Capcom

Capcom is a Japanese video game developer and publisher founded in Osaka in 1979. Originally a manufacturer of electronic game machines, the company moved into console and arcade game development in the early 1980s and never looked back. Capcom is responsible for some of the most influential franchises in gaming history and remains one of the most consistent publishers in the industry, known for quality control and a willingness to reinvent its biggest series when they need it.

Mega Man was always a favorite franchise to rent at Blockbuster. I can still remember the easiest order in the third one to beat all the bosses, starting with Snake Man.

Capcom’s Origin Story

Capcom was founded by Kenzo Tsujimoto in 1979 as a manufacturer of electronic game machines. The name is a contraction of Capsule Computers, a term the company used to describe the dedicated hardware it built for its early arcade games. Capcom entered the home console market in the mid-1980s and quickly established itself as one of the premier third-party publishers on the NES, producing licensed games for Disney properties including DuckTales and Darkwing Duck alongside its own original titles. The Disney licensed games were among the finest on the platform and demonstrated Capcom’s ability to translate IP faithfully while building genuinely good games beneath the license.

Capcom’s arcade output in the 1980s ran alongside its console work and was equally significant. Ghosts ‘n Goblins in 1985 and Commando the same year established the company as a force in arcade action. The Capcom Play System, or CPS, arcade hardware launched in 1988 and became the platform for Street Fighter II in 1991, one of the most important arcade releases in history. The CPS-2 and CPS-3 hardware that followed powered the fighting game renaissance of the mid-1990s, cementing Capcom’s position as the dominant arcade publisher of the era. Haruhiro Tsujimoto, son of founder Kenzo, has served as president and CEO since 2001 and has overseen the company’s transition from its arcade and PS1 era identity into its current form.

Capcom’s Key Franchises

Resident Evil

Resident Evil launched January 22, 1996, in Japan and March 30, 1996, in North America, developed by the team led by Shinji Mikami and published by Capcom for PlayStation. The original game, set in the Spencer Mansion outside Raccoon City, established survival horror as a commercially and critically viable genre, combining locked camera angles, limited inventory management, ink ribbon save systems, and escalating creature threats in a structure that rewarded careful play and punished panic. The franchise sold over 150 million units worldwide across mainline entries and spinoffs, making it Capcom’s most commercially important property across nearly three decades.

Resident Evil 4 in January 2005, directed by Shinji Mikami for GameCube and later PlayStation 2, was the franchise’s most significant evolution, replacing the fixed camera and tank controls with an over-the-shoulder perspective and a different kind of tension built around crowd control and resource management. It is consistently cited as one of the greatest games ever made and influenced the design of third-person action games across the following decade. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard in January 2017 marked a second major reinvention, shifting to a first-person perspective and returning the series to its horror roots after the more action-focused Resident Evil 5 and 6. Resident Evil Village in 2021 and remakes of Resident Evil 2 in 2019, Resident Evil 3 in 2020, and Resident Evil 4 in 2023 have sustained the franchise commercially and critically through the current generation, with the RE4 remake in particular receiving a Metacritic score of 93 and selling over seven million copies.

Street Fighter

Street Fighter launched in arcades in 1987 before Street Fighter II: The World Warrior in 1991 essentially invented the modern fighting game genre. The game’s six-button layout, eight playable characters with distinct move sets, and the competitive dynamic between two human players set the template that every fighting game since has built on. Street Fighter II sold approximately fifteen million copies across its Super NES port alone and drove a wave of fighting game development across the decade that followed. The franchise has sold over fifty million copies across all entries.

The Alpha series, Street Fighter III, and Street Fighter IV each refined the formula for different eras and competitive communities. Street Fighter V in 2016 launched to criticism for lacking content before years of updates built it into a competitive staple. Street Fighter 6, released June 2, 2023, for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC, is the franchise’s most complete launch package, introducing the Drive System as a central resource mechanic governing both offensive and defensive options, Modern Controls that simplified inputs for newcomers without removing depth, and the World Tour single-player mode that taught mechanics through an original story. Street Fighter 6 won multiple awards for its accessibility design and revitalized the competitive community around the series.

Monster Hunter

Monster Hunter launched on PlayStation 2 in Japan in 2004, a cooperative hunting game in which players tracked and killed large fantasy creatures to harvest their parts and craft progressively more powerful equipment. The series built a massive audience in Japan across its PSP entries before struggling to achieve comparable Western success until Monster Hunter: World in January 2018 made the franchise globally accessible by removing the compartmentalized quest structure and placing players in seamless open ecosystems where monsters lived and behaved dynamically. World sold over twenty-one million copies and remains Capcom’s single best-selling game.

