Namco

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

~ the obituary ~

Masaya Nakamura put two coin operated rocking horses on the roof of a department store in Yokohama in 1955 and named the company after himself. That is where Pac-Man comes from. Rooftop amusement rides were a real business in postwar Japan, and Nakamura ran his well enough that by the early seventies he was buying other people's. In 1974 he bought the Japanese arm of Atari, which had come to Tokyo, sold almost nothing and wanted out. The company shortened Nakamura Manufacturing to Namco in 1977.

Galaxian arrived in 1979. Pac-Man followed on 22 May 1980, designed by Toru Iwatani, who has said for forty years that he was trying to make something for the people who would not go near a room full of shooting games. It became the best selling coin operated machine ever built and has never been displaced. Xevious in 1983 set the shape of the vertical shooter for a decade. By October 1991 Namco held the top six positions on the Japanese arcade chart in a single month, which is not something that happens to a company twice.

Namco was one of the very few arcade houses that understood what a console was for. Ridge Racer shipped alongside the PlayStation in Japan in December 1994 and Tekken arrived the same year, and both of them worked at home instead of feeling like a souvenir of somewhere else. The arcade money was already thinning by then. The console money covered it for another decade.

Bandai and Namco announced a merger in May 2005, and the offer was accepted on 2 May. A holding company was created on 29 September 2005 in a transaction valued at roughly 175.3 billion yen, with Bandai holding the larger share of it. On 31 March 2006 the game operations of both sides went into a new subsidiary called Namco Bandai Games. That is the end date. Everything after it is a trademark somebody else owns.

Namco's games reached Turkey and the company never did. Pac-Man arrived on cabinets with no maker's name anywhere on the cabinet, and on cartridges that had been copied twice before they got to a shop, and the Turkish word for all of it was atari no matter what the machine actually was. i got online in 1998 at fourteen, and by the time the name meant anything specific to me it was a logo on a disc rather than a company in Yokohama. The distance between those two things is most of what this grave is about.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

Buying Atari Japan in 1974 was the decision everything else rests on. It gave Nakamura a distribution network and a games business at the exact moment coin operated video was about to stop being a novelty. Five years later the company had Galaxian, and a year after that it had the thing that got printed on lunchboxes.

Pac-Man went to North America through Midway, which had the license and changed the name off Puck Man on the sensible grounds that American teenagers would take a marker to the P. Namco kept the arcade market at home and took most of the eighties on hardware it designed itself. The System 21 boards in the early nineties were doing textured 3D in cabinets while home machines were still drawing sprites.

~ what really happened ~

The merger was not a rescue. Namco was profitable and Bandai was profitable, and the combined revenue for 2005 was around 458 billion yen. What the deal actually solved was scale: two Japanese companies that were each too small to argue with Sony or Nintendo alone, at a point when a console game had stopped costing what a company like Namco could comfortably lose.

The legal mechanics are worth stating plainly, because the popular version gets them backwards. The original Namco Limited, the one Nakamura founded, became the holding company. A brand new subsidiary was given the Namco name and the arcade centers to run. The games went somewhere else entirely, into a company that had never existed before 31 March 2006. Nothing that carries the name today has any continuous corporate line back to the rooftop.

~ what the name means now ~

The publishing labels were consolidated in February 2014 and the Namco imprint stopped appearing on boxes. On 1 April 2015 the company renamed itself Bandai Namco Entertainment. On 1 April 2018 the amusement machine business moved to a sister company called Bandai Namco Amusement, which still runs arcades in Japan under a lowercase namco sign. So the word survives on buildings and not on software, which is the exact reverse of how anyone outside Japan encountered it.

Masaya Nakamura died in January 2017 at ninety one, eleven years after the company stopped existing and forty years after he named it. The obituaries all called him the father of Pac-Man, which he was not, in the sense that Iwatani designed it. He was the person who bought a failing Atari subsidiary and put the money from children's rides into it, which is a stranger and better claim than the one he got.

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