Paul R. Moriarity spent more than four decades in gaming, but much of his career unfolded behind the machines and software that players actually saw. He was not a programmer who became famous for creating a particular game, nor was he a designer whose name appeared prominently in credits. Moriarity was a businessman, executive, importer, licensing figure, and industry representative whose career followed the American video game business from its formative arcade years through the Nintendo era and into new forms of electronic gaming.
His most important years came with Taito America. Moriarity joined the company near its beginning, became one of its senior executives during the rise of Space Invaders, and took over as president when the American arcade industry was moving into one of the most difficult periods in its history. He later became involved in Taito’s home-software business before moving into consulting, amusement gaming, charitable gaming, and other ventures that kept him in the industry long after the golden age of the arcade had passed. Contemporary records and later accounts place him at the center of Taito America’s business operations for nearly fifteen years.
Moriarity’s story is therefore not simply part of the history of Taito. It is the story of a man whose career repeatedly changed with the industry around him, from importing Japanese coin-operated machines to navigating an arcade collapse, selling Nintendo software, and helping develop new gaming systems decades later.
A Massachusetts Beginning
Paul R. Moriarity was born on April 21, 1947, in Newton, Massachusetts, to Charles E. Moriarity Jr. and Myrtle M. Cavanaugh Moriarity. His later career would take him into an international entertainment industry, but his professional background began with business rather than engineering or game design.
Moriarity attended Suffolk University in Boston, receiving a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration in 1970 and an MBA in 1972. That education came at an unusually fortunate moment. The commercial video game business was just beginning to develop in the United States, and Japanese amusement companies were looking increasingly toward international markets. Within a few years, Moriarity would find himself working in a field that barely existed when he entered college.
Later biographical accounts described him as entering the coin-operated amusement industry during the 1970s as an importer for Taito. His obituary would eventually describe him as a founder and president of Taito America, while a contemporary 1987 report stated that he had been associated with the company since its inception in 1973. The exact language differs between the later recollections and the contemporary trade press, but the evidence agrees on the essential point: Moriarity was present during Taito America’s earliest period and remained with the company as it grew from a licensing and importing operation into a major American video game business.
Building a Career at Taito America
Taito America opened its doors in March 1973. Moriarity later described those early years by explaining that the company initially concentrated on licensing games rather than manufacturing them itself. Only in 1979 did Taito America begin manufacturing its own products in the United States.
For Moriarity, those years meant learning the business of moving amusement products between Japan and America. That required far more than finding games that looked promising. The company needed relationships with manufacturers, distributors, operators, service organizations, and developers. It also needed executives who could translate the priorities of a Japanese parent company into the realities of the American coin-operated amusement trade.
Moriarity rose within that structure. By the period when video games were becoming one of the hottest segments of the amusement business, he was serving as Taito America’s vice president of administration. Later colleague Keith Egging remembered Moriarity as constantly occupied with the expanding business as video games boomed.
One game in particular transformed Taito’s position and placed Moriarity close to one of the most important business decisions of the early arcade era.
Moriarity and the Arrival of Space Invaders
Space Invaders became one of the defining games of the late 1970s, but Taito America faced a practical problem when the game was ready for the American market. Its own manufacturing operation was not yet prepared to produce the game on the scale that suddenly appeared possible.
Keith Egging later remembered pressing Taito to test Space Invaders in the United States after recognizing the game’s potential. Earnings from those tests were extraordinary. According to Egging’s later account, Taito president Ed Miller and vice president Paul Moriarity decided that the company should license Space Invaders to Midway Manufacturing rather than wait for Taito America’s own factory to become ready.
That episode illustrates the kind of role Moriarity played throughout his career. He did not design Space Invaders, but he was involved in the business decisions that determined how a Japanese game would reach American players. Speed mattered. Manufacturing capacity mattered. Distribution mattered. A great game sitting inside a company that could not produce enough machines would not take advantage of the moment.
The Midway arrangement helped put Space Invaders throughout American arcades while Taito America continued building its own capabilities. Taito’s American manufacturing operation subsequently expanded, and the company introduced its first made-in-America video game, Qix, in 1981.
Moriarity’s responsibilities grew along with the company. A 1980 Cash Box item already identified him as a Taito America executive, and by the early 1980s he was established as vice president of administration.
His career seemed to be rising with an industry that had nowhere to go but up.
That assumption would not last.
Becoming President of Taito America
Jack Mittel led Taito America during much of its early growth, with Moriarity working closely beside him. When Mittel stepped down in 1983, Moriarity succeeded him as president.
