Sega Co-Founder and Arcade Founding Father David Rosen Has Died - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 05 January 2026 / 2,964 Views
Sega co-founder and arcade founding father in Japan David Rosen has died at the age of 95, according to RePlay Magazine.
Rosen died on Christmas Day 2025 at his home in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, California. His spokesman said he was surrounded by family members when he died.
He founded Sega (known as Service Games at the time) as an amusement operation. It would later release early arcade games like Periscope and Monaco GP. He helped the company expand into North America in the 1960s.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Sega never get the credit they should. Many people fail to realise that without Sega, the whole industry would be totally different today.
RIP legend
RIP and thank you for SEGA. To be this good takes AGES
RIP David. :(
I never knew SEGA was short for "Service Games". RIP.
They used to have that information on their website in the late 90s. It was also kind of neat to discover that Sega was founded by an American in the 1940s, kind of like how it was neat to learn that Nintendo had been in business since the late 1800s. They were briefly owned by Paramount in the 1980s. They put out a Star Trek arcade game at that time. The Japanese branch split off under Hayao Nakayama's leadership during that time, and that's the Sega that we have now.
