Shinjiro Sugitani the CEO of CyberConnect Ltd

[Erroneous]

The original CEO aka the director and president of CyberConnect Ltd was 役社長 杉谷 伸二郎  Shinjiro Sugitani. This was from February 16th 1996 when the company was founded and up to 2000, one year into .hack//Infection's game development.

Back then CyberConnect Ltd only had one office at:

Quote

福岡県福岡市博多区博多駅東
１丁目１番３３号
はかた近代ビル５階

Quote

Hakata Station East, Hakata Ward, Fukuoka City, Fukuoka Prefecture
1-1-33
Hakata Modern Building 5th floor

Their office moved in the years that followed.

Prior to the founding of CyberConnect Ltd, Shinjiro Sugitani worked for Taito's Kumagaya Research Center as a graphic artist for the arcade game Ray Force in 1994. With just 15 employee's, they created two PlayStation 1 games including Tail Concerto and Silent Bomber. For their third game they wanted to work on a PlayStation 2 game.

However Shinjiro Sugitani saw the gaming future being played on phones and want the company to focus on making games for mobile phones, in 2000 that would mean flip-phones. Smart phones and app stores like iTunes and Google Play didn't exist in 2007, the first iPhone was released in June 2007. After Shinjiro Sugitani's departure, Hiroshi Matsuyama became the new CEO president/director and renamed the company from CyberConnect Ltd to CyberConnect2 as we know it today.

In 2009 Gamasutra published an interview with Hiroshi Matsuyama about the whole ordeal between these two friends, here's what Hiroshi Matsuyama himself had to say:

Quote

And it was in the year 2000 that something... happened. There was a happening. At that time, it was right when the PS2 was looming on the horizon. There was a presence of this oncoming approach of the PS2 platform. So I said, "Let's all band together and work on this new hardware platform. Let's all make games for the PS2."

And it was at that time that mobile games were taking off in Japan -- like i-appli for the Docomo network -- and it was at that time that the CEO, my friend, and I had an argument. I had insisted that we work together for the PS2 hardware, but my friend insisted that everybody go their own separate ways, or separately work toward making video games for the mobile market.

And my response was, "Why are we dividing our strengths when we need to unify our strengths and bring everybody together under an umbrella? Why are we dividing this thing that we have? Why are we splitting up into different groups?" And so we had an argument because of a difference in opinions.

And so, this is not a story that you hear very often, but the CEO left the company. My friend. Normally what you could expect for a company of that size is that if the president just leaves, the company would end up just disbanding -- that would be what the expected result would be, and in some senses that is exactly what had happened.

At that time -- the headcount had been about 20, at that point in time at the company, and there was a discussion between everybody. There were a couple of options. One option was: OK everybody, let's go out and try working for a video game company; each go our own separate ways and we'll all try to find jobs within the game industry. You work for this company, I work for that company; we'll all go our separate ways.

Or, the other option would be: let's start over. Let's start over, but please let me do the job of a president. Let's get rid of this whole democratic method of doing things, where everybody gets a vote. And up until that point, all 10 of the people that had created the company each pitched in an equal amount of start-up money in order to found the company.

I had appealed to all of the other members that were remaining and said, "I will buy out your shares in the company and unify the shares into one share, and I will have total ownership of the company. But at the same time, I will take all the responsibility for what happens to you and to this company. But, I have the confidence to succeed, and I will make sure this company succeeds." And so I presented that to the remaining members of the people that were working for the company.

And so, all the people remained, except for my friend, the former CEO, who left. All of them, the 20 people, stayed on board, and it was decided that they would go forward with my proposed plan.

But we also, in order to move forward with game development, we were a new company -- but we didn't want to act like the previous company never existed, either. And so it's for that reason that we decided to stick a 2 on the end of the company and create the name CyberConnect2.