by books he read without always understanding every word. He would mentally reconstruct whatever escaped him. That feeling of having to fill in the missing spaces would become one of the most recognizable signatures of his work.

The result is unusual.

The player does not simply receive a story.

They participate in rebuilding it.

And when several players compare their interpretations, the mystery begins to live outside the game itself.

Designing space as a puzzle

In many games, moving through the world mainly means reaching the next objective.

At FromSoftware, understanding where you are can already feel like a victory.

Shortcuts are rarely just conveniences.

They reveal the structure of the world.

Opening a door after an hour of exploration can suddenly reveal that two areas you thought were far apart were almost touching.

Verticality, loops, hidden passages and viewpoints therefore contribute to storytelling as much as they do to level design.

The studio does not merely fill its worlds with things to discover.

It tries to make the organization of those worlds itself discoverable.

A beauty that loves ruins

FromSoftware also possesses a particularly recognizable aesthetic.

Its worlds are often already broken when the player arrives.

Civilizations have disappeared.

Kingdoms are barely surviving.

Heroes have become monsters, relics or memories.

Yet these worlds are never merely bleak.

Miyazaki has repeatedly spoken about seeking a balance between beauty, strangeness and the grotesque, a tension visible both in the studio’s creatures and its architecture.

At FromSoftware, a ruin is not simply what remains after disaster.

It is often the most beautiful thing to look at.

Good to know

  • FromSoftware was founded on November 1, 1986, but the company initially developed business software and did not enter the video game market until 1994.
  • King’s Field was the studio’s first game, released for the original PlayStation in 1994.
  • Armored Core predates the Souls games by many years. The mech series began in 1997 and remains one of FromSoftware’s historic franchises.
  • Demon’s Souls was released in 2009, before Dark Souls in 2011. The two share several design principles, but Dark Souls is not a direct sequel to Demon’s Souls.
  • Hidetaka Miyazaki is currently Representative Director and President of FromSoftware.
  • FromSoftware joined the Kadokawa group in 2014. Kadokawa initially acquired 80% of the company before the studio became a group subsidiary.
  • Kadokawa remains FromSoftware’s largest shareholder, alongside Sixjoy Hong Kong, a Tencent subsidiary, and Sony Interactive Entertainment. The 2022 transaction set their respective holdings at 69.66%, 16.25% and 14.09%.
  • FromSoftware currently has its headquarters in Tokyo and a studio in Fukuoka, which opened in 2015 to expand its development capabilities.
  • The philosophy presented on its recruitment website remains surprisingly simple: create interesting games, or more precisely, games that contain something of value for the people who play them.