ASCII News: Summer Issue 1991

This is the summer 1991 newsletter from ASCII Corporation which in North America consisted of its two subsidiaries: ASCII Entertainment Software and Nexoft Corporation. The main feature in the newsletter is the merger of the two subsidiaries to form ASCII Consumer Products. After that the Nexoft name did disappear but games and hardware continued to use the ASCII Entertainment name on the packaging. There is also a page about Wizardry from the guys at Sir-Tech Software, details on many ASCII products, and even a brief entry listing role-playing games from other publishers.

Gaming Ads: ASCII Entertainment Software

ASCII Corporation was founded in Japan in 1977 and opened the U.S. branch ASCII Entertainment Software in 1991. The publisher didn't release a lot of games in North America but it did publish some versions of well known titles, such as Wizardry, King's Field, and Armored Core. ASCII also released a variety of gaming accessories with the majority of them being gamepads and joysticks for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis, though they also made Game Boy gear and PlayStation controllers. In 1991 it was merged with another ASCII Corporation subsidiary, Nexoft, to form ASCII Consumer Products, though the ASCII Entertainment name continued to appear on game and hardware packaging. As mentioned back in February when I posted Agetec ads, the American branch of ASCII became the independent publisher Agetec in 1998.

If you're wondering what ASCII is short for it is American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It might seem like an odd name for a Japanese video game company but ASCII started as the publisher of a microcomputer magazine.

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