Telenet Japan ((株)日本テレネット)
Established in 1983, October 27th by entrepreneur Kazuyuki Fukushima who owned and headed the company until its closure in 2007, October 25th.
History
The company started as a small game shop first releasing a driving game called American Truck and endless ports and versions of a golf series called Albatross. Then until mid-1990's it was best known for its Valis and Cosmic Fantasy series as well as its Wolfteam subsidiary. But then they pretty much stopped publishing games other than Parlor games until 2003 and developed the Tales series for publisher Namco meanwhile. Telenet sold its last remaining stake in Tales Studio in 2006, April 1st. Telenet's latest business were golf games as well as, through Telenet Jr, online and mobile phone services related to gambling or using content by Tenmei Kanoh who is a popular photographer of idols. The latest addition was the bb5.jp webshop for promoting and selling "bishoujo" (or rather hentai) games, as well as golf related websites.
Subsidiaries
Telenet Japan created and owned plenty of more or less independent subsidiaries, many of which had members who later left the company for creating games elsewhere. Know subsidiaries were Wolfteam, Laser Soft, Renovation, Reno and Riot in the past which all de facto disappeared when Telenet was restructured in 1993. Current subsidiares wholey or partly owned are Commseed, Telenet Jr and Namco Tales Studio.
Although it cannot be called a subsidiary, Glodia is a company closly related to Telenet, as it was formed by Telenet workers as early as in 1986. The crew who worked on Glodia's first game, Lyrane continued to work with Telenet at the same time.
Former employees of Telenet and its subsidiaries now work at companies like Neverland, NexTech, Skip, Matrix, Media Vision, Camelot Software Planning, tri-Ace and tri-Crescendo.
Websites
http://www.telenet.co.jp/
Albums
Telenet Sound Special Since 1985 followed the MSX release of XZR, released in 1988, three years after Telenet's first game, American Truck.
In August 1988, Telenet contracted King Records for Telenet Game Music Collection Vol. 1. Unfortunately, no Vol. 2 was ever released. Almost exactly one year later, they made Toshiba EMI release a soundtrack for Valis II, and pretty soon after, an arrange album called Telenet Selection. The day after Telenet Selection's release, a single called My Sugar Baby was released. It contained a single piece from both of the earlier Toshiba EMI Telenet albums. Talking about singles, XZRII Single was added as a bonus item to the MSX2 version of XZRII somewhere around 1989.
About 1 1/2 year was to pass before Telenet and Toshiba EMI released their third album, Valis III, which obviously enough contained music from Valis III.
In 1995, Telenet released their last album, a Cosmic Fantasy drama album. They also released the soundtrack to their Cosmic Fantasy OVA in 1992.