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HAL Laboratory
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Founded:
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February 21, 1980
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Founder:
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N/A
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President:
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N/A
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Parent / owner:
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N/A
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Divisions / subsidiaries:
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Warpstar Inc., HAL America
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HAL Laboratory, Inc. is a development studio partnered and closely affiliated with Nintendo. For many of their projects they in the early to mid-1990's the company went under the name HALKEN, and published many of their early titles through HAL America. The name "HAL" was at first thought to be derived from HAL 9000, the AI villain of the 2001 A Space Odyssey film, as stated by Satoru Iwata himself[1], though he later stated that the name was actually decided upon because "each letter put us one step ahead of IBM"[2]. The HAL logo is a dog incubating a group of eggs; according to president Masayoshi Tanimura, the logo represents the thought put into "completely new ideas that eventually hatch into incredibly fun games."[3]
HAL was founded by a group of friends in 1980 that simply wanted to develop games. The group started off creating titles for the MSX and Commodore VIC-20[4] and later started developing exclusively for Nintendo. Satoru Iwata was president of the company until 2000, when he became CEO of Nintendo and acquired HAL soon after. Masayoshi Tanimura was later promoted to president of HAL.
HAL is most well known as being the developer for the Kirby series, created by ex-employee Masahiro Sakurai. While under HAL Sakurai also began the Super Smash Bros. series, and HAL is also the main developer of the EarthBound / Mother series.
Games published by Nintendo
* - Published by Nintendo for Virtual Console release.
External links
References
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Key employees
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Presidents
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Managers, etc.
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Internal
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Subsidiaries
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- NNSD: Yusuke Beppu
- Monolith Soft: Hirohide Sugiura, Tetsuya Takahashi
- 1-Up Studio: Gen Kadoi
- ND Cube: Hidetoshi Endo
- Retro: Michael Kelbaugh
- NERD: Alexandre Delattre
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