David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah. There's a lot of arcades that when you look at the side of them have a gigantic Sega logo plastered over it. It's clearly a company-focused not just on home consoles, but making games. When you say a company-focused not just on home consoles, from the parent company's perspective, they'd rather not focus on home consoles at all. Now you can start to see another perspective on things here. In 1981, Sega publishes the game Frogger that Konami had made, but Sega published it. They made hundreds of millions of dollars on that thing. In 1983, right before the home video game console crash led by Atari, they do $214 million in revenue, Sega does, as a division within Paramount. Then when the video game crash happens at the end of that year, Paramount, just like Warner Brothers and Atari, want out of the business. They want to divest Sega. One of the original founders from back in the day, a guy named David Rosen, and a Japanese entrepreneur of a company Sega had acquired named Hayao Nakayama, engineer a management buyout of Sega for the grand total price—I don't know if this is in PitchBook—of $38 million. This is the steal of the century. Yes, actually. There's a transaction in 1984. It looks like the investor name is CSK Holdings.…

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