Monster Hunter Rise in March 2021, initially a Nintendo Switch exclusive that arrived on PC in January 2022, introduced the Wirebug traversal system and a new Japanese aesthetic to the series. Monster Hunter Wilds released February 28, 2025, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC, building on World’s open ecosystem design with dynamic weather systems that changed hunt conditions in real time and cross-map monster migrations that made the world feel genuinely alive. Wilds sold over ten million copies within three days of launch, making it the fastest-selling game in Capcom’s history and the fastest-selling game in Japan in 2025 by a significant margin. The Monster Hunter franchise has sold over one hundred million copies worldwide.

Mega Man

Mega Man launched December 17, 1987, for NES, designed by Akira Kitamura and developed by Capcom’s internal team. The game followed a robot created by Dr. Light who battled the evil Dr. Wily’s robot masters, with each boss dropping a weapon when defeated that proved effective against a specific subsequent boss in a network of counters the player discovered through experimentation. Eleven mainline Mega Man games released for NES and later platforms through the classic series, with the franchise expanding into distinct subseries including Mega Man X beginning in 1993, Mega Man Zero, Mega Man Battle Network, and Mega Man Legends across handheld and console platforms. The franchise has sold over thirty-eight million copies. Mega Man 11 released October 2, 2018, the first mainline classic series entry in eight years, applying the double gear system on top of the original’s mechanics while updating the visual style.

Devil May Cry

Devil May Cry released August 23, 2001, for PlayStation 2, originally developed by Hideki Kamiya as a Resident Evil 4 prototype before the action direction diverged enough to warrant its own identity. The game followed Dante, a demon hunter who used firearms and a sword in a style-scored combat system that rated performance across battles and rewarded flashy play rather than simply survival. The franchise sold over twenty-six million copies across five mainline entries. Devil May Cry 5, released March 8, 2019, for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, brought back Dante alongside series regular Nero and a new character V, receiving a Metacritic score of 89 and the strongest critical reception in the series since the original.

Ace Attorney

Ace Attorney launched in Japan for Game Boy Advance in 2001 before coming to North America on Nintendo DS in 2005, a visual novel courtroom drama in which players represent defendants in murder cases by finding contradictions in witness testimony. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and its sequels became a defining handheld series, known for their writing, their humor, and the dramatic impact of the signature Objection mechanics. The franchise has sold over ten million copies and generated significant fan communities outside Japan, where the games took longer to localize. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles in 2021 brought two previously Japan-only prequel entries to Western audiences for the first time.

Dragon’s Dogma

Dragon’s Dogma released May 22, 2012, for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, an action RPG with an unusual Pawn system in which players created an AI companion that could be shared with other players’ worlds and learned from its experiences in different games. The game built a dedicated cult audience despite modest initial sales. Dragon’s Dogma 2 released March 22, 2024, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC, expanding the original’s open world and Pawn system into a larger and more ambitious design. Dragon’s Dogma 2 sold over three million copies and brought significant new attention to a franchise that had waited twelve years for a successor.

The RE Engine

Capcom developed the RE Engine internally, first deploying it for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard in January 2017 as a complete departure from the MT Framework engine that had powered the company’s releases since 2006. The RE Engine was designed specifically to support photorealistic visuals through photogrammetry, scanning real-world textures and surfaces into game assets rather than building them purely by hand, and first-person gameplay with the fidelity requirements that perspective demands. The result was Resident Evil 7’s Louisiana plantation, which remains one of the most convincingly realized horror environments in gaming.

The engine’s flexibility became apparent as Capcom deployed it across genres beyond survival horror. Devil May Cry 5 in 2019 used it for character model quality and environmental destruction in an action game context. Monster Hunter Rise on Nintendo Switch demonstrated it could scale down to handheld hardware without losing its visual identity. Street Fighter 6 in 2023 applied it to the specific demands of a fighting game with frame-perfect animation requirements and online play stability. Dragon’s Dogma 2 used it for large-scale open-world environments. Resident Evil Village, the Resident Evil 2, 3, and 4 remakes, and Monster Hunter Wilds all run on evolved versions of the same engine. The RE Engine is now the technical foundation of virtually every major Capcom release and represents one of the most successful internal engine investments any Japanese publisher has made in the current generation.