Drillimation Studios

Drillimation Studios (株式会社ドリメーションスタジオ), better known as The Drillimation Company, is a family-owned Japanese video game developer and publisher, as well as an animation studio located in Tokyo, Japan. The company specializes in anime and video games, and they also have developed films and computer software. The studio is currently owned by Bandai Namco Holdings, who acquired the studio in 1985. The Walt Disney Company also owns a 15% stake of the company, with them distributing all anime they produce in the United States and the Nuclear Islands. Their franchises have topped many rankings, and currently competes with Bombtoon Studios.

The studio is famous for the ultra-successful The Drillimation Series anime and game series, with it winning numerous awards for their excellence and the characters have become cultural icons in Japan and North America. Drillimation is also famous for their "bullet hell" shoot-'em-ups, mainly for popularizing the maniac shooter genre in the 1990s, with several notable franchises being Touhou Project and Lucky Star. Several games by Drillimation have won the Game of the Year award while some have been nominated. Drillimation was also considered the very first anime studio to produce anime exclusively for the internet, with the creation of Anime Atrocities on VidSpace and YouTube. However, Drillimation had been criticised for controversies they have caused from the late 1980s and onwards over studio acquisition and/or promotion of violence and sexuality to children. Drillimation uses more specific brands to market more mature content in order to separate it from their flagship family-friendly brands.

Lively beginnings (1958 - 1968)
Drillimation Studios was founded as Driller Animation Productions (ドリラーアニメーションプロダクション) in 1958 by a recent graduate of the Tokyo University named Hiroshi Takajima. In 1961, Drillimation created their mascot character, Susumu Hori, who would then become a worldwide phenomenon in the years that pass. He would star in a series of theatrical short films under the collective title of Mr. Driller. Drillimation initially reached out to Toei Animation to distribute their shorts, but was turned down. Drillimation only got its name when one of the first foreign employees of the studio combined the words drill and animation as a portmanteau word.

In 1964, Drillimation Studios opened their doors to the public in Creation Universe Tokyo (called Drill Land at that time). As time flew by, Takajima and his staff presented the anime shorts to Toho, the famous studio for producing the Godzilla film series. Toho found them useful and bought half of Drillimation, making them a second-party studio for Toho and acting as distributor for all of their anime productions. Toho also gave the company an unlimited budget and let them make any anime series they wish. Due to theatrical shorts on the decline in the 1960s, Drillimation mostly shifted their resources to television in the late 1960s.

Toho Era (1969 - 1985)
With the unlimited budget, Drillimation went on to produce their first big hit: the Angry German Kid series. The series was a huge success spanning three years and almost one-third of all children in Japan enjoyed the series. The group would work around 14 hours a day to continue their ongoing success with Space Ninja Team Star Trigon, which began airing in 1972. Star Trigon went on to become the most-viewed Saturday morning program in the United States. In 1974, the studio received a request from Hanna-Barbera to create a Drillimation series exclusively for the United States. Takajima packed his bags and headed to Los Angeles, California to talk with Hanna-Barbera founders William Hanna and Joseph Barbera about bringing The Drillimation Series to the United States. The GoGang series was a series to introduce the American children to the world of anime. In 1979, Ayano Fuchigami died of breast cancer, and Yutaka Yamamoto became director for the next two years.

While working of Star Trigon, Takajima wanted to do a series based on girl fighters as part of the series. Near the end of Star Trigon ' s broadcast, Kagami Yoshimizu joined Drillimation, who already drafted part of the concept. Takajima asked Yoshimizu to put the girls in driller suits. This ended up becoming Lucky Star, based on Yoshimizu's concepts. While the studio was working on Magical Girl Team Lucky Star, Lucasfilm and Hanna-Barbera produced the English dubs of Angry German Kid and Space Ninja Team Star Trigon. In 1981, Lucky Star began airing on TV Asahi, and became an instant hit. Yutaka Yamamoto, the first director for the series, was replaced after the first twenty episodes due to his death by Yasuhiro Takemoto. The English dubs of Star Trigon, Lucky Star, and the 1986 Mr. Driller anime became huge hits in North America, and became the most-viewed programs on Saturday mornings, causing Takajima to win three Emmy Awards for Excellence in Children's Programming. This led to him working on it for the next six years. Lucky Star was considered the most popular magical girl series in Japan before being beaten out by Sailor Moon in 1993.

