Sega co-founder David Rosen dies at 95, leaves behind gaming legacy
David Rosen, co-founder of Sega and a key figure in the global gaming industry, has died at the age of 95. He played a major role in building Sega's arcade dominance and challenging Nintendo in the home console market.
New Delhi: David Rosen, one of the most influential figures in the world of video games and co-founder of Sega, is dead at the age of 95. Rosen died on Christmas Day, which marked the termination of the arcade and console gaming. He was the leader of Sega from the 1960s all the way into the 1990s and involved in the formation of the video game business in Japan.
Rosen helped Sega develop into a world-renowned entertainment giant by changing it into a coin-operated machine importer. His vision contributed to the creation of gaming culture over the decades, especially during the golden years of Sega that lasted in the 1980s and early 1990s when it revolutionised arcade innovation and advanced the game into the home console market.
US Air Force pilot to Japanese entrepreneur
Rosen was initially sent to Japan as a US Air Force pilot back in the Korean War. He decided to remain after the war due to the opportunity presented by the rebuilding economy in Japan and the new business. He founded Rosen Enterprises in 1954, which initially imported photo booths to the US to supply increased demand for ID photos in Japan.
The company later ventured into pinball machines and any other coin-operated entertainment machines. Rosen combined his firm with Nihon Goraku Bussan in 1965. Its coin-op branch, Service Games, was reduced to the name Sega, and the name of the brand that would doom all the arcades around the world was born.
Building Sega’s Arcade dominance
Within 15 years, Sega shifted from importing machines, and it started designing its own games. The company left the jukeboxes and pinball behind and shifted to all-electric arcade hits such as Periscope and Killer Shark. Sega started running its own arcades with tight control of the hardware as well as player experience.
By the 80s, the arcade games released by Sega, like OutRun, Space Harrier and After Burner, reinvented arcade culture. Sega would later become a 3D and arcade leader with games such as Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter.
Among the most significant strengths of Rosen was spotting future leaders. He acquired Hayao Nakayama for Sega in 1979. Nakayama would subsequently become president of Sega Japan and guided the company to its most successful years, from 1983 to 1998.
Sega became a leader in the industry, becoming innovative and technologically advanced under this leadership, surpassing other rival companies such as Namco, Capcom, and Taito.
Rosen took Sega to the market of home consoles in the late 1970s. Nintendo was leading with the NES, but Sega was in search of a competitive advantage. The Sega Master System did not do very well in the US but achieved significant success on the grounds of Europe and South America, especially in the niche of highly action-orientated games targeting teenagers.
The climax of this strategy was the release of the Sega Mega Drive in 1988. In the case of the US market, Rosen changed its name to Genesis as an indication of a new beginning. Rough marketing, blatant advertisements and the notorious slogan of Genesis, ‘Genesis does what Nintendon’t’, saw Sega break into the reign of Nintendo.
Rosen had been working with Sega until his retirement in 1996. Although Sega found it difficult to compete in the console market with PlayStation by Sony, its dominance in the arcade market survived well into the 1990s.
Rosen was also proud of the cultural influence of Sega even decades later. Friends remembered how strangers would always scream the name of Sega when they saw him in Los Angeles. The games, consoles, and memories that defined the generations of players globally are his legacy.