December 24, 1925, in Tokyo. He graduated from the Yokohama Institute of Technology in 1948 with a degree in shipbuilding, however following World War II he was unable to secure a job with his experience. His father owned a shotgun repair business in a Tokyo department store. In the wake of Japan's economic recovery, Nakamura founded his own company on June 1, 1955, "Nakamura Seisakusho, Ltd.". Beginning with US$3,000, he purchased two mechanical rocking horse rides that had to be installed on the roof of a department store due to stiff competition. Each day, Nakamura would clean and repair the rides if needed, and greeted the mothers of the children when they arrived. His company was renamed to "Nakamura Manufacturing Co., Limited." in 1959. Following this, Nakamura would make a deal with the Mitsukoshi department store chain in the early 1960s to install a ride on the rooftop of one of their stores. This ride, named the "Roadaway Race", was popular with children and led to Mitsukoshi commissioning Nakamura and his company to install similar rides for all of their stores. Nakamura's company would continue to design similar mechanical games for other stores — one such game was Periscope (1965), claimed to be the first game he designed himself. Acquisition of Atari Japan By the early 1970s, Nakamura and his company had shifted away from mechanical amusement rides to coin-operated arcades games. Many of these were racing games that used electro-mechanical projection technology, such as Racer (1970), Formula-X (1975) and F-1 (1976). In 1972, Nakamura visited the Japanese branch of Atari, formed by Nolan Bushnell as a response to the country's vast market and enthusiasm for arcade games. With the business struggling, Atari Japan was closed in 1974 and put up for auction — Nakamura saw this as the perfect opportunity to get into the video game market and purchased it for US$500,000, beating rival Sega's offer of US$50,000. Atari Japan president Hideyuki Nakajima was then promoted as vice president of Nakamura Manufacturing. In 1976, Bushnell sent Nakamura Breakout, which Nakamura saw as a sure-fire hit — to his disappointment, his company was only allowed to distribute the game and was forbidden from exclusive manufacturing rights. Nakamura, in response, requested for as many units possible. Following his company's distribution of Breakout in Japan, Nakamura noticed a surge of counterfeit units across the country. After some investigation, he had found that