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In a way, you can say, the current leading pinball company (Stern Pinball) is a continuation of Stern Electronics who made pinball tables and other arcade games in the 70s and 80s.

It's a very ship-of-Theseus argument that becomes more compelling because the name came full circle. Here's the connection:

  • Stern Electronics, founded by Sam Stern, stopped making pinball tables in 1982 and any games at all in 1985.
  • Data East bought the remains to start their pinball division in 1986.
  • Data East sold their pinball division to Sega in 1994.
  • Sega sold their pinball division to Gary Stern (son of Sam Stern) in 1999.

But also, in a way, Stern is a continuation of Genco, one of the pinball companies dating back to the first year of pinball mass production, 1931.


The top of this post has a flyer for a Genco table (Buster Ball, a clone of Gottlieb's Baffle Ball). I played one of their tables ("Sky Ride" from 1933) on the first Silver Ball Century stream.

Here's the way they're connected:

  • Genco was started by three brothers named Gensburg in 1931.
  • Chicago Coin was a competing amusement company that was started by a fourth brother, Sam Gensburg. (He must have felt left out.) It started manufacturing pinball tables in 1933.
  • The companies merged in 1959, as part of Chicago Dynamic Industries, which then used Chicago Coin as a brand name, becoming the fourth-place pinball company of the '60s and '70s.
  • Stern Electronics bought Chicago Coin in 1977.

So that's sort of continuity from 1931 until now! The most dubious link in the chain is the one from Stern Electronics to Data East. It's not quite the same company because Stern completely shut down first.

Another way to look at this is, pinball manufacturing only started once. Gottlieb, Bally, and Williams also date back to the early '30s. Whenever a company rises to the top of the pinball world, they didn't get there by starting from scratch; they built it on expertise and manufacturing processes that chain back to the 1930s pinball boom.


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