Contemporary coverage shows that the transition was not simply the promotion of an executive who had happened to be next in line. Moriarity had worked closely with Mittel during the preceding years and publicly expressed respect for his departing colleague. By July 1983, Cash Box’s industry directory listed Paul Moriarity as president of Taito America, with Mark Pugh handling finance, Keith Egging involved in product development, Mike Von Kennel in marketing, and Rene Lopez in customer service.
Moriarity had reached the highest position in Taito’s American operation, but the timing could hardly have been more difficult.
The video game business had expanded at a breathtaking pace. Manufacturers had enlarged factories and planned around enormous production volumes. Operators had bought cabinets in large numbers. By 1983, however, saturation was becoming impossible to ignore. Too many games were competing for too many locations, earnings were falling, and manufacturers built around permanent growth suddenly faced a market that could no longer absorb their output.
Moriarity became president just as he had to help determine what Taito America should look like after the boom.
A President During the Arcade Downturn
The challenge placed Moriarity in a very different position from an executive presiding over easy expansion. His presidency became a period of adaptation.
One of the products associated with that period was Ice Cold Beer, an electromechanical game that did not depend on the same video formula flooding arcades. Egging later remembered that Taito received orders for more than 40,000 Ice Cold Beer machines at a time when many companies dependent entirely upon video games were disappearing. Whether viewed as a fortunate product or part of a deliberate attempt to diversify, it gave Moriarity’s Taito America another source of business while the video market weakened.
By February 1984, Moriarity had become the public face of Taito America to the American trade. Cash Box placed him on its cover alongside Elevator Action, Zeke’s Peak, Ice Cold Beer, and Exerion. The selection of products reflected the direction of the company under his leadership. Elevator Action represented Taito’s growing interest in conversion kits, while Ice Cold Beer offered operators something different from another conventional video cabinet.
Moriarity increasingly spoke in practical terms about what the market could sustain. In September 1984, amid rumors concerning Taito America’s future, he acknowledged that the company was consolidating its operations. His reasoning was straightforward. The video game market no longer required the immense manufacturing capacity created during the boom. Factories designed to turn out hundreds of machines each day made little sense when operators were no longer buying at that pace.
Rather than insisting that the old market would return, Moriarity argued for concentrating Taito’s efforts on new approaches to amusement games. It was a revealing statement from a president whose company had benefited enormously from the first great video game expansion. He was willing to admit that the structure created during that expansion had become unsustainable.
Moriarity as a Licensing Executive
Manufacturing was only one part of Moriarity’s work. Licensing became increasingly important to Taito America’s survival and later resurgence.
A particularly well-documented example came through Irem and its football game 10-Yard Fight. Moriarity has sometimes been associated with the title strongly enough that his role can be misunderstood, but the contemporary evidence is clear. He was not an Irem developer. He was president of Taito America when Irem granted Taito America exclusive manufacturing and sales rights for the game across North, South, and Latin America.
Game Machine reported the agreement in February 1984 and specifically identified Taito America with Moriarity as its president. Irem planned to supply printed circuit boards while its foreign partners handled their respective markets. The arrangement shows Moriarity functioning in exactly the kind of international business system that had defined much of his career.
Moriarity also personally promoted the game. When Cash Box covered 10-Yard Fight that April, he described the experience of allowing ordinary football fans to take control on the field, run and pass the ball, score touchdowns, and pursue the game’s version of a championship. The importance of the episode in his biography is not that he created 10-Yard Fight. It is that he was the executive responsible for a company positioned to turn somebody else’s Japanese game into an American arcade product.
That ability became increasingly valuable as Taito America reduced its reliance on manufacturing every game from the ground up.
Protecting Taito’s Games
Moriarity’s presidency also involved protecting the company’s intellectual property at a time when unauthorized copies and disputed rights had become serious concerns for video game companies.
When Taito pursued cases involving unauthorized versions of Space Invaders, Moriarity publicly supported an aggressive approach toward copyright and trademark enforcement. In 1984, he described Taito’s successful legal actions as part of a broader battle against video game piracy.
His involvement later extended beyond Taito itself. In 1985, Moriarity was elected to the board of the American Amusement Machine Association and became the organization’s vice president. The office placed him alongside executives from Data East, Nintendo, Williams, Atari, Bally, and other companies competing within the American amusement market.
That same year he represented the American association in discussions with the Japan Amusement Machinery Manufacturers Association. Game Machine recorded Moriarity attending the Japan-U.S. conference as AAMA vice president. Among the subjects discussed was the flow of unauthorized copied circuit boards into the American market from other parts of Asia and the need for cooperation between the American and Japanese trade organizations.
By this stage of his career, Moriarity was therefore doing more than running Taito America. He had become one of the executives representing the interests of the American amusement industry in international discussions.
