Kōichi Nakamura (中村 光一 Nakamura Kōichi, born August 16, 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.
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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 yen 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 yen. 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 yen. 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 yen.[1] Due to his activities with I/O, he became preeminent among young PC enthusiasts.[2]
With his royalty earnings, Nakamura purchased a PC-8801 and decided to become a professional Video game developer, entering the 1st Annual Hobby Program Contest held by Enix during his 3rd year of high school in 1982. Submitting his first original game, Door Door, Nakamura was selected as the runner-up prize winner for programming excellence, and received 500,000 yen in prize money.[3]
In 1983, Nakamura moved to Tokyo and entered the University of Electro-Communications. Porting his prize-winning Door Door to various PC platforms, his annual royalties as a university student exceeded 10 million yen.[4] After that, Nakamura released his 2nd PC game Newtron and founded the 5-person-strong Chunsoft on April 9th, 1984, during spring break of his 2nd year of university. He started to work out of a room in a condominium in Chōfu, Tokyo. The first Chunsoft release was the 1985 PC-6001 version of Door Door mkII. Following that, joining Enix on the Famicom, Chunsoft began development on home video game consoles.[5] While the PC version had sold 80,000 copies, the Famicom version recorded sales of 200,000 copies, leading subsequent development to focus on home consoles. From that, fellow Enix program contest winner Yuji Horii joined Nakamura in collaborating on the Famicom port of Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken.
At the time, Nakamura and Horii were fans of the computer roleplaying games Wizardry and Ultima, and so set out to develop a full-blown Famicom RPG called Dragon Quest.[6][7] Nakamura continued development on the Dragon Quest series through Dragon Quest V before breaking away from Enix products.
Otogirisō marked Chunsoft's debut brand. Following that, successive genre-trailblazing titles Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon, Kamaitachi no Yoru, and Shiren the Wanderer established the company's good reputation. Nakamura himself had to move away from programming in order to run the company.[8]
For a time, the company's products were considered mediocre, but 3-Nen B-Gumi Kinpachi Sensei: Densetsu no Kyoudan ni Tate! was a hit that showed signs of recovery. Recently, Chunsoft has tied up with Sega's home video game business. Nakamura served as producer for the Wii game 428: Fūsa Sareta Shibuya de.
According to an interview on TV Tokyo's World Business Satellite in 2006, Nakamura had purchased an Australian-made cruiser for 120 million yen.