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Sega Corporation

Sega Corporation – World’s Most Prolific Arcade Game Developers.

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Sega Corporation is a Japanese-Based Multinational Video Game and entertainment firm. It is headquartered in Shinagawa, Tokyo, and was founded in 1960. It has its other subdivisions overseas. One is established in Irvin, California, known as Sega of America. The other is Sega Europe, located in London. It is a subsidiary of Sega Group Corporation (Sega Sammy Holdings) which develops video game consoles. It has a division called Saga Games which develops arcade and home video games. They were different entities that merged in 2020. It has achieved a revenue of 247.7 billion Japanese Yen in 2020. They have about 3,000 employees working in the firm. Key people who contributed a lot to the corporation are Haruki Satomi (Chairman and CEO), Yukio Sugino (President and COO), Shigeru Yamashita (vice-chairman), Ian Curran (President, Sega of America), and Gary Dale (President, Sega Europe).

History

Sega Corporation was founded on 3 June 1960 by American Businessmen Martin Bromley and Richard Stewart as Nihon Goraku after it acquired the fortune of its predecessor, Service Games of Japan. After five years, its name was changed to Sega Enterprises, after the acquisition of a coin-operated game importer, Rosen Enterprises. The firm created its first-ever coin-operated game in 1966 which was called Periscope. But In 1969, it was sold to Gulf and Western Industries. In the early 1980s, it experienced a downturn and initiated the development of video game consoles such as SG-1000 and Master System, but there was great competition with companies like Nintendo Entertainment System in the market.

Sega Corporation
Image source: www.spieltimes.com

Subsidiaries

It has various subsidiaries.

  • Amplitude Studios
  • Atlus
  • Creative Assembly
  • Hardlight
  • Ignited Artists
  • Play Heart
  • Relic Entertainment
  • Sports Interactive
  • Two Point Studios
  • TMS Entertainment

Renowned Products

The firm has developed numerous multi-million-selling game franchises, which include Total War, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Yakuza Sonic. It has developed several long-running series such as Virtua Fighter and Initial D Arcade Stage. It is mainly renowned for its game consoles, creative approach, and innovative thinking.

Acquisition

In 2001, the firm stopped the production of game consoles and decided to become a third-party developer and publisher. In 2004, it was acquired by Sammy Corporation. After that, its profit started increasing and its name was changed to Sega Games Co., Ltd. The different domains like entertainment, arcade, and toy were divided into various companies which merged in 2020 as Saga Corporation.

Achievements

Sega Corporation is known as the world’s most abundant arcade game developer. It has more than 70 franchises, 500 + games, and 20 arcade system boards since 1981 and was recognized by Guinness World Records for the same. The Sega Genesis is one of the best consoles.

Founders – Martin Bromley, Richard Stewart

Martin Jerome Bromberg also known as Martin Jerome Bromley was born on 8 August 1919 and died on 7 September 2008 at the age of 89. He was a great entrepreneur and was one of the primary founders of Service games, a predecessor of Sega before its merger with Rosen Enterprises in 1965. He worked in coin-operated amusements with his father at Standard Games and also participated in World War II with his duty at a shipyard.

Richard Stewart was born on 5 January 1995 in Texas, United States, and died at the age of 74. He served as a key executive member of Sega and was a great American businessman.

CEO – Haruki Satomi

Haruki Satomi is the Chief Executive Officer of Sega Corporation born on 11 January 1979 in Tokyo, Japan. He has been a key executive member of Sega Sammy Holdings, Sega Networks, and Sega of Japan. He is a Japanese Businessman and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Arts.

Ethan Nicholas

Ethan Nicholas : From A Software Engineer to an Overnight Successful Game Developer

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In the programming world, which is already brimming with the tech experts and finest coders, only a few have achieved overnight success. Experience plays a vital role in the journey of a long-term accomplishment, but who knows when one can turn out to be a millionaire while just planning to earn some extra cash. Ethan Nicholas, a senior software engineer currently working at Google, developed a game with the sole purpose of earning some extra cash. But iShoot, the game he developed, turned out to be the biggest achievement of his life and brought him profit he never dreamt of.

Early Life

Nicholas started programming from the tender age of 8 and became a professional coder at the age of 16. He went to North Carolina State University and graduated in 1998. In June 1998, he joined GeoCities as a software engineer, but he shifted to Yahoo! only after a year and worked there as a lead developer. In July 2006, he joined Sun Microsystems and worked as a primary developer on the Java Kernel Project. And, while working for this company the idea of developing a game strike his mind, and he started learning objective C. Nicholas had to learn objective C so that he could start developing the game.

Development of iShoot

Ethan Nicholas
Image Source: wired.com

While he was working as a staff engineer in Sun Microsystems, he spent eight hours every day to develop iShoot. Since he didn’t know objective C and also didn’t have enough cash to afford the documentation he needed to learn it; he mastered it from various internet sources within six weeks followed by writing the code. Programming from an early age of 8, he was able to ace a whole different language very quickly.

Ethan Nicholas, in one of his interviews, mentioned that he was inspired by Steve Demeter, developer of Trism, a game that brought him overnight glory and became a connoisseur in the world of game development. In 19th October 2008, Nicholas launched iShoot, an artillery combat game which was available in Apple’s iPhone app store. The launch of iShoot changed his life dramatically by earning $37,000 in a single day.

He was still working at Sun Microsystems and decided to leave his job to work on the next version of the game. In January 2009, Nicholas left his job and founded the gaming software company, Naughty Bits, under which he launched the second version of the game. By then, he totally made up his mind to devote all his time to iPhone software development.

The Success of iShoot

Though many game and application developers release their apps on the Apple Store, the success of Ethan Nicholas was quite appreciable and unpredictable. Initially, when the app was launched in October the number of users was less than expected and to attract more of them, Nicholas created both paid and free (iShoot Lite) versions of the game. This hiked the selling of the app, and the game became ranked number 1 on the App Store, within a few months of its release.

The game also acquired the top spot on the Top Paid Apps list, witnessing minimum 10,000 downloads per day. The free app was downloaded around 2.4 million times and over 300,000 users bought the paid app. Revenue of $21,000 was confirmed for 10,000 downloads per day, which were partially the driving force for creating the second version of it. By early 2009, Nicholas had already bagged $800,000, which is a more than a decent amount.

He was pretty surprised about the success, the 6-weeks hard work brought to him. So, for the next version, he was ready to blow the minds of the users with better graphics and game strategies exposing more of his programming skills.

Apart From Being a Game Developer

While Nicholas focused on expanding Naughty Bits, he was also involved with other business tycoons to expand his influence on other fields.

In January 2010, he cofounded echoBase and served as the lead server engineer for four years. He developed software that was useful to the medical professionals to track patient’s data. He served as a software engineer at Oracle for eight months.

At present, apart from working at Google, he is developing a swift compiler in Apportable.