Bandai Digital Entertainment

Bandai Digital Entertainment at a Glance

If you are browsing PlayPile looking for information on Bandai Digital Entertainment, you will find a company with a very short history. Founded in Japan in 1995, this publisher operated for only three years before closing its doors in early 1998. Their entire catalog on our site consists of just twelve games, and they acted solely as a publisher without developing any titles themselves. The data shows their output was concentrated almost entirely in the 1990s, with eleven releases during that decade and none afterward. The company focused heavily on niche technology rather than mainstream consoles. All twelve of their published titles were for the Apple Pippin platform. They also released ten games for Mac computers and seven for PC systems running Microsoft Windows. Their genre portfolio was broad but small in scale, featuring four adventure games and four point-and-click titles. They also published three simulators along with single entries in racing, strategy, card and board game, platformer, and puzzle categories. Quality trends in their catalog are difficult to judge broadly due to the low volume of releases, but the specific games listed show a mix of licensed properties and original content. Titles like Zukkoke Threesome: Drama Murder Case, @Card SD Gundam Gaiden, and Tamagotchi CD-ROM appeared in late 1997. The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime was released in June 1997, and Tunin'Glue came out in December 1996. These were the final releases before the company ceased operations. The reason for their rapid exit is clear in the data. Bandai Digital Entertainment was created to support the Pippin console after Bandai licensed technology from Apple Computer. Despite this backing, the hardware sold poorly with only 30,000 units moving in Japan and 12,000 in the United States. The company announced on February 27, 1998, that it would abandon the platform and shut down just over a month later on March 13. Their staff and facilities were absorbed by other divisions of Bandai, ending their brief attempt to build a digital entertainment business around a failed hardware experiment.