Changing Taito America Instead of Abandoning It
The restructuring that began during the arcade downturn changed the company Moriarity managed.
Taito America eventually disposed of its large Elk Grove Village manufacturing operation and moved to Wheeling, Illinois. Moriarity did not regard the move as an end to Taito’s American business. Instead, the company stopped assembling finished games on the same scale while retaining functions involving marketing, service, licensing, kits, and product development.
In a major 1986 Cash Box interview, Moriarity explained that Taito America was still performing most of the functions it had handled previously. The major difference was that it was no longer assembling finished machines in its own factory. Dedicated games could be manufactured under contract while Taito concentrated more heavily on conversion kits and outside development relationships.
The interview provides one of the clearest portraits of Moriarity as an executive because he discussed not simply products but how he thought a game company should operate. Taito maintained substantial development capabilities in Japan while also working with independent developers. Moriarity emphasized the need for a broad product base because no developer, regardless of reputation, could produce a hit every time.
He also traveled to Japan with other Taito America personnel to meet with development teams, review products, exchange information about the American market, and discuss where development should be directed. In that sense, part of Moriarity’s job was to communicate what American operators and players wanted to people developing games thousands of miles away.
A 1986 Play Meter directory still listed Paul R. Moriarity plainly as president of Taito America, now located at 660 South Wheeling Road in Wheeling, Illinois. The company was smaller and structurally different from the manufacturing organization of the arcade boom, but Moriarity remained in charge.
Moriarity’s View of a Changing Industry
The arcade downturn also seems to have sharpened Moriarity’s understanding of how power in the video game business was shifting.
By the end of 1985, Japanese companies were becoming increasingly influential in the American video game market. Moriarity summarized the situation in remarkably direct terms when discussing Japanese influence with Play Meter. In his view, control over desirable products meant control over the industry, and Japanese firms were becoming increasingly dominant because they possessed the software operators wanted.
It was an observation rooted in his own career. Moriarity had watched American companies license Japanese games, watched Taito build an American manufacturing operation, watched that manufacturing model become too expensive, and then watched valuable software again become the critical part of the business.
The lesson would become even more important when video games moved back into American homes.
Paul Moriarity and the Nintendo Era
By 1987, Taito America was preparing for another major transformation.
Nintendo had revived the American home video game market through the Nintendo Entertainment System, and established arcade companies were looking for ways to participate. For Taito, the opportunity involved turning arcade properties into home software.
Moriarity was closely involved in that transition. When Taito America announced its home-software initiative in 1987, he personally summarized the company’s history for Cash Box. Taito America had begun in 1973 by licensing games, he explained, before starting American manufacturing in 1979. Now it planned to translate arcade hits into home cartridges.
Titles associated with this new consumer strategy included Arkanoid, Elevator Action, Renegade, and The Legend of Kage. Moriarity, whose early career had centered on importing and licensing coin-operated amusements, was now helping move Taito toward software purchased by people for machines in their homes.
Later industry accounts state that Moriarity became president of Taito Software as the company expanded into the home market. That detail comes from retrospective accounts rather than the same contemporary documentation available for his Taito America presidency, but both RePlay and InterGame remembered him in that role.
It was another example of Moriarity adjusting with the industry rather than remaining tied to the form of gaming that had first made his career.
Leaving the Taito America Presidency
In October 1987, Moriarity resigned as president of Taito America.
Cash Box reported that he was leaving the position to pursue other interests, although his relationship with Taito did not end immediately. He would continue working with the company as an independent consultant on new business opportunities and special projects. The contemporary announcement emphasized the length of his service, stating that Moriarity had been with Taito America since its inception in 1973.
The timing makes his tenure especially notable. Moriarity had remained with the company through the licensing-oriented 1970s, the Space Invaders explosion, the expansion of American manufacturing, the early 1980s arcade downturn, the shift toward kits and outside manufacturing, and the beginning of Taito’s Nintendo business.
When he left the presidency, Taito America was no longer the same company he had helped build.
Neither was the video game industry.
Consulting and U.S. Games
Moriarity did not retire from gaming after leaving Taito.
According to RePlay’s later account of his life, he spent several years working as a consultant in the Chicago area before moving south to Georgia. There he became involved with Michael Pace and U.S. Games. Moriarity concentrated on the business side of the operation, allowing Pace to focus more heavily on research and development surrounding products such as Pot-O-Gold.
The move suited the pattern of Moriarity’s career. His strength was not designing the games themselves. It was creating the organizational structure around products, handling business operations, and helping technical or creative work reach a market.
By the 1990s, that experience would lead him into yet another part of gaming.
Building World Touch Gaming
In December 1995, Moriarity and Don Fiechter founded World Touch Gaming.
