Data East

Japan · Founded 1976 · Developer / Publisher

The arcade maker behind BurgerTime, Karate Champ and Bad Dudes, inventor of the first interchangeable arcade board, and for a while the world's second-largest pinball manufacturer.

Tetsuo Fukuda, a Tokai University graduate, founded Data East on 20 April 1976. Its first major technical contribution was the DECO Cassette System, developed in 1979 and released in 1980 — the first interchangeable arcade system, on which operators could change games by swapping a cassette tape and a security dongle rather than replacing the whole board. Data East's arcade catalogue was broad and frequently eccentric. BurgerTime (1982) cast a chef against walking hot dogs; Karate Champ (1984) is credited as the first successful one-on-one fighting game and led to a copyright suit against Epyx's International Karate, which Data East ultimately lost on appeal; Bad Dudes vs. DragonNinja, Heavy Barrel, RoboCop, Caveman Ninja and the disc-throwing sports game Windjammers followed. The company also distributed other makers' games in North America. Its American arm opened a second business in 1987: Data East Pinball, which manufactured pinball machines until 1994, when the factory was sold to Sega. At that point it was the world's second-largest pinball maker, with 25 percent of the market. The video game business did not survive the decline of the Japanese arcade. Data East filed for bankruptcy in April 2003 and was declared bankrupt by a Tokyo court on 25 June 2003; G-Mode acquired most of its game library in February 2004.