Advertising Posters Company
Overview
Advertising Posters Company was a Chicago art and graphics firm closely tied to the pinball industry rather than a conventional manufacturer of complete games. In the present catalog it is represented by six titles, including Aloha, Circus Star, Parade, Pirates Gold, and Vikings, but surviving documentation identifies these as decorative backglass-style wall pieces rather than playable pinball machines.
That distinction matters. Chicago pinball depended not only on designers and factories but also on specialist art houses that created the visual language of the machines: glamorous figures, bright theme paintings, and instantly legible backglass compositions. Advertising Posters Company appears to have operated in that adjacent world of production, and the surviving 1978 flyer for these pieces suggests a business repurposing pinball-style glass art as a consumer decorative product. As a result, the company belongs in pinball history less as a builder of games than as part of the broader industrial ecosystem that gave the machines their look.