Sacnoth
Sacnoth, from 2000 Operating as under the name Nautilus, was a Japanese development studio for video games. It was founded on 30 April 1997 by Hiroki Kikuta, who turned away along with other employees at the time of Squaresoft, and was financially supported by SNK.
History
The original goal of the company was the development of the genre RPG, which you no longer zutraute Squaresoft at the time. In addition to smaller publications for SNK's Neo Geo Pocket Color handheld as Dive Alert and drivel! , The first major development was therefore a role playing game for the PlayStation names Koudelka, bandage which elements of survival horror with those of SRPG games. However, the game came with the critics and players to bad, which was also due to the expiring life cycle of the Playstation and the resulting nachlassendem interest of the players, so that Kikuta drew his conclusion from this financial failure, and stepped back.
In the coming year 2000, took over after the bankruptcy of the company SNK Aruze, a manufacturer of Japanese gaming machines like Pachinko, leadership, and named Sacnoth in Nautilus to. As CEO Matsuzo Itakura was used, which had a leading position during the development of Koudelka. His goal was to get back more turn to the classic RPG understanding, and to introduce the necessary but it also in his view, innovation manageable and in smaller increments.
Just one year later, 2001, the result of this new alignment will be presented, as Shadow Hearts was released for the PlayStation 2 as the last game under the developer name Sacnoth. Although designed as a starting point for a new series, it refers to a large extent still Koudelka, but puts much more emphasis on the SRPG part of the game. An important new, and typical for the following games element was the Judgment Ring, a method to maintain the player's attention even in ordinary actions during the game by introducing a controllable random element. In the following two games of this series, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, which in 2004 was also released on the PS2, and Shadow Hearts: From the New World, which was released in 2006 as the last game of the company, this control element was a typical brand recognition, and in many ways employed.
After influential members of the studio had already been dismissed, and should any further games in the series appear more Aruze announced the end of the first quarter of 2007 officially the resolution of the development studio.