The new business moved Moriarity farther from the traditional video arcade and into electronic gaming systems, including multigame Class II machines intended for Native American gaming markets. InterGame later recalled that the partnership was created specifically with that developing market in mind.
World Touch Gaming became the longest chapter of Moriarity’s career after Taito. His obituary stated that he worked as the company’s executive vice president for more than twenty years alongside Fiechter.
The products changed as technology and gaming regulation changed. RePlay reported that World Touch became involved in charitable video pull-tab systems and tablet-based implementations, while Moriarity and Fiechter also pursued other technology ventures. They formed Totem Technologies to work with tribal nations on gaming concepts and later created Sloth Rocket Games as a mobile application development studio.
By then, the industry surrounding Moriarity looked almost nothing like the one he had entered in the 1970s. The heavy upright arcade cabinet had given way to software, regulated electronic gaming, touchscreens, tablets, and mobile applications.
Moriarity had changed with it.
The Man Colleagues Remembered
The surviving trade record naturally presents Moriarity through job titles, corporate decisions, conventions, products, and licensing agreements. Later remembrances add a more personal picture.
Michael Green, recalling Moriarity after his death, described him as exceptionally helpful and someone willing to go beyond what was required. Green also remembered him as a strong ambassador for Taito after Jack Mittel’s departure.
Moriarity also had a life beyond the gaming industry. During his Taito years, he raised his family in Arlington Heights, Illinois. RePlay reported that he was involved with St. Edna’s Parish while living there. He later moved to the Atlanta area, where he became active at Shallowford Presbyterian Church. His obituary also noted his involvement with the Atlanta Corvette Club.
He married Janice Belford Moriarity on July 26, 1997. They remained married for nineteen years. His family included children Darren, Sheri, Paul Jr., Aaron, and Jill, along with grandchildren and extended family.
Those details matter because Moriarity’s career stretched across decades in an industry famous for companies that appeared and disappeared quickly. By the end of his life, gaming was not simply an episode in his professional past. He was still working in it.
Paul Moriarity’s Final Years
Moriarity remained active with World Touch Gaming almost until the end of his life.
He died at his home in Atlanta on October 25, 2016, at the age of sixty-nine after a brief illness. RePlay reported that Don Fiechter said Moriarity had continued working until only about two weeks before his death.
That fact seems appropriate for a career defined less by one famous moment than by continued participation.
Moriarity had entered amusement gaming when Japanese and American companies were still learning how to work with one another. He had helped manage Taito during the Space Invaders era, taken responsibility for its American operation during a market collapse, represented the amusement industry internationally, helped move Taito toward home software, and then continued into new forms of electronic gaming for decades afterward.
His career did not stop when the arcade golden age ended because Moriarity’s career had never depended entirely on arcades.
It depended on the business of games.
Paul Moriarity’s Place in Video Game History
Paul Moriarity’s name is less familiar to players than Space Invaders, Elevator Action, Arkanoid, 10-Yard Fight, Rastan, or the Nintendo Entertainment System, but those better-known names should not obscure the kind of work executives like him performed.
Games had to travel.
They had to move from developers to manufacturers, from Japan to the United States, from factories to distributors, from distributors to operators, and eventually from arcades into people’s homes. Rights had to be negotiated. Products had to be promoted. Service networks had to be maintained. Companies had to decide when manufacturing made sense and when it did not. When markets collapsed, somebody had to decide what could be saved and what had to change.
For many years at Taito America, Paul Moriarity was one of the people making those decisions.
His relationship with Irem and 10-Yard Fight was one example, not the definition of his career. Space Invaders was one important chapter, not his entire story. Even his presidency of Taito America accounted for only part of a professional life that continued through U.S. Games, World Touch Gaming, charitable gaming, tribal gaming ventures, and mobile applications. The research trail makes clear that Moriarity belongs among the business figures who helped connect Japanese game development with the American market and who remained active as that market repeatedly reinvented itself.
His most difficult years may also be the ones that best explain his historical importance. Moriarity did not become president of Taito America at the comfortable beginning of the arcade boom. He took the position as that boom was breaking apart. He then spent the following years helping reshape the company around a smaller manufacturing footprint, conversion kits, licensing, outside development, international cooperation, and eventually consumer software.
That required a different kind of leadership from simply managing growth.
By the time Moriarity left Taito America’s presidency in 1987, the company he had joined in the 1970s had survived one of the fastest expansions and contractions in entertainment history and had found a place in the emerging Nintendo market. Moriarity then continued working in gaming for almost another three decades.
Paul Moriarity was never simply the man attached to one famous video game.
He was an executive whose career stretched across several generations of the gaming industry, and whose work helps explain how games moved from one market, one company, and one era into the next.