SEGA's main offices, as well as the main offices of its domestic division, Sega of Japan, are located in Tokyo, Japan. SEGA's North American division, Sega of America, is headquartered in San Francisco, California. It had moved from Redwood City, California in 1999.
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2 Consoles 3 Internal Structure 4 Historical legal case 5 External link |
Sega was originally founded in 1940 as Standard Games in Honolulu, Hawaii, by Martin Bromely, Irving Bromberg, and James Humpert to provide coin-operated amusements for American servicemen on military bases. Bromely suggested that the company move to Tokyo in 1951, and "Service Games of Japan" (SeGa) became registered in Japan in May of 1952.
In 1954, another American businessman David Rosen fell in love with Tokyo and established his own company, Rosen Enterprises, Inc., in Japan to export art. When the company imported coin-operated instant photo booths, it stumbled on a surprise hit: The booths were very popular in Japan. Business was booming, and Rosen Enterprises expanded by importing coin-operated electro-mechanical games.
Rosen Enterprises and Service Games merged in 1965 to become Sega Enterprises. Within a year, the new company released a submarine-simulator game called "Periscope" that became a smash worldwide.
In 1969, Gulf & Western Industries purchased Sega, and Rosen was allowed to remain CEO of the Sega division. Sega continued to grow and prosper. In the videogame arcades, Sega was known for creating Frogger and Zaxxon, and soon Sega split into two divisions, Sega of Japan and a North American division called Sega Enterprises Ltd., to handle the workload. In 1982, the two Sega divisions reaped a combined total of $214 million in revenue.
Then came the video game crash of 1983. Hemorrhaging money, Gulf & Western sold the assets of the North American Sega division to Bally Manufacturing Corporation. Sega of Japan was purchased for $38 million by a group of investors led by Rosen and Hayao Nakayama, a Japanese businesman who owned a distribution company that had been acquired by Rosen in 1979. Nakayama became the new CEO of Sega, and Rosen became head of its subsidiary in the United States. In 1984, the multi-billion dollar Japanese conglomerate CSK bought Sega, and renamed it to Sega Enterprises Ltd., based in Japan, and two years later, shares of its stock were being traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. In 1986, Sega released the first Alex Kidd game. He would be their mascot until 1991, when they would replace him with Sonic the Hedgehog.
Sega would become famous for manufacturing a number of consoles over the years:
Internally, the company is actually made up of various research and development teams, originally named AM1, AM2, AM3, etc. They now have more memorable monikers:
Sega lost the Sega v. Accolade case, which involved independently produced software for the Sega Genesis console that copied a small amount of Sega's code. The verdict set a precedent that copyrights do not extend to non-expressive content in software that is required by another system to be present in order for that system to run the software. The case in question stems from the nature of the console video game market. Hardware companies often sell their systems at or below cost, and rely on other revenue streams such as in this case, game licensing. Sega was attempting to "lock out" game companies from making Genesis games unless they paid Sega a fee (ostensibly to maintain a consistent level of quality of games for their system.) Their strategy was to make the hardware reject any catridge that did not include a sega trademark. If an unlicensed company included this trademark in their game (which they had to, if they wanted the game to work) Sega could sue the company for trademark infringment. Though Sega lost this lawsuit, the Sega Dreamcast seemed to incorporate a similar hardware requirement.
Several webcomics have been produced starring the Sega characters, one of the more popular ones being That's My Sonic
History
Consoles
Unfortunately Sega has fallen on hard times recently and is moving out of hardware manufacturing, at least in the home console market; the arcade SEGA Naomi units are still being produced. Fortunately the company has knowledge acquired over several decades and hundreds of talented developers to realize its vision, and has evolved primarily into a platform-agnostic software company that creates games that will work on a variety of game consoles produced by other companies, including the Microsoft XBox, the Nintendo GameCube, and the Sony PlayStation 2.Internal Structure
There is a healthy sense of competition between the various teams which has resulted in some of the most remarkable and innovative gaming events.Historical legal case
External link