Data East

Data East was founded in 1976 by Tetsuo Fukuda in Tokyo, and it spent nearly three decades as one of the industry's most prolific — and idiosyncratic — arcade and console developers. Known affectionately by fans as "DECO," the company built a reputation for churning out a huge and wildly varied catalog of games that ranged from inspired to bizarre.

Its breakout hit was BurgerTime, a 1982 arcade game in which a chef assembled giant hamburgers by walking across their ingredients while dodging anthropomorphic hot dogs and eggs. Quirky, colorful, and instantly memorable, it became a classic of the era. Data East followed with an eclectic run of titles including the martial-arts brawler Karate Champ, the tongue-in-cheek beat-'em-up Bad Dudes vs. DragonNinja (famous for its "rescue the president" premise), the run-and-gun RoboCop games, and the moody detective adventures of the Kunio-and-noir-flavored catalog.

Data East was also a notable force in pinball, producing a steady stream of tables through the 1980s and early 1990s that gave it a foothold in American arcades. Its game-design sensibility was omnivorous — fighting games, shooters, platformers, sports titles, and licensed adaptations all flowed from the company, sometimes in imitation of trends and sometimes in genuinely inventive directions. This scattershot, high-volume approach produced cult favorites but rarely a blockbuster franchise capable of anchoring the company financially.

That lack of a stable tentpole ultimately proved fatal. As arcades declined and the console business grew more expensive and competitive through the 1990s, Data East struggled to keep pace. Mounting financial troubles caught up with the company, and in 2003 Data East filed for bankruptcy and dissolved.

After its collapse, its intellectual properties were scattered and sold off, with various rights ending up in other companies' hands over the years. Yet Data East retains an outsized place in the affections of retro-gaming fans, precisely because of the eccentric, anything-goes character of its output. BurgerTime and its stranger siblings live on in compilations and fond memory as emblems of the arcade era's freewheeling creativity.