Gaming Era (1986 - 1997)
In 1982, when Takajima was taking a break in the United States, he purchased a Commodore 64. With it, he began making simple games featuring Susumu and Konata. In 1985, employees from Namco visited Drillimation Studios, looking for purchase offers. In November 1985, Namco paid a total of $200 million to own 100% of Drillimation, making them a first party studio for Namco. Around that time, Takajima also purchased a Commodore Amiga. This caused Toho to lose the rights to Drillimation properties, but Namco let Drillimation continue producing anime. After the accusation, Namco began reworking Drillimation into a video game developer. At that point, Namco gave Drillimation a choice of any Namco character to implement into The Drillimation Series, and they chose Taizo Hori from Dig Dug.

Shortly after the Namco acquisition, the studio was split into two halves. One half remained at the animation department to work on the Mr. Driller anime, while the other half moved to the new-formed game development department. The first game that Drillimation produced was Mr. Driller using the new Driller Engine game engine in 1986. It was a huge success in Japan and the United States with the impressive anime-style cutscenes and catchy music, prompting Walt Disney Television to produce an English dub of the Mr. Driller anime series. It went on to become the most viewed Saturday morning program in North America, with more than 25 million viewers. While Drillimation Studios continued their ongoing success in the Japanese and American arcade markets with Lucky Star and the video game adaptation of the first season of Angry German Kid, the first five games of Amusement Software's Touhou Project also made it into the Driller Engine 1000 series.

Upon creation of Touhou, Drillimation began experimenting with more realistically-designed characters modeled by ZUN himself, most of which have different eye styles, leaner bodies, and altered proportions. Shortly after the release of Touhou 5: Mystic Square in December 1988, Amusement Software went bankrupt and Drillimation Studios purchased the rights to all of their assets. Touhou Project later went on to become the intellectual property of Namco and Drillimation Studios.

When Drillimation upgraded to the Driller Engine 2000 arcade board, they couldn't stop moving on. The first game they developed using the Driller Engine 2000 arcade board was Mr. Driller G. Their next huge success occurred with Super Lucky Star 4. In 1990, Drillimation began working on the fourth game in the Angry German Kid series, as well as the English dub of Magical Girl Team Lucky Star. Unable to continue the Angry German Kid project, the team decided to make a fighting game instead, thus becoming Super Smash Keyboards. Drillimation upped the project by adding features that weren't seen in Street Fighter II, such as brutal finishing moves, digitized voice acting, and lots of sweat.

While they were making their next big hit, Drillimation developed Driller Engine Grand Prix to hold their fans over until the release of Angry Video Game Nerd: The Arcade and Crystal Island in 1994. After receiving the rights to the now-defunct Amusement Software's Touhou Project series in 1989, the next four games in the series would make it into the arcades. Touhou 6: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (1992), Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom (1993), Touhou 8: Imperishable Night (1994), and Touhou 9: The Phantasmagoria of Flower View (1995) all used the same engine as Super Lucky Star 4.

In 1995, Drillimation began working on the third official version of the Driller Engine arcade board: the Driller Engine 3000 board. The game would have the ability to display 3D graphics. Ultimate Super Smash Keyboards 2 was originally intended to be the first game for the new board, but technical problems caused the release of the board to be delayed and Ultimate Super Smash Keyboards 2 was released on the Driller Engine 2000 arcade board instead. After the Nintendo 64 development kits were available to develop the board, Drillimation began development on Mr. Driller Drill Spirits (known as Mr. Driller 64 on the Nintendo 64). The game was finished in the summer of 1996 and the game was released in the winter of 1996 and 1997.

The New Driller Era (1998 - present)
In 1996, Drillimation Studios was brought shocking news as Hiroshi Takajima suffered an issue with a brain tumor. He quickly underwent a successful surgery to remove the tumor. When he reappeared in Nintendo Power interviews later that year, he was noticeably different.

