Pioneer LDC パイオニアLDC
Planning, financing and release of the anime, soundtracks and books tie-ins; developer and publisher of the PlayStation game
Pioneer LDC was the LaserDisc and software arm of the electronics maker Pioneer, and by the 1990s an important anime and music producer. Lain was planned in-house by Ueda's section, and Pioneer also published the game. According to 4Gamer, Pioneer's first game was the Super Famicom title Bounty Sword (1995); a colleague's team there led Ueda to Nakahara and the Noel series, made by a team called SR-12W that visual experiments lain says Nakahara headed. Lain's game team was about four people in a rented apartment. Ueda recalls that Pioneer, as an AV maker, cared about video sales, though he concentrated on the broadcast. The US arm, Pioneer Entertainment, released Lain in English from 1999. The company became Geneon after Dentsu bought it in 2003, and later NBCUniversal Entertainment Japan, which in 2019 published guidelines allowing fan derivative works of Lain.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org archived · en.wikipedia.org archived · 4gamer.net · konaka.com archived · animenewsnetwork.com