Rooftop amusements
Masaya Nakamura graduated from the Yokohama Institute of Technology in 1948 with a degree in shipbuilding, which tells you something about the state of Japanese industry in the immediate postwar years and nothing whatsoever about where he ended up. In 1955 he founded Nakamura Manufacturing, and the entire business consisted of operating children's rides on the roof of a department store in Yokohama.
The company slogan captures the ambition exactly: "From Rocking Horses to Monorails." That is a statement about amusement as an industry — the idea that the impulse driving a child onto a coin-operated horse scales, that it does not stop at small rides, and that a company organised around providing fun could grow indefinitely along that axis. Nakamura was not in the toy business or the machine business. He was in the business of charging people for a good time, and the specific apparatus was negotiable.
Becoming Namco
In 1958 the firm was reorganised as the Nakamura Amusement Machine Manufacturing Company — a name whose initials would eventually contract into the acronym everyone knows. It was formally renamed Namco in 1977, and released its first in-house video game the following year: Gee Bee (1978), designed by Toru Iwatani.
The move into video games came through an acquisition that reads, in hindsight, as one of the great bargains in the industry's history. In 1974 Nakamura bought the struggling Japanese division of Atari, and with it the right to distribute games like Breakout in Japan. He was buying a distribution business from a company that had decided Japan was not working out. What he had actually acquired was a position in the arcade video game market at the moment it was about to become the largest entertainment business on earth.
Pac-Man
Pac-Man (1980) sold over 400,000 arcade units in the United States alone and made Namco a global company. Nakamura's role in it was not design — that was Iwatani's — but the entire apparatus that let Iwatani design it existed because a shipbuilding graduate had spent twenty-five years building a company on the theory that amusement was a serious industry with room to grow.
He came to be described as "the father of Pac-Man," a title that sits oddly on a man who did not draw it or program it, and is nonetheless roughly right in the way that matters. Someone had to decide that a Japanese amusement company should make video games in-house rather than distribute other people's, hire the designers, and back a game about a yellow circle eating dots in an industry then convinced that the money was in shooting aliens. Nakamura received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette, in 2007, and was inducted into the International Video Game Hall of Fame in 2010. He died in 2017 at 91.
The long view
The through-line from 1955 to 1980 is the part worth extracting. Nakamura's business changed medium completely — mechanical rides to electromechanical machines to video games — while the underlying proposition never moved an inch. Put an amusement where people are, charge them a small amount, make the experience good enough that they come back. A rooftop rocking horse and a Pac-Man cabinet are the same business model executed with twenty-five years of intervening technology.
This is why the Atari Japan acquisition looks like foresight rather than luck. Nakamura was not betting on video games as a technology; he was recognising a new kind of amusement machine and moving into it the way he had moved into every previous kind. Companies that understood themselves as being in the electronics business, or the toy business, had a much harder time making that transition, because their self-definition was attached to an apparatus rather than to a purpose. "From Rocking Horses to Monorails" was not marketing copy. It was an accurate description of a company that knew what it was for, and it is the reason Namco was standing in the right place in 1980.