Scott Tsumura
| Scott Tsumura | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
January 1, 1942 Nagoya, Aichi, Japan |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Education | Osaka University of Commerce（Economics） |
| Occupation | Co-Founder and Executive Producer of Tozai, Inc. (Tozai Games), Co-Founder of Tozai Games Japan, Inc. |
Scott Tsumura (Japanese: スコット津村) is a Japanese-born American video game producer. He has produced and localized a number of iconic video games such as Spelunker, Lode Runner, Moon Patrol, Kung-Fu Master and R-Type Dimensions. He is the co-founder and executive producer at Tozai, inc, based in Bellevue, Washington.
Although Tsumura's Japanese given name is Kenji, he adopted the nickname Scott shortly before moving to America at the suggestion of a friend. The name resonated with Tsumura due to his deep admiration for Scottish historical novelist, playwright and poet, Walter Scott. He became a US citizen in 2005.
After graduating from college, Tsumura started working as a bartender at Kobe Club. Since then, he's had seventeen or eighteen career changes, working in sales, plumbing, civil engineering, apparel, architecture, wholesale, trading, driving and painting. Tsumura moved twelve times and lived in various places all around Japan, including Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo.
Ten years after graduation, Tsumura got a job in the slot machine industry. At the time, a German slot machine called 'Rotamint' was very popular. It had been converted to work with Japanese 100-yen coins and was said to be bringing in more than 1.5 million yen a month.
A year later, the Businesses Affecting Public Morals Regulation Law was revised and it became illegal to use real money with slot machines, and the use of tokens was enforced. Rotamint machines were soon replaced by video games. Tsumura's acquaintance, Kenzo Tsujimoto, realized that this development might be a potential boon for the video game industry and founded a game company called IPM (which later became Irem, before splitting into Apies and Irem Software Engineering). Tsumura joined IPM and oversaw the distribution of video game cabinets before he launched a global sales department.
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