While Drillimation was continuing to crank out new games for the Driller Engine 3000 arcade board such as Lucky Star: Symphony of the Night (known as Lucky Star 64 on the Nintendo 64) and Super Smash Keyboards 3, all of which were released in 1997, Drillimation went on to produce a game originally supposed to be on the Driller Engine 2000 board called To Heart. Originally supposed to be a light-hearted action-adventure game, the game was transformed into a raunchy, vulgar game about a teenage boy with a hangover at the request of Rareware. The critics loved it, but sadly it caused several controversies (see below under Controversies).

In the summer of 1997, Hiroshi Takajima passed away at the age of 61 after having issued with a stroke: the tumor had returned. All attraction at both Creation Universe Tokyo and Anaheim did not operate due to Takajima's death. This ultimately ended the original era with his son Susumu Takajima taking over the company as the present, starting a whole new era. Despite his takeover, many fans started liking him and despite his passion, he can speak excellent English. At that time, Touhou 10: Mountain of Faith was released in August of that year, bringing the Touhou series into 3D with new mechanics and the arrival of Sanae Kochiya.

In 2000, Drillimation released the Driller Engine 4000 board, the fourth version of the Driller Engine series. On of the games that were released using the board that didn't come out in the arcades was Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Originally a run-and-gun shooter called Grief Syndrome for the Driller Engine 3000 board, it later became an action-adventure game on the Driller Engine 4000 board.

In 2003, Susumu Takajima and Kagami Ochiai got married, and later that year, Drillimation released another big hit, Driller Engine Grand Prix 2x2. The game sold more than 20 million copies worldwide for all platforms it was released for. The game's online mode is still being played today.

In 2006, the Drillimation YouTube channel was launched, featuring clips from the anime and the films they have produced.

Games

 * Main Article: List of Drillimation games

During the Driller Engine 1 Era, games were produced using Commodore Amiga computers. Surprisingly, Takajima created a new type of music: the mod tracker. The decision to make this was because Takajima did not want to program songs with complex MML, so he used an eight-channel synthesizer based off of the Nintendo Entertainment System retaining all five channels while adding three FM Synthesis channels based off of the YM3812. As of today, Amiga computers are no longer being used. As Amiga software cannot run properly on Windows, an emulator is required to play Driller Engine 1 games.

Since the Driller Engine 2 Era, games were produced on MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows computers. The updated version of his tracker had twelve channels, with all eight channels coming from the Super Nintendo, with the addition of four FM channels based on any sound chip.

Drillimation's games have topped many rankings across the world, with several of their games receiving critical acclaim. During their growth in the gaming industry, Drillimation has had one game in each franchise that received universal acclaim (Metacritic score of 90% or higher). Some of these include Driller Engine Grand Prix 2x2 (97%), Super Smash Keyboards 8 (96%), To Heart (95%), Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom (94%), and Super Lucky Star 4 (93%).

Music
Games generally use tracker music for soundtracks, with some or all mainly composed by award-winning composers such as Kinuyo Yamashita, Go Shiina, and Nintendo-composers Koji Kondo and Kenta Nagata for some games. The software mainly used for composing music for Drillimation games was mainly ProTracker when Drillimation was using Amiga computers during the Driller Engine 1 Era. The games mainly used the .mod format for storing music. When the Driller Engine 2 Era hit the shores, Drillimation switched to MS-DOS computers and began using Scream Tracker for remastering the Driller Engine 1 songs in .s3m format. All the Driller Engine 2 songs were composed in Impulse Tracker in .it format. Since the Driller Engine 3 Era, Drillimation has been using OpenMPT for composing game soundtracks. Ian Luck, an engineer at Drillimation Studios California, created the .mo3 format for storing music. The first game to use the .mo3 format for soundtracks was the 1993 game Seihou 3: Pennant Purple Dragon on the Super Nintendo, the last game published under the Amusement Software name.

Art and Animation
The art style used for The Drillimation Series was inspired by American cartoons such as Mickey Mouse and Tom and Jerry with an anime theme to it. The founder and the main animators for the anime took art-focused classes in high school, as well as college.

Up until the early 1990s, Drillimation mainly relied on pen and ink for the animation, with Drillimation working 14 hours a day animating the anime. It takes one to three weeks to produce an episode of the anime. During the 1990s, Drillimation began using Alias PowerAnimator on Silicon Graphics machines to animate the anime, as well as designing the character models in Driller Engine games. The first episode of the fourth season of the 1986 Mr. Driller anime, which premiered on February 26, 1989, became the first anime episode to be animated entirely in CGI. In 2000, Drillimation began using Maya to animate the anime, with production rates only taking 3 - 7 days.

