How it started
History
In April 1997, Culture Publishers, a movie and television distributor, formed a video game division, which was led by Yiji Ito. The division made a name for itself the following year when it introduced the Simple 1500 series of budget titles for the PlayStation, which by 2001 had sold seven million units.
In 1999, Culture Publishers announced that it would exit the video game business, with Yiji Ito planning to purchase the division and re-establish it as an independent company. In June, Ito purchased and renamed International Signal Co., Ltd., as D3 Publisher Co., Ltd. International Signal, originally formed in 1992 as CM Japan, was a real estate company, and after the purchase, its real estate operations were terminated. On July 12, Ito officially purchased Culture Publishers' video game division and merged it into D3 Publisher.
In September 2002, D3 Publisher formed a new joint-venture development/publishing subsidiary with Sega called 3D Ages, with D3 Publisher holding a 49% stake in the new joint-venture unit.
In August 2004, D3 announced it had purchased 100% in stocks of Japanese studio Entertainment Software Publishing for ¥120 million, becoming a fully-owned subsidiary.
In April 2005, D3 signed a deal with Buena Vista Games to publish a majority of its video games in Japan.
From Wikipedia’s article on D3 Publisher, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2