Co-founder & CEO · Sega · b. 1930 · 1954–1996
An American airman who stayed in Japan after his service, started an amusement business, and merged it into the company that became Sega.
David Rosen was born in Brooklyn on 22 January 1930 and served in the United States Air Force from 1948 to 1952, stationed largely in Japan during the Korean War. When his service ended he did not go home. In 1954 he founded Rosen Enterprises in Tokyo, initially around photo booths producing the identification photographs that postwar Japanese bureaucracy demanded in quantity — an unglamorous business that worked, and that taught him what a coin-operated machine could earn in a country with dense cities and limited leisure space. In 1957 he obtained a licence to import American coin-operated amusement machines into Japan, and the amusement arcade as Japan would come to know it began to take shape around that decision. The name everyone knows arrived in 1965, when Rosen Enterprises merged with Nihon Goraku Bussan — which traded as Service Games — to form Sega Enterprises, the name a contraction of SErvice GAmes, with Rosen as chief executive. The following year the new company released Periscope, an electro-mechanical submarine shooter with a genuinely striking presentation, which exported successfully to the United States and Europe and is widely credited with helping establish the quarter as the standard price of an American arcade play. Rosen remained central to Sega through decades of ownership changes, including the 1984 management buyout that took the company out of Gulf+Western's hands alongside Hayao Nakayama and Isao Okawa, and he stayed with the business into the mid-1990s. He died on 25 December 2025 at the age of 95, having outlived by some margin the assumption that Sega was ever a Japanese company in origin.