David Rosen

David Rosen was born in 1930 and grew up in the United States, coming of age in a country whose entertainments, from jukeboxes to photo booths, he understood intuitively as businesses. Stationed in Japan as a United States Air Force airman during the Korean War era, he saw opportunity in a nation rebuilding itself and, rather than return home for good, stayed to become an entrepreneur.

In 1954 he founded Rosen Enterprises, starting with a two-minute instant photo-booth business that thrived in a Japan short on cameras and eager for portraits. He soon moved into importing coin-operated amusement machines from America, mechanical games and jukeboxes, distributing them across a fast-growing leisure market. He proved a gifted operator with a foot in two cultures, fluent in American entertainment and Japanese business alike.

His defining move came in 1965, when Rosen Enterprises merged with a Tokyo-based rival, Service Games, whose name, shortened, gave the combined company its identity: Sega. Rosen ran the new firm, and under his leadership Sega shifted from importing machines to manufacturing its own. Its 1966 submarine-warfare game Periscope became an international arcade hit and helped establish Sega as a genuine game maker rather than a mere distributor.

Rosen's signature was cross-Pacific dealmaking and an operator's eye for what would draw a crowd and a coin. He steered Sega through changes of ownership, including a period under American conglomerate control, and remained a central, steadying figure as the company evolved from arcades toward the home consoles, the Master System and the Genesis, that would eventually make it Nintendo's fiercest rival.

He spent his later decades in California, an understated figure compared with the flamboyant founders of Atari, yet the company he named endured as one of gaming's most beloved brands. When he died on Christmas Day in 2025 at the age of ninety-five, Sega honored him as a founding father, the American in Tokyo who turned photo booths and imported jukeboxes into a company whose name generations would grow up chanting.