Kōichi Nakamura

Kōichi Nakamura (中村 光一, Nakamura Kōichi^?, born August 15, 1964) is a Japanese video game designer. A programming prodigy, Nakamura gained fame while still in high school; in 1982, he entered Enix's national programming contest and claimed first place with his entry, Door Door. In 1984, he founded the video game company Chunsoft, of which he is currently President.

Nakamura was a member of the math club at Marugame High School in Kagawa Prefecture, Japan. There he ported the video game Galaxy Wars to the BASIC programming language on a Tandy TRS-80, among other projects.

In order to play games such as Galaxian that were ported to the NEC PC-8001 by Geimu Kyoujin from I/O magazine, Nakamura bought a PC-8001 using money he'd saved up by delivering newspapers. It was on that PC-8001 that he developed his program submissions. He submitted a machine code input tool to I/O magazine, which was published in the February 1981 issue as his debut publication, earning him ¥20,000 for his work.

From that experience, spring break of his first year in high school found Nakamura porting the arcade game Space Panic as ALIEN Part II, published in the May 1981 issue. The program was released on cassette tape and brought in royalty income of ¥200,000. Then in the January 1982 issue, Scramble (later renamed to Attacker due to legal issues) was also released on cassette, earning royalties of ¥1 million. Furthermore, the port of River Patrol called River Rescue was published in the Maikon Game Book 4 special edition of I/O, bringing Nakamura's total high school earnings from submissions to I/O to over ¥2 million. Due to his activities with I/O, he became preeminent among young PC enthusiasts.

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