Capcom Coin-Op Inc.

Capcom Coin-Op Inc. was the pinball division of Capcom USA, run out of Arlington Heights, Illinois. Capcom built the division around designer Mark Ritchie, who left Williams Electronics in August 1993 to become director of engineering for the new operation, and artist-designer Python Anghelo, another Williams veteran. Williams sued Ritchie over the non-compete clause in his old contract, though the case became moot once Capcom stopped making pinball machines.

The division's first machine, Pinball Magic, reached operators in 1995 and sold about 1,200 units. Capcom followed it in 1996 with Airborne and Breakshot, then Flipper Football, which sold fewer than 1,000 units. Two more designs, Big Bang Bar and Kingpin, were finished and ready for the factory floor, but neither entered mass production before the company pulled the plug.

Capcom ended pinball production in December 1996, pointing to Flipper Football's weak sales and a pinball market that had cooled sharply from its early-1990s peak; the parent company wound down in 2004. Only 14 Big Bang Bar prototypes and a handful of Kingpin machines had been built. Gene Cunningham, owner of Illinois Pin Ball and holder of Capcom's leftover pinball parts, announced a production run at the 2004 Pinball Expo and completed 191 machines by 2007, built from a mix of original and newly made parts.