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description

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 [[technology-generation:electromechanical]] machines produced in Japan, then expanded significantly in the late 1970s and early 1980s as the company's American and Brazilian divisions produced [[technology-generation: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 [[technology-generation:solid-state]] era, producing games alongside Taito's Japanese and Brazilian operations. The combined catalog includes titles spanning from [[title:crown-soccer-special]] (1967) through early-1980s solid-state machines like [[model:hawkman]] (1983) and [[title:zekes-peak]] (1984). Taito's pinball machines were generally modest in ambition compared to contemporary offerings from [[manufacturer:bally]] or [[manufacturer: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.

Seed import (backfilled).

name

Taito

opdb_manufacturer_id

73

slug

taito