Taito

Taito is best known globally as a Japanese video game company — the creator of Space Invaders — but the firm also maintained a meaningful presence in pinball manufacturing across multiple decades and continents. Taito’s pinball involvement began in the late 1960s with Electromechanical machines produced in Japan, then expanded significantly in the late 1970s and early 1980s as the company’s American and Brazilian divisions produced Solid State machines for their respective markets.

Taito America Corporation, based in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, served as the company’s North American pinball manufacturing arm during the Solid State era, producing games alongside Taito’s Japanese and Brazilian operations. The combined catalog includes titles spanning from Crown Soccer Special (1967) through early-1980s solid-state machines like Hawkman (1983) and Zeke’s Peak (1984). Taito’s pinball machines were generally modest in ambition compared to contemporary offerings from Bally or Williams, but they found placement in markets — particularly in Japan and South America — that the dominant American manufacturers served less aggressively.

Taito exited pinball by the mid-1980s as the company focused its resources on the booming video game industry. The firm’s pinball catalog is an interesting artifact of a multinational amusement company that maintained parallel manufacturing operations across three continents, and a reminder that pinball’s story extends well beyond Chicago — even when one of its chapters was, in fact, based in suburban Illinois.