About the studio
MAGES. was founded April 6, 2005 as 5pb. Inc. by Chiyomaru Shikura after he left Scitron, restructuring under the MAGES. name in April 2011. Based in Tokyo, the company develops visual novels and games that regularly get adapted into major anime, most notably the Science Adventure series: Steins;Gate, Chaos;Head, and Robotics;Notes. *A game studio whose side hustle, a music label called 5pb. Records, ended up lending its name to the whole company for years.* Ownership has shifted repeatedly: Shikura's own Chiyomaru Studio acquired it in 2019, before selling it to mobile game company Colopl in March 2020 for roughly 1.6 billion yen. Two decades in, MAGES.'s real legacy in anime terms comes almost entirely through Steins;Gate, a single game-turned-anime that's become one of the most acclaimed time-travel stories in the medium.