Sega

Sega, whose name is short for Service Games, is a Japanese video game publisher, developer and former hardware maker headquartered in Tokyo.

The company’s roots go back to 1940, when it began distributing coin-operated games, jukeboxes and slot machines. It later went on to supply these machines to American military bases in Japan.

As it grew, Sega moved from importing machines to manufacturing them and began releasing its own arcade games. By 1979, during the arcade boom, Sega’s revenue had passed $100 million.

In 1982 Sega’s revenue passed $214 million, and it released its first 3D game. The video game crash that followed cut its revenue to $136 million, and soon afterwards Sega was bought for $38 million by a group of investors led by David Rosen, Robert Deith and Hayao Nakayama.

Sega released its first home console, the SG-1000, in 1983, followed by the Master System, Genesis (Mega Drive), Saturn and Dreamcast. Its consoles had both successes and failures, and it left the hardware market in 2001. During this time Nakayama stepped down and Isao Okawa took over.

By 2002 Sega had made losses for five years in a row. Before his death in 2001, Okawa gave the company around $700 million of his personal fortune.

Planned deals and mergers fell through as the company tried to recover. In 2003 Sammy bought the 22% stake held by CSK, and Sammy’s chairman, Hajime Satomi, became Sega’s CEO. In 2004 Sammy bought a controlling share of Sega for $1.1 billion, and the two companies merged as Sega Sammy Holdings.

Sega has since returned to profit as a software publisher, with franchises such as Sonic the Hedgehog released on every major console.