Square Enix Limited

Domark

In 1983 Dominic Wheatley and Mark Strachan were Junior Account Executives for a small advertising agency in Great Britain. While looking for new business for the agency, they realized that home software was poorly marketed. Dominic came up with the idea to start a company after showing Mark the C64 game The Heroes of Karn which he had bought for his son. The two entrepreneurs had no programming experience and so they approached their business plan from the marketing side. Within a few months they both quit their jobs at the agency, secured 20+ shareholders, and in 1984 Domark Limited, London UK, was born.

Eureka! was their first game, written by Ian Livingstone, one of the company's earliest investors. They hired Hungarian company Andromeda to program it, and established Concept Marketing as a separate company to handle a large promotional campaign for the game, offering a £25,000 prize to the first person to completely solve the game. Through their extensive marketing efforts on this game, Domark was off to a great start.

During the following years, Domark secured licenses for several well-known IPs including Trivia Pursuit, James Bond, and Star Wars, again using outside companies to do the programming for them. The company concentrated on publishing and marketing at first, but, eventually, in-house artists, designers, programmers, and technicians were hired to make Domark a totally self-sufficient company. The company had a Macintosh programming team called "The Domain" and another development team was "The Kremlin". This surge of growth caused moves to new locations in London several times.

1990, Domark Limited became Domark Group Ltd. and was the main corporate entity for the entire Domark conglomerate of companies including Domark Software Ltd. (UK, founded 1990) and Domark Software Inc. (USA, founded late 1992 or early 1993). This company was the owner of all copyrights, licenses, and trademarks acquired and created by Domark collectively. This name is most commonly credited with "Software, Instructions, Artwork and Packaging" on game boxes and in credits. It is believed that production of marketing materials, promotions, artwork and printing was handled by this company, leaving the creation, publishing and distribution of the actual products to the lower divisions.

Eidos

After Domark Group Limited, Simis Ltd., and The Big Red Software Company Ltd. were bought by Eidos Public Limited Company (which became the holding company), all three were merged into Domark to create Eidos Interactive Limited. This was followed by the acquisition of 8-bit publishing powerhouse U.S. Gold, which brought the development studio Core Design with it.

Following the unexpected success of Core's Tomb Raider (1996), Eidos found itself catapulted to the center of massive attention and profits. A string of franchises were born, including Commandos, Hitman, Deus Ex, Legacy of Kain and Thief.

Square Enix

At the end of March 2009, Eidos as a whole was acquired by Square Enix, who now owns it. Since then this company handles the European publishing and distribution. Not to be confused with Square Enix (2009) Limited, the former European publishing arm of Enix / Square Enix which only remains for tax purposes.

(The Domark portion was mainly contributed by Jeanne)