Outsourcing is fairly common in lots of industries. It makes sense: if you can accomplish more with the help of an outside firm -- especially if it comes at a low cost -- why not use it? Where things get interesting, however, is when outsourcing isn't acknowledged -- or, in other words, kept secret.

We all know that Square Enix makes the Final Fantasy games or that Capcom makes the Resident Evil games, right? Well, not exactly. One game development studio -- one of the biggest in the world, actually -- has secretly been behind a lot of the games you've played. And you've likely never even heard of it.

My fascination with Tose began at the Tokyo Game Show in 1999. I was walking by the Capcom booth with a friend of mine deeply entrenched in the Japanese games industry. We checked out Resident Evil Gun Survivor, the Resident Evil offshoot for PlayStation that made use of the light gun. My friend turned to me and whispered "You know, this game wasn't actually developed by Capcom...it was done by a company called Tose. But you're not supposed to know that." It certainly seemed plausible -- as anyone who's played the Gun Survivor games knows, they weren't quite up to standards set by the main Resident Evil games -- but how was it possible that this developer was working on the game and Capcom was passing it off as its own? And how was it that no one else knew about this?

Since then, I've had a strange curiosity with Tose, and have attempted to find out more about the secretive developer over the years. It's an incredibly fascinating company: Based in Kyoto, Tose has around 1,000 employees (some also in studios in Shanghai and Tokyo), making it the biggest non-publisher game developer in the world. And almost every major publisher has used it at one point or another -- yet few have ever acknowledged this. Looking at Tose's list of clients, almost all of gaming's big names are there: Nintendo, Capcom, Namco, Sony, Square Enix, and even major American publishers like Electronic Arts and THQ. Tose has over 1,000 games to its name -- or rather, to other companies' names. And it's been working in secret like this for over 25 years.

Tose primarily deals with porting games from one platform to another -- a task most publishers are more than happy to hand off to an external developer. Square Enix, for example, gave Tose the task of porting its Final Fantasy games to the PS1 and GBA (including the recent Final Fantasy IV and upcoming Final Fantasy VI), and titles like Valkyrie Profile to the PSP. Sega has allowed Tose to port such arcade titles as Ferrari F355, King of Route 66, and Sega GT to home systems. Nintendo has used Tose for ports like Kid Icarus to the Game Boy and the Game & Watch titles for Game Boy and GBA. But perhaps as retribution, most of these publishers have also allowed Tose develop new games with some of their most prized franchises. Nintendo, for example, had Tose develop such DS titles as Super Princess Peach. Square Enix allowed Tose to develop Dragon Warrior Monsters and Dragon Quest Rocket Slime. Sega had Tose develop Virtua Fighter Quest. Capcom has handed much of its work with the Resident Evil series to Tose -- the developer handled the ports of the Resident Evil games for the GameCube, developed the Resident Evil Survivor light gun games, and even helped with Resident Evil 0. Konami had Tose help on Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babel for the Game Boy Color. Almost every Dragon Ball Z game before Budokai was developed by Tose.

And yet few of those games mention Tose -- on the box, in their credits, or otherwise. If the Tose name does appear in a game's credits, it's typically in the "Special Thanks" section. And if any Tose staff members are included the credits, they're usually pseudonyms and not their real names. Tose proudly displays its list of clients on its website, but won't reveal any of the over 1,000 titles it has worked on for them.

Why all this secrecy? A few years ago I was lucky enough to speak with members of Tose and I jumped at the opportunity to ask them about their company's practices. My questions immediately brought huge grins to their faces -- this dirty little secret is what their company is based on. Since its inception, Tose has worked behind the scenes and with the pledge that it will never act as a publisher; it will follow other publisher's visions. "We have a different vision than most other companies," Tose's Daisuke Satou told 1UP. "What we want is to support publishers in creating good games and help them make lots of money. We want to be a strong hidden crew that helps them achieve their goals." And it seems Tose is pretty open to helping publishers in whatever manner works best for them. "We do all types of different work for publishers, ranging from assisting with certain elements to developing an entire game. Sometimes a publisher will just come to us with an idea or license and hand off all the design and development to us." Tose also comes relatively cheap -- many of its developers are fresh out of school and look at the job as a foot in the door as well as an opportunity to work on some of gaming's biggest franchises.

What's interesting is that Tose doesn't mind publishers taking the credit for its work. In fact, Tose wouldn't have it any other way -- it has absolutely no desire to make its name known to anyone but the heads of companies who contract it. "Maybe for certain individuals on the team there might be some hope for that, but as a company, we don't care," said Satou.

Trying to pry the names of some of its projects out of Tose is an exercise in futility, though; the company has contracts with most publishers to never reveal them. Nonetheless, I and others have collected names of titles we've found to be from Tose over the years, including many of the games mentioned earlier in this article. Unfortunately, hundreds upon hundreds more of its games are still unknown, many likely never to be revealed. How many NES, Super NES, Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast, or PS1 games have we played that Tose had secretly worked on? Never mind that -- how many titles are we playing today that these guys have had a hand in? "There are publishers that simply don't have the resources to develop everything they'd like to release but don't want to necessarily give off that impression -- that's where we come in," said Satou. "Also, some publishers have used us for quite some time, so they know exactly what to expect."

The many games Tose has worked on over the years. But you didn't see this.
Interestingly, as Tose generates more business from North American publishers, it has started to become more visible. Recently, TDK had Tose develop some of its Shrek titles, THQ had Tose work on Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Buena Vista had Tose handle Nightmare Before Christmas. All three companies seemingly had no qualms about revealing Tose as the developer for the games (either that, or didn't realize the long standing tradition in Japan to keep Tose's work a secret). But by working with more of these North American publishers, Tose hopes to develop even more of the titles we play. It's not quite as easy, though. "The major difference in working with North American publishers is the time difference and working around it," said Satou. "Also, there have been cases where content that would normally be accepted in Japan might not be in the U.S. Sometimes we get comments from U.S. publishers that we wouldn't expect."

Of course, Tose isn't the only company that works on games in secret like this. Capcom, for instance, also contracted the development of Resident Evil: Code Veronica to the developer Nextech, who earned the publisher's respect with the Saturn port of Resident Evil. (This was one of the reasons Code Veronica was a slight variation on the Resident Evil formula). But Tose is by far the largest, and most secretive, developer of its kind.

Ultimately, does it matter if Tose has developed our games instead of these publishers? As long as the end result is of good quality, probably not (although it should be said that some Tose games have been criticized for being sloppy or amateurish). But as long as companies continue to pass of Tose's work as their own -- and more seem to do so each year -- expect to unknowingly play plenty more games from the developer.

So the next time you load up a game, whatever it may be, just don't be so sure you know who really made it.