You ever heard of Tose? No? Yeah, me neither, but I've played some of their games, and never even knew it. Tose is essentially, the behind the scene developer that is contracted to do a lot of the work, gets no credit for it, and yet they wouldn't have it any other way. So who is this Tose and why have you never heard of them before?

From the article:

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?

Read the full article over at 1up.com