In May 2026, it was announced on the video game news website Time Extension that industry veteran Roy Ozaki had passed away in 2024 at age 73. Ozaki was the president of Mitchell, an arcade game distributor and game developer behind the Pang series, Cannon Dancer, and Puzz Loop.
Much of what we know about Ozaki comes from his very candid interview in the first volume of The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers. Before that, he was interviewed for Insert Credit. At the time of that interview, Mitchell was developing games for the Nintendo DS, and they were apparently in the process of filing a lawsuit against PopCap Games over Zuma and its similarity to Puzz Loop (which did not come to pass, as we find out in the Untold History interview).
As far as I know, Ozaki did no interviews with Japanese media, at least that were published. He was interviewed by the game historian Zekuu. Otherwise, there isn't much about him on Japanese sites.
Ozaki's career in games started at Data East, where he was a voice director on their LaserDisc arcade games and worked in sales. He then joined TAD, a company started by former Data East staff.
After a falling out with TAD over Toki*, he and his business partner Koichi Niida started Mitchell, built on the shipbuilding business Ozaki inherited from his father.
(*Ozaki alleged in his Untold History interview that he paid for the development of Toki [and other games?] and was supposed to receive 80 million yen.)
Mitchell was a longtime coin-op distributor for Capcom and served as an overseas agent for smaller companies like Home Data, Metro, Seta, Video System, and Visco. It started to develop its own games in the early 1990s* and later moved into consumer development.
(*The first three Pang games were developed by Capcom.)
Ozaki is survived by his son Shinichiro. Koichi Niida has taken over management of Mitchell's IP and liquidation of the company.
