Data East

» see dataeast.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The first time this name meant anything to me it was a copyright line at the bottom of a title screen, read years after the company that owned it had gone. That is how most people outside Japan and America met Data East. The cabinets that reached Turkey were mostly bootlegs with no maker's name on the outside, and by the time i had a machine of my own and a phone line, in 1998, the arcade as an institution was already finished here.

Tetsuo Fukuda founded Data East in Tokyo on 20 April 1976 as an electronics engineering firm, which is what most Japanese arcade companies were first. Four years later it shipped the DECO Cassette System, and this is the part of its record that deserves better than it got. Until 1980 an arcade cabinet was one game welded into one box. DECO put the game on a standard audio cassette with a security module, so an operator could buy the cabinet once and change what was in it. The machine copied the tape into memory at power-on and this took about five minutes.

The idea was right and the execution was not. Tapes demagnetize, key modules fail, and an operator who has to wait five minutes after every power cut does not want your machine. Data East discontinued it in 1985. Every arcade board since has been swappable, which is the sort of vindication that arrives after it can do you any good.

The games are what people kept. BurgerTime in 1982 put a chef on a set of ladders being chased by a hot dog. Karate Champ in 1984 was the first one on one fighting game with two players facing each other, four years before Street Fighter and seven before its sequel, and the entire genre traces back through it. Bad Dudes in 1988 opened by asking whether you were a bad enough dude to rescue the President and has outlived its own gameplay as a sentence. Data East also made pinball tables from 1987, on licenses including Star Wars and The Simpsons, until it sold that business to Sega in 1994.

It was never a first tier company. Its games were usually near the thing you actually wanted, made faster and priced lower, which is a viable position in an arcade market with a hundred cabinets in a room and no viable position at all once a console generation costs millions. The court filings started in 1999 over roughly 3.3 billion yen of debt. Bankruptcy was filed in April 2003 and declared by the Tokyo District Court on 25 June, and made public a fortnight later.

~ the dossier ~

~ the arcade years ~

Data East's method was volume. About a hundred and fifty titles across twenty seven years, most of them competent, a few of them memorable, almost none of them the best in their category. That works when a game costs a small team a few months and an operator buys on price, and it stops working the moment the buyer is a teenager choosing one cartridge for their birthday.

The company also had a habit of ending up in court on both sides of the same question. Data East sued Epyx in the late eighties over a home computer karate game and lost on appeal, with the Ninth Circuit deciding that two karate games resembling each other was mostly karate's fault. Six years later Capcom sued Data East over Fighter's History for resembling Street Fighter II, and Data East won using roughly the argument that had been used against it. The two rulings together are why fighting games are allowed to exist as a genre rather than as one company's property.

~ the day it died ~

There was no dramatic collapse to report. Data East had already stopped making video games after the 1999 reorganization and had spent its last years as a company that mainly owned things. The 2003 bankruptcy was the paperwork catching up with a business that had ended somewhere around the point where a game stopped being something four people could finish in a summer.

The declaration on 25 June 2003 was not publicized until 7 July, so for two weeks the company was legally dead and nobody outside the process knew. That gap is oddly typical of how Japanese arcade companies of that generation went: no announcement, no farewell, just a name that stops appearing on new hardware and a court record filed later.

~ the long tail ~

G-Mode bought the majority of the catalog and the trademark in February 2004, which is why BurgerTime keeps reappearing on whatever the current platform is. The rest scattered. Paon took Karnov and Windjammers, Kadokawa took Metal Max, and Arc System Works took the detective series. Windjammers in particular got a second life on the Neo Geo revival circuit that the original company never saw a yen of.

What survives best is the pinball. The tables Data East built between 1987 and 1994 went to Sega and then to Stern, and machines from that run are still in operation in basements and bars, being repaired by people who mostly do not know or care whose name is on the backbox. For a company whose whole business was making the second best version of something quickly and cheaply, that is a decent afterlife.

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