Masaya Nakamura
Amusement park entrepreneur responsible for Pac-man, one of the world’s first computer games
MASAYA NAKAMURA, who has died aged 91, started out working in his father’s gun repair shop in Yokohama, Japan, and went on to found Namco and build a global entertainment empire; its best known product, Pac-man, originally a coin-operated amusement arcade game, morphed into one of the first computer games to sweep the world.
Born in Tokyo on Christmas Eve 1925, Masaya Nakamura studied shipbuilding at Yokohama State University, but could not find a job in the depressed postwar Japanese economy after graduating in 1948. His father, whose gun-repair business had been destroyed by the Second World War, had set up in business again in a department store in Yokohama, where Masaya performed a variety of odd jobs.
Over time the Nakamuras moved from repairing rifles to selling air guns, but when business was threatened by legislation restricting gun ownership, the inventive Masaya decided to modify the guns into children’s pop guns, shifting the focus of the family business to toys.
In the early 1950s he bought two crank-operated mechanical horse rides and installed them in the rooftop garden of the store. In 1955 he established Nakamura Manufacturing (later the Nakamura Amusement Machine Manufacturing Company – Namco) to produce horse rides for amusement parks.
The rides were initially a sideline, but in 1963 Nakamura won a contract to build a rooftop amusement park for Japan’s leading department store chain, Mitsukoshi, in Tokyo. In addition to horse rides, he added a 3D sound and picture viewing machine, a pond out of which children could scoop goldfish, and an elaborate amusement machine called the “Roadway Ride”. Based on the success of this venture, Mitsukoshi decided to add rooftop amusement parks to all its stores, and Nakamura was soon operating 10 parks across Japan.
By the mid 1960s Japanese firms in the coin-operated games industry were leading the world in technological innovation and Namco emerged as one of Japan’s leading operators. But as competitors began to muscle in on the company’s amusement park business, Nakamura responded by securing a licence from the Walt Disney Company to use its characters and opening a new factory in Tokyo.
Initially it produced fairground rides but Nakamura soon turned his attention to more elaborate coinoperated games beginning with “Periscope”, a target shooting game which featured dramatic electronic sound effects and an innovative control system in which up to three players peered through actual periscopes to destroy ships with torpedoes represented by points of light. The game was expensive, but the public loved it and after a slow start it took off.
In 1974 Namco bought Atari (Japan) and moved into the electronic-arcade market. Then in 1980 it released Pac-man, an arcade game created by the Namco engineer Toru Iwatani, which involves players steering a little round yellow munching icon through mazes, on the run from ghosts called Inkey, Blinky, Clyde and Pinkey, while collecting bonus points by gobbling up fruit. Pac-man was originally named Pakku-man or Puck-man, based on the Japanese phrase “paku-paku taberu” – onomatopoeia for munching.
Pac-man became a huge success for Namco, entering the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s most successful coin-operated arcade game and inspiring a range of merchandise and spin-offs. It was later adapted for the Nintendo Family Computer home console, cell phones, Playstation and Xbox formats.
Namco grew into a multinational listed on the Tokyo stock exchange and continued to expand its amusement park business to include some 1,000 indoor theme parks. It merged with the Japanese toy maker Bandai in 2005 and Nakamura remained an active player in the business until his death.
Masaya Nakamura, born December 24 1925, died January 22 2017