Taito do Brasil

Taito do Brasil was the Brazilian arm of the Japanese amusement company Taito and, from the mid-1970s until 1985, the dominant maker of Pinball and arcade machines in Brazil.^[1] Registered in São Paulo in 1972 as Taito do Brasil Indústria e Comércio Ltda., it was directed by Abraham Kogan — “Abba”, the son of Taito’s founder Michael Kogan — and had already operated for up to four years under the name Trevo Diversões Eletrônicas, a domestic front floated to satisfy Brazil’s rules on foreign electronics companies.^[2]

The subsidiary began as an importer, bringing in U.S. machines and Japanese components for assembly within the country.^[3] That model became untenable as import taxes climbed and the government, treating pinball as a game of chance, tightened its rules; by 1976 a computing market-reserve regime under CAPRE (the Electronic Processing Activities Coordinating Committee) had made importing pinball machines illegal.^[3] Cut off from finished imports but facing booming demand, Taito do Brasil did what many Brazilian technology firms did at the turn of the 1980s: with capital from its Japanese parent it built a factory in São Paulo, absorbed smaller local outfits such as Liberty, Fipermatic and Mecatronics, and began producing national imitations of foreign machines.^[4]

Those machines were, for the most part, unlicensed copies — bootleg pinballs whose target-and-obstacle layouts reproduced successful imports while their artwork was redrawn (by the illustrator J. Pecegueiro) and their scoring logic was re-implemented locally.^[5] The results were the games a generation of Brazilian arcade-goers remembers. Cosmic, the firm’s greatest commercial success, was a clone of Stern Electronics’s Galaxy;^[6] Drakor was nearly identical to Williams’s Gorgar;^[7] Cavaleiro Negro was, in one Brazilian historian’s words, far more than “inspired” by Williams’ Black Knight;^[8] and Oba-Oba took the playfield of Bally’s Playboy but rethemed it around Oba Oba, the Rio de Janeiro samba house of showman Oswaldo Sargentelli.^[9] Only Shark, according to a Brazilian pinball club, carried an original playfield of the maker’s own design.^[10]

Almost none of this was done with permission, which makes the firm’s one true licensed build the exception that proves the rule. Its own Meteor, a version of Stern’s 1979 machine of the same name, was “manufactured in Brazil under license from Stern” — a grant printed on the playfield apron — and is remembered as the only Taito do Brasil game that acknowledges any licence at all.^[11] Yet the line between bootleg and licensed build is blurrier than it first appears: much of the company’s documented history rests on oral accounts, and recent scholarship has turned up evidence that some titles may have been made legitimately under parent Taito Corporation’s own distribution deals rather than pirated — the arcade game Time Fighter, for one, proving to be a licensed conversion of Konami’s Time Pilot.^[12]

Technically the firm climbed a steep curve. Its earliest pinballs, up to about 1978 and including Roman Victory, were CPU-less digital machines copied from the TTL designs of Spain’s Recel, and they lost money, plagued by reliability and maintenance problems.^[13] A staff engineer, Viggo Tristed, then developed a microprocessor board around Intel’s 8080 — and later Zilog’s Z80 — that let the company chase the more advanced Solid State machines of Bally, Williams, Gottlieb, Stern and Zaccaria.^[14] Across roughly a decade it turned out more than thirty pinball models and, all told, some 25,000 machines.^[15] The end came abruptly: after founder Michael Kogan died on a U.S. business trip in early 1984 and public appetite for pinball collapsed against home video games, the owners wound Taito do Brasil up in 1985 — honouring every debt, without bankruptcy — and the Japanese parent passed to Kyocera the following year.^[16] Among the assets it left behind was the Sega trademark in Brazil, which Taito do Brasil had held and sold on to TecToy.^[17]