Hudson Soft

Hudson Soft was a Japanese video game developer and publisher, best known for creating the  franchise. They also co-developed the consoles with NEC in the late 1980s. Hudson's most notable work for Nintendo and Mario is the Mario Party series, of which they developed eight console games and two portable games (Mario Party Advance and Mario Party DS). Most of the Mario Party staff at Hudson moved to the Nintendo-owned NDcube when Hudson's former president moved over there.

In January 2011, Konami revealed that it was to fully acquire Hudson, buying out the company and merging it into Konami on April 1; as a result, all Mario Party games starting from Mario Party 9 were developed by NDcube. On March 1, 2012, Hudson Soft officially ceased to exist, having been merged into Konami Digital Entertainment, though quite a few of Hudson's staff members migrated to NDcube.

Hudson's mascot was Hachisuke, a reference to the, a sedan from the 1950's built by the unrelated Hudson Automobile Company. It appears in Super Mario Bros. Special as an item that can be collected to earn 8,000 points.

Hudson Soft also created Family BASIC and the Super Multitap.