When I went to Japan in December, I spent some quality time in a Namco arcade. Japan still has a number of arcades, and many feature one of the games that started it all: Pac-Man. And Bandai Namco announced sadly that one of the people who helped build the industry, Namco founder Masaya Nakamura, has died.
Masaya Nakamura, founder of Namco.
Nakamura was 91, and he was one of the pioneers of Japan’s arcade industry. He founded his first company in 1955. He acquired Atari’s struggling Japan subsidiary, and then he renamed the company as the Nakamura Amusement Machine Manufacturing Co., or Namco, in 1977.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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