Sega's American co-founder David Rosen dies at 95 years of age
David Rosen, one of the original founders of Sega Games in post-war Japan, has died at the age of 95 years old. Spokesman Brad Callaway told the arcade industry's RePlay magazine that Rosen died December 25, 2025, at his home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family.
Rosen was a former US airman stationed in post-war Japan and the Far East, and after his service ended in 1952 stayed in Japan, first founding the company Rosen Enterprises, Inc., which sold Japanese art in the US market and also had a successful business in photo booths called Photorama. In 1957, the company's focus changed to importing coin-operated amusement machines to Japan, which proved lucrative, and establishing its own venues.
"Right off the bat, the machines were tremendously successful," Rosen told Next Generation Magazine in 1996. "At this point, I was opening up arcades with these shooting and hunting games throughout Japan, and we were fortunate… I don’t know [how many we had], but by the time I left, there wasn’t a city in Japan that didn’t have one of our arcades."
In 1965, Rosen Enterprises merged with Nihon Goraku Bussan, which used Sega as a brand name for coin-op machines: the name comes from a contraction of SErvice GAmes Japan. "We decided to merge, and in trying to establish the name of the company, we decided Sega was the best known name, and we took Enterprises from Rosen Enterprises," recalled Rosen. "So our new company became known as Sega Enterprises Ltd, and I became CEO/President after the merger."
Within a year, Sega had produced its first original game, Periscope, under Rosen's direction, a machine that would establish the company's successful export business. This was a game, but not a videogame: you aimed a submarine's periscope and then fired 'torpedos', a line of coloured lights, to sink cardboard ships. Periscope was a massive hit and, while it may seem basic now, was pioneering in how it used technology. "We were doing lots of things that hadn't been done before," Rosen would later tell Wired, "like adding sound and special effects."
Rosen became the face of Sega in the 60s and 70s as it grew to become one of Japan's biggest manufacturers and exporters in the arcade market, where the company built its reputation before entering the home videogame market: the company's first console, the SG-1000, would release in 1983.
There's much in the way of further corporate shenanigans to Sega's history over these decades, but we pick up again in 1984 when Rosen and Hayao Nakayama put together a group to purchase Sega's Japanese assets back from the Gulf+Western conglomerate. Nakayama ran Sega Japan, while Rosen established Sega of America in LA and became chairman, overseeing, among other things, the hugely successful US launch of the Genesis / Mega Drive. He would also remain a director of Sega Japan until his resignation in 1996.
"Sega was involved in videogames very shortly after they were invented," said Rosen in 1996. "Certainly, we were importing games like Pong from day one. We started producing our own videogames shortly thereafter.
"Sega has tremendous engineering and technology capability. It's an interesting situation that really comes out of our coin op business. Basically, due to the coin op business, we have this ability to translate and transpose the engineering know-how into consumer product, consumer-oriented product. Sometimes we become over-sophisticated and think anybody can understand the operating system and thereby program for it. But that rectifies itself in time."