Drillimation's animators are salaried employees rather than freelance animators paid per frame or cel produced. Therefore, the animators are able to focus more on the quality and quantity of all the frames and cels they produce.

Themes
The Drillimation Series spans a variety of themes. According to an interview with GameInformer, Susumu Takajima stated, "Drillimation came up with a new theme for each anime". Themes of romance were common in the anime, duos such as Susumu Hori and Konata Izumi, as well as Wataru Hoshi and Miyuki Takara, became a few of Drillimation's signature couples within the anime. Drillimation also explored the genre of gross-out humor when making the Angry Video Game Nerd series.

Notable Staff

 * Hiroshi Takajima, founder and director of several Drillimation games and anime
 * Susumu Takajima, current president of the company, as well as the director of several games by Drillimation
 * Hideaki Hatta, animator for several episodes of Space Ninja Team Star Trigon
 * Mikihiro Iwata, animator for several episodes of Magical Girl Team Lucky Star and Mr. Driller
 * Nobuo Uematsu, former composer for Magical Girl Team Lucky Star

Controversies and criticism
Drillimation Studios had been criticized for numerous controversies they have caused over the years over studio acquisition, promotion of violence and sexuality, and advertising efforts.

Studio acquisition

 * Main Article: List of acquisitions by Drillimation Studios

During their period of growth in the gaming industry, Drillimation was often criticized by people in Japan and others around the globe for buying out smaller development studios, doujin groups, and animation studios, mainly for their intellectual property assets, and then producing drastically changed versions of their games and anime. For example, Seymour Games' Patry series was developed under their ownership after the acquisition, with the result being sub-par than to the rest of the series starting with Patry: Smash It!.

At one point, Drillimation was criticized for trying to acquire Alexonia-based Tenma Games in 2002 but ended up getting only 25% of the stake. The stake was sold back to Tenma Animation in 2010. Drillimation also faced criticism for attempting to buy the rights to the Klonoa franchise to reboot it but failed to do so.

Promotion of violence against women in Killer Minecraft
In 1994, Killer Minecraft: Immaterial and Missing Power was released in the arcades to a financial and critical success. However, with the almost all-female cast with the exception of a few male characters such as Wataru Hoshi, Susumu Hori, James Rolfe, and Fred Fuchs, this has sparked anger among female players and mothers of players as well. Killer Minecraft carried over the blood-splatter effects from Super Smash Keyboards, which was released two years earlier. When the ESRB was founded in 1994, both games received a Teen rating for "Animated Blood" and "Animated Violence". Their arcade counterparts use a different rating system and were rated "Animated Violence - Strong" by the AAMA.

While the game did not spark controversy in Japan but in North America and PAL regions, both games still faced censorship for some of the fatality moves in order to prevent the game from receiving a "Mature" rating from the ESRB. One editor in a 1995 article for the El Kadsre Daily Inquirer stated this:


 * Super Smash Keyboards and Killer Minecraft reached mainstream popularity within a matter of months when they first came out. It was a great transition for The Drillimation Series to enter the fighting genre, but not with its use of blood and guts. I have an 11-year-old son who loves The Drillimation Series and we do own some of the games, these two series are the only games I will not let him play as a result of this. I enacted this after I had went into an arcade and saw him playing this exaggerated game, especially where he was like "attacking women".

To Heart
In 1997 and 2004, Drillimation released two games of the To Heart anthology for the Nintendo 64 and Xbox consoles, with production assisted by Rareware. During those times, there were numerous reports of teens engaging in the activities featured in both games. Nintendo and Microsoft have filed lawsuits against Drillimation for the controversies.

Driller Engine Grand Prix series
In March 2001, Drillimation released the third game in the Driller Engine Grand Prix series in the arcades. Shortly after the arcade release, Drillimation began airing commercials for the game, and one was recalled after one of the songs in the game supposedly had lyrics from the 92nd Surah of the Qu'ran, even though they were sung in English and not in its native Arabic. In Islam, it is forbidden to recite anything from the Qu'ran in public. The commercial was taken down at the request of Nintendo.

