Data East was never one of Japan’s giants. Wireframe called it “something of an underdog” even in its heyday, a company much smaller than Konami, Sega or Capcom. But it had a knack for arcade games that stuck in the memory, often with a streak of oddness: a chef chased by hot dogs in BurgerTime, a fire-breathing Russian strongman in Karnov, and a pair of street fighters rescuing the President from ninjas in Bad Dudes Vs. DragonNinja. Its Karate Champ of 1984 was one of the first one-on-one fighting games, and its American arm went to court to defend it.
Fast facts
- Founded: 20 April 1976, in Tokyo, by Tetsuo Fukuda. Its American subsidiary, Data East USA, was set up in California in 1979.
- Known for: BurgerTime (1982), Karate Champ (1984), Karnov, Bad Dudes Vs. DragonNinja and RoboCop (1988), Midnight Resistance and Sly Spy (1989), Joe & Mac (1991), Windjammers (1994).
- Also: the DECO Cassette System for arcade operators, pinball machines from 1987, and home publishing in America.
- Ended: declared bankrupt by a Tokyo court on 25 June 2003.
Cassettes and burgers
Data East began, according to later accounts, as an electronics firm, and its first big idea was hardware. The DECO Cassette System, launched in 1980, let an arcade operator change the game in a standard cabinet by swapping an audio cassette instead of buying a new machine. Wireframe judged it a sound idea that “failed to gain long-lasting traction”: the tapes were unreliable and easy to pirate. Its early games, the magazine added, were often clones of other companies’ hits.
BurgerTime (1982) was the first that people remembered. The player is a chef, Peter Pepper, who builds giant hamburgers by running along each bun, patty and garnish until it drops a level towards the plates at the bottom, chased all the while by “angry frankfurters, rotten eggs, and killer pickle slices”. A shake of pepper stuns them for a moment. In America it came out under Bally Midway’s name as well as Data East’s: Electronic Games reviewed it in July 1983 as “Bally Midway’s tongue-in-cheek climbing game”, praised the “waddling swagger of the hot dogs”, and advised: “Eat before you play!”
Karate Champ
In February 1985 Bill Kunkel of Electronic Games reviewed a new Data East coin-op that followed its Tag Team Wrestling. Karate Champ had two joysticks, one to move the fighter and one to attack, and the instructions on screen listed “some 24 possible maneuvers”: punches, kicks, leaps, crouches, spinning reverse kicks and a somersault over the opponent’s head. A fighter in white faced one in red. Blows scored half a point or a full point “much the same as in actual karate competition”, and between rounds came bonus challenges in which the player broke a stack of boards, fended off objects thrown at him and, Kunkel wrote, “I kid you not”, faced a charging bull. He found the graphics a little bland but the game “a fascinating exception” to arcade machines that looked better than they played.
Later accounts credit its development to Technos. According to a US court, Data East began selling it in Japan in July 1984 and an updated version from that September, which went on to America and Europe; a Commodore 64 version followed in the United States in October 1985. Wireframe called it Data East’s most significant contribution of the era: “it sparked an entire genre of one-on-one fighting games.”
The Epyx case
British home computer games soon took up the idea. When ZZAP!64 first saw Melbourne House’s The Way of the Exploding Fist in 1985, it was told the game was based on Karate Champ. It was a different British game, though, that Data East took to court.
In 1986 Epyx began selling System 3’s International Karate in America as World Karate Championship, and Data East USA sued it for copyright, trademark and trade dress infringement. Judge William Ingram of the district court in Northern California dismissed the trademark claims but found the games “substantially similar”, and on 10 June 1987 he ordered Epyx to stop selling World Karate Championship and to recall all copies of it and of International Karate. On 30 November 1988 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed him. Everything the two games shared, from the fourteen moves and the referee’s speech balloons to the 30-second rounds, came from the sport of karate or from the limits of the Commodore 64, and could not be protected; the parts Data East did own, the scoreboard and backgrounds, were not similar enough. “When idea and expression coincide,” the court quoted, “there will be protection against nothing other than identical copying.”
The ruling came back to Data East in the 1990s. When Capcom sued it over the likeness of Fighter’s History to Street Fighter II, the case was dismissed; Retro Gamer later put that result down to the precedent Data East had set against Epyx.
