AlphaDream

AlphaDream Corporation, Ltd.

Native name	株式会社アルファドリーム
Romanized name	Kabushiki gaisha ArufaDorīmu
Company type	Private
Industry	Video games
Predecessor	AlphaStar (video game division)
Founded	January 12, 2000 (2000-01-12), in Tokyo, Japan
Defunct	October 1, 2019 (2019-10-01)
Fate	Bankruptcy
Headquarters	Wako Miyamasuzaka Building, 2-19-8, Shibuya, Tokyo , Japan
Key people	Tetsuo Mizuno (president)
Number of employees	38 (2011)
Website	alphadream.co.jp at the Wayback Machine (archived September 30, 2019)
Footnotes / references 1

AlphaDream Corporation, Ltd.^a was a Japanese video game developer based in Tokyo. It was founded in 2000 by Square alumni Chihiro Fujioka and Tetsuo Mizuno. Closely associated with Nintendo throughout its existence, the company was known for their role-playing games, most notably the Mario & Luigi series for the Game Boy Advance, the Nintendo DS and the Nintendo 3DS. On October 1, 2019, AlphaDream was shut down after filing for bankruptcy.

AlphaDream was a spinoff company from AlphaStar,^b a staffing agency that dealt in construction work also known as Mente Tomo and Ai.^c Chihiro Fujioka joined AlphaStar in 1999 to head up a video game production division.² He and Tetsuo Mizuno spun the company off as AlphaStar Software on January 12, 2000, before renaming it to AlphaDream in July of that year.² Several members of their staff had previously worked at Square, including Mizuno, Square's second president, and Fujioka and Yoshihiko Maekawa, who were game directors at Square.² The name AlphaDream, meaning the 'first dream', is a play on Final Fantasy, Square's most popular series.²

Their first game, Koto Battle, is a Pokémon-style role-playing game, wherein the player battles three of their twenty character cards against AI opponents. It was released in March 2001 for the Game Boy Color. It was later re-released for the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console.

AlphaDream's next game was Tomato Adventure, released in January 2002. The player, as DeMille, a tomato-hater in the Ketchup Kingdom, fights his way from his outcast village to rescue his girlfriend. The in-game weapons are toy-like and the battles against opponents involve minigames. Tomato Adventure was co-developed with Graphic Research and directed by Chihiro Fujioka of Super Mario RPG and Final Fantasy Legend III. It was expected for release on the Game Boy Color as Gimmick Land, but was pushed to the new Game Boy Advance and renamed for better marketing.³ AlphaDream became the developer of the Mario & Luigi series of games shortly after, with the first entry in the series, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, releasing in 2003.

On October 1, 2019, AlphaDream declared bankruptcy, citing sluggish revenues and high development costs, and being unable to keep up with growing debt (which as of March 2018 was over ¥465 million).⁴⁵ The next game in the Mario & Luigi series, Mario & Luigi: Brothership, included some of the "original staff" according to Nintendo.⁶⁷