VGDensetsu - Toshio KAI / 甲斐敏夫

Toshio KAI / 甲斐敏夫

A former professional jazz musician, Toshio Kai joined Namco in June 1970 as head of its design department, which he suggested should be created in order to centralise the company's designers.
In particular, he influenced the aesthetics of Pac-Man (for which he also composed the music) by suggesting, with designer Tadashi Yamashita, the use of neon tubes to determine the contours of the game zone.
It was also Toshio Kai who came up with the concept for the Namco logo in 1972 - a logo with the same font as the Mazda logo and the Modern Jazz Quartet's Third Stream Music album - while Namco president Masaya Nakamura asked for the color to be the same as that of Bravas perfume. However, the color finally chosen by logo designer Tadashi Yamashita was burgundy. It should be noted that while the company's official name remained Nakamura Seisakusho Co. until 1977, in practice it had already been called Namco since 1971.
Toshio Kai was also probably behind the fact that Namco asked the famous illustrator Shusei Nagaoka to create the main illustration for Bosconian, an arcade game released in 1981.
Toshio Kai influenced the identity of the company that employed him, and not just through his aesthetic or the music he composed. He was responsible for the names of many games (both video games and electro-mechanical games) up until the mid-1980s, including Galaxian (a word made up of Galaxy and Parisian) and Cutie Q (inspired by Suzie Q. The Q stands for Queen Bee).
He is also behind one of the company's slogans, "遊びをクリエイトする / Creating play", which appeared on many Namco game flyers and cartridges from the 80s. Similarly, he was behind the slogan used on recruitment adverts from 1978 to 1982, namely "集まれ前科者", the equivalent of McDonald's "Come as you are", but aimed at jobseekers (the message tells ex-offenders that Namco's doors are open to them, at a time when the video game industry was still very much absent from career plans).
Note: Most of this information comes from historian Zekuu, who has written books about Namco.

Games
Other video game related works
Gallery

Games (in alphabetical order)

Galaga '88 / ギャラガ'88 (Arcade - 1987)
Composer (Source: Namco Sound Museum from X68000)

New Rally-X / ニューラリーX (Arcade - 1981)
Composer (Source: Namco Sound Museum from X68000)

Pac-Man / パックマン (Arcade - 1980)
Composer (Source: Namco Sound Museum from X68000)

Rally X / ラリーX (Arcade - 1980)
Composer (Source: Namco Sound Museum from X68000)

Gallery

Namco logo