In May 2017, a few days after the release of Driller Engine Grand Prix 8 Ultimate, one of the game's most popular DLC characters, Honoka Kousaka from Love Live!, was temporarily removed after she generated controversy from one of her taunting animations. The animation depicted her gripping her bicep and raising her fist, resembling a Bras D'Honneur. This prompted a negative response from South American and European players and even the BBC, as that gesture is considered highly disrespectful in those territories. As a result, she was temporarily removed from online play while an update was made to patch out the highly offensive pose. She was re-added back into all versions of the game on May 17, 2017.

Recruiting of Drillimation Online users as terrorists
In the summer of 2005, Drillimation Online fell into controversy due to it being accused of being an Al-Qaeda recruiting tool. CNN reported that Drillimation Online was used to discuss and plan the London 7/7 bombings which occurred around the same time. CEO Susumu Takajima encouraged users to report users who claimed to be with terrorist groups. As a result, a total of 5,000 Drillimation Online accounts who claimed to be with the group were device-banned.

Touhou Gensou Rondo: Bullet Ballet and vote manipulation on Steam
In 2006, Drillimation released the first game Touhou Gensou Rondo: Bullet Ballet as part of the Play, Doujin! program on Steam and consoles. It was also a launch title for the Nintendo Wii in all regions. The game was poorly received and drew a great deal of mixed to negative reception due to a long tutorial, bland backgrounds, and a "completely dead" online multiplayer mode, causing this to be ranked as one of the worst video games of all time. Critics noted an in-game prompt stated "Five-star ratings will help us give you free updates!", suggesting Drillimation would stop giving them new content if the game did not get enough high ratings. This led to widespread criticism of Drillimation manipulating the game's score on storefronts.

Drillimation Studios CEO Susumu Takajima apologized for this in an article in The Sydney Morning Herald, regarding this to be a shame for the gaming industry. Nonetheless, the game was also featured in an episode of Angry Video Game Nerd.

Later that year, Drillimation released another game from the program named Touhou Gensou Wanderer, which received better reviews, with it being mixed but not perfect. The main criticism was being similar to the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series of games.

YouTube
In 2009, the FBI accused Drillimation Studios of abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in order to remove criticism by forcing YouTube to remove many videos that contain Drillimation content. As a result, Drillimation has persistently blocked/muted videos with Content ID matches or takedown notices, as well as rejecting disputes for Content ID claims, even though many of them were covered by fair use. This caused so much anger and frustration to many YouTubers, one of the videos they took off was a group of high school students at a local high school in Holly Ridge, North Carolina doing a cover of the song Take It for a Sailor Uniform from Magical Girl Team Lucky Star. In the same year, Drillimation was accused of abusing the DMCA to indiscriminately remove videos related to Lucky Star, and most notably a 1-minute home video which a child played Super Lucky Star 4 on a Nintendo Wii. Drillimation eventually retracted many of their claims and responded to many counter-notifications they received after being challenged by their competitor, Bombtoon Studios. The copyright manager for the Japan facility was fired and Drillimation hired a new copyright manager who had a better understanding of fair use. WatchMojo.com ranked this controversy as #4 on the Top 10 Worst Things Drillimation Has Ever Done

In 2012, a small group of Team Crimson hackers hacked the Drillimation Studios YouTube channel in an attempt to ruin the 2012 Double Dash Classic tournament. Specifically, the hackers muted the audio track during the Minecraftian national anthem, Notch Save The Prince.

Mismanagement of Drillimation Studios Florida
Drillimation Studios Florida was established in 2001 in Miami, Florida, mainly to help the main branch at Anaheim, California with the English localizations of Drillimation games and their DLC. However, the Florida studio did not see very many chances in their early years, as the California facility was mainly focusing on Mr. Driller X ' s development, the first Drillimation game that was produced outside of Japan. Mr. Driller X was even planned to have DLC worlds but that was scrapped due to lack of online functionality in the Nintendo GameCube version.

The international version of Touhou Gensou Rondo: Bullet Ballet was horribly rushed by Drillimation Studios Florida, who had to start from scratch in order to accommodate the new Driller Engine Ultimate engine, as the original game was made using Driller Engine 5. As a result of the rush, the game was met with numerous technical issues and received mediocre reviews from critics. This eventually led to the infamous Amazon review manipulation.

