Originally headed by Masahiro Akishino, Wolf Team became independent from
Telenet in 1987, was reintegrated in 1990 and got merged with another Telenet subsidiary called
Lasersoft, then was completely absorbed in an internal restructuring at Telenet in 1993 at which point most of the staff left together with Akishino. The remaining staff were the then-very-young programmer
Yoshiharu Gotanda, designer
Masaki Norimoto, director
Joe Asanuma, graphic artist Yoshiaki Inagaki, sound composer
Motoi Sakuraba, and sound effect designer
Ryota Furuya. Wolf Team went on to create games such as
Sol-Feace and
Hiouden: Mamono-tachi tono Chikai, which faced weak sales. They were also notable for porting
laserdisc video games to the
Sega Mega-CD, including some Japan-only arcades like
Time Gal and
Ninja Hayate (released as
Revenge of the Ninja for the Sega Mega-CD outside Japan). For
Tale Phantasia, a game concept by Gotanda, they looked for an outside publisher with a better reputation. After approaching
Enix, Telenet struck a contract with
Namco. Namco insisted on many changes to the game, including changing the title to
Tales of Phantasia. The conflict over these changes pushed the game's release from 1994 into late 1995. Most of the initial staff left during this dispute and founded
tri-Ace in early 1995. To continue the lucrative arrangement with Namco to develop the
Tales series, Telenet re-staffed Wolf Team and retained some other staff, such as
Motoi Sakuraba on a freelance basis. Wolf Team dedicated itself to the series, developing or co-developing nearly every game. In 2003, Namco assumed majority ownership of the company and renamed it Namco Tales Studio. At the time of its renaming Namco owned 60% of this venture, Telenet Japan/
Kazuyuki Fukushima retained 34%, and Tales series director
Eiji Kikuchi received 6%. (Kikuchi, who was the head of Telenet's game development department for 10 years, left Telenet to head the new team full-time.) Effective on April 1, 2006, the then-newly merged
Bandai Namco Holdings bought the remaining shares from Telenet Japan, cutting the last link to the developers' former employer and increasing its stockholding majority to 94%. In October 2007, Telenet filed for bankruptcy and closed, putting an end to the Wolf Team name. Namco later acquired the remaining shares. Namco Tales Studios remained the primary developer of the so-called "mothership" titles of the
Tales series, with the exception of
Tales of Legendia and
Tales of Innocence.
Legendia was developed by an internal Namco development team called Team Melfes; while
Innocence was developed by an independent developer,
Alfa System, which also developed various spinoff games in the
Tales series. In November 2011, it was announced that the current Tales Studio would be dissolved and would merge with their publisher,
Namco Bandai Games. In February 2012, it was announced that the 80 people of the Tales team would join
Bandai Namco Studios. ==Developed games==