[2] The company was founded on November 22, 1995 in Meguroku, Tokyo under managing director Tetsuo Mizuno.

Lightweight cut its ties with Square in 1998, and in March 1999, Naotaka Ueda was appointed as CEO and director of the company.

In March 2001 Lightweight became a wholly owned subsidiary of Genki, but dissolved this connection on March 31, 2006 when Lightweight was bought by Index Visual & Games, Ltd. Ueda retired in his position in November 2008.

[3] In July 21, 2023, video game developer M2 announced that it purchased the rights of all NEC Avenue and NEC Interchannel games published on TurboGrafx-16 owned by Lightweight, including CD titles.

Despite this, Lightweight only started the process of transferring the rights of those games to M2 on March 31, 2023.