It's hard to think of a more influential figure in the arcade video game industry than David Rosen, who has died at the age of 95.
The co-founder of Sega, who remained the company's director until 1996, played a significant role in the birth and rise of the video game business in Japan, and in the 80s and 90s oversaw the founding of Sega of America and the huge success of the Mega Drive console.
As a U.S. Air Force pilot during the Korean War, Rosen found himself stationed in Japan, and once the conflict ended, he stayed, intrigued by the country and seeing opportunities in its recovering economy.
In 1954 he founded Rosen Enterprises and, noticing that Japanese civilians now needed an ever-increasing number of new identity cards, he began importing photo booths from the US to meet the demand.
From here he expanded into pinball tables and other coin-operated machines, importing them for installation in stores, restaurants and movie theaters.
In 1965, he merged the company with another importer, Nihon Goraku Bussan, whose coin-operated business, Service Games, was shortened to Sega for the new venture.
For the next 15 years, Sega innovated in the video game sector, moving from importing games to designing its own games, and moving from jukebox and pinball machines to electromechanical electronic games, such as the submarine shooting simulator Periscope and, in 1972, Killer Shark, a shark-hunting game that would briefly appear in Jaws.
Sega also began to develop its own video games, allowing the company tight control over every aspect of its business.
One of Rosen's great skills was finding and hiring people who instinctively understood where games were going. In 1979, he spotted the industry's rising star Hayao Nakayama, the director of Esco Trading, another video game company.
“Nakayama was very active as a distributor at the time – he was someone I felt was very smart and quick to adapt to what was happening in the industry, and I loved him – we did this through an acquisition of his company. By assimilation, we had him and the staff join us,” Rosen said in 2013.
Nakayama would go on to be president of Sega Japan during its heyday from 1983 to 1998.
During this time, Sega rose from a competitor alongside other video game manufacturers Namco, Capcom, Taito, and Konami, to an industry leader.
Its sleek and stylish 80s games – Outrun, Space Harrier and AfterBurner – changed the image of video games from hidden places for all those crazy to aspirational places, while 90s titles Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter established the company as a technological powerhouse.
By the late 70s, Rosen was pursuing a new market: home television gaming. He faced a major rival, Nintendo, which dominated with its Color TV-Game console, and later with the Nintendo Entertainment System.
When Rosen returned to the US in the early 1980s, he was determined to take a piece of the global console industry from his Kyoto-based competitor.
"Nintendo was responsible for reviving the home console market after Atari's collapse in 1983," he said.
"We wanted to see if we could create a device that would be competitive. Unfortunately, our first attempt failed to compete. It was made up of off-the-shelf parts, and it wasn't until 1986 that we released the Master System," he added.
This car would struggle in the US, but it was huge in Europe and South America, and Rosen noticed a niche.
While Nintendo was all about family entertainment, the titles that found success on the Master System were games for young people, such as Golden Axe and Shinobi.
When it came time to launch the new Sega Mega Drive console in Japan in 1988, Rosen insisted on changing its name to Genesis for the US launch, emphasizing a fresh start and a more mature perspective.
He also brought in Michael Katz, an experienced executive from Mattel and early console company Coleco. /Telegraph