Super Smash Keyboards 8
In 2011, Drillimation released Super Smash Keyboards 8 for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, as well as PC and Mac computers. The game became a smash hit and was the fourth best-selling Drillimation game of all time. However, the flesh pits version of Tsukasa triggered controversy over her appearance. The costume is unlockable in Story Mode where Shinkuns strip Tsukasa completely nude and later appears at Cinemassacre offices, where she puts on linen bandages to avoid being detected by the public. Later in the cutscene, Tsukasa lies on the couch while speaking with Mike Matei, who then goes on to draw her like that. However, Matei is caught by Miki, Tsukasa's mother, who shreds up the drawing. Susumu Takajima said this about the cutscene:


 * The ESRB is an organization that game companies have a relationship with. Directors and producers gun the ESRB and talk about the ratings they want for their games. This happened in Super Smash Keyboards 8, and I told the ESRB that the game's budget was so expensive and that we invested more than $20 million into it. We didn't want to lose that money, so we asked them to give us that Teen rating. However, our developers had some Mature-rated material in that game and I had to keep changing stuff. They were able to negotiate and give us that Teen rating to make that money back and of course, it would end up being the #4 most popular Drillimation game of all time behind Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom and beating To Heart, which attracted a similar audience. There were reports of children aged 7 - 10 years of age buying a copy of the game, and a lot of parents bought the game for their kids around that age group. Parents and children who were aged 10 - 12 years were shocked when they found out there was that "ecchi" scene, and I mean nudity. There was a background noise with two teenagers who had oral sex, and there was profanity throughout the entire game. And what I mean by the game's Teen rating, a lot of that stuff wasn't appropriate for children under 13.

Drillimation Studios America
Drillimation operates two subsidiaries in the United States: Drillimation Studios California, which was established in 1975 and located in Anaheim, California, and Drillimation Studios Florida, which was established in 2001 and located in Orlando, Florida.

The first American subsidiary of Drillmation Studios was formed in 1975 as Drillimation Studios America to assist in the production of the GoGang anime. In 1986, they began localizing and releasing Drillmation games in North America for NES, as well as their respective arcade versions. They also asked Box Office, Inc. to port these budget PC titles into the NES, all using Driller Engine 1, these included The $100,000 Pyramid and High Rollers. However European game developer Virgin Mastertronic was later asked by the company to bring Virgin's PC games to the NES which included Shōgun before many of the staff left to form Virgin Games' North American arm. In 1990, the company became Namco Hometek, Inc. and published more titles for other consoles. Any Drillimation games released during the Driller Engine 2 Era and beyond were published under the Namco/Drillimation branding.

In 2001, when Drillimation Studios Florida was founded, Drillimation Studios America was renamed to Drillimation Studios California.

Drillimation Studios Europe
A European subsidiary of Drillimation opened in 1987 as Bladesteel Games in London, England. They do the PAL localizations of all Drillimation games in Europe and Oceania. Bladesteel Games was founded in 1986 when they wanted to bring 1986's Mr. Driller to PAL regions. Bladesteel was mostly independent until their acquisition by Drillimation in 2015, before they folded to become Drillimation Studios Europe.

Other things by Drillimation

 * List of Drillimation games
 * List of productions by Drillimation Studios

Studios founded by former Drillimation Employees

 * Shaft, studio founded by former Drillimation animator Hiroshi Wakao
 * Kyoto Animation, studio founded by former Drillimation animator Hideaki Hatta
 * PopCap Games, studio founded by former Drillimation Studios California programmers John Vechey, Brian Fiete, and Jason Kapalka
 * CinéGroupe, studio founded by former Drillimation animators Jacques Pettigrew and Michel Lemire (the first two non-Japanese employees of Drillimation)
 * LTS Garðbær Studios, entertainment company co-founded by former Drillimation Studios California programmer Raymond P. Le Gué
 * Jumbo Pictures, animation studio co-founded by former Drillimation Studios California animator and artist Jim Jinkins.
 * Golden Films, studio founded by former Drillimation Studios California animator and director Diane Eskenazi
 * Studio Ghibli, studio co-founded by former Drillimation animator Yasuyoshi Tokuma