Arcades and licences
Data East’s late-1980s arcade games were its best known in Europe, where many reached home computers through other publishers. Karnov starred the bald, fire-breathing Russian; Wireframe reported the story, from a 2002 developer interview, that the hero was drawn to poke fun at one of the company’s bosses, who was not amused. Bad Dudes Vs. DragonNinja opened with the President kidnapped by ninjas. Atomic Runner Chelnov (1988), about a Russian miner caught in a nuclear accident, was criticised by at least one Japanese outlet for making light of the Chernobyl disaster.
RoboCop (1988) was one of Data East’s bigger arcade hits. At the PC Show in 1988 the coin-op stood on Ocean’s stand while Ocean’s programmers converted it. Data East had little to do with the home versions, Wireframe noted, and they became far more popular than the arcade original. Ocean’s American office was later run by Ray Musci, formerly Data East’s chief salesman in America.
Data East also put its name on other companies’ games. It released Irem’s Kung-Fu Master, and later took the licence for FASA’s Shadowrun, which Beam Software developed for the Super NES in 1993. It made pinball machines from 1987, many on big licences such as Guns N’ Roses, The Simpsons and Jurassic Park, before selling the pinball business to Sega in the mid-1990s.
Bankruptcy
The 1990s went badly. Arcades were shrinking, Data East USA was wound up in the second half of the decade, and in 1999 the Japanese company filed for reorganisation. It kept going for a few more years by licensing its old games and, according to later accounts, by selling negative ion generators. In April 2003 it filed for bankruptcy, and a Tokyo district court declared it bankrupt on 25 June 2003.
The games outlived the company. In February 2004 the mobile games company G-Mode bought most of them, and it re-releases them under the Data East name. Windjammers (1994), a Neo Geo game of flying discs, was re-released in the West in 2017, and by 2019 a sequel was on the way, made without Data East.
Sources
- Wireframe issue 5, January 2019, pp. 50–53: Data East developer profile (the “underdog”; its size; the DECO Cassette System; BurgerTime; Karate Champ sparking a genre; Karnov and the boss; Chelnov; RoboCop; the Epyx and Capcom cases; Kung-Fu Master; pinball; Windjammers).
- Video Games (US), April and May 1983: arcade charts (BurgerTime, Data East/Bally).
- Electronic Games, July 1983, p. 88: BurgerTime review.
- Bill Kunkel, “Karate Champ: New Coin-Op Kicks”, Electronic Games, February 1985, pp. 71–72.
- COMPUTE!’s Gazette, November 1985: Karate Champ for the Commodore 64.
- ZZAP!64 issue 3, July 1985: preview of The Way of the Exploding Fist (“based, so I’m told, on the highly popular arcade game Karate Champ”).
- Data East USA, Inc. v. Epyx, Inc., 862 F.2d 204 (9th Cir. 1988), decided 30 November 1988: release dates of Karate Champ; the district court’s findings; the reversal. https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F2/862/862.F2d.204.87-2294.html
- Computer Game Forum (Computer Gaming World), issue 1, Fall 1987, p. 5: the 10 June 1987 order. Computer Gaming World issue 57, March 1989: the reversal.
- Retro Gamer issue 22 (2005): the Epyx case and Capcom’s suit over Fighter’s History. Retro Gamer issue 13 (2005) and Retro Gamer Collection vol. 1 (2007), p. 88: Karate Champ credited to Technos.
- CRASH issue 58, November 1988, p. 11: PC Show report (Data East’s RoboCop on Ocean’s stand).
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean Software (Revival Retro Events, 2013): Ray Musci.
- Edge issue 102, October 2001: “The making of… Shadowrun” (Data East’s Shadowrun licence).
- Sega Retro, “Data East” (web, secondary): founding by Tetsuo Fukuda on 20 April 1976, the US division in 1979, pinball, the 1999 reorganisation, negative ion generators, the 2003 bankruptcy and G-Mode. https://segaretro.org/Data_East
- Wikipedia, “Data East” (web, secondary): founding date, Data East USA, pinball, the bankruptcy dates and G-Mode’s purchase in February 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_East