Data East USA Inc.

Data East USA Inc. entered the pinball business in November 1986 as a division of Data East, the Japanese electronics and arcade-game company whose American subsidiary had been based in San Jose, California, since 1979. Gary Stern, whose family's Stern Electronics had closed in February 1985, helped establish the new division and served as its president. Data East's pinball operation ran out of a factory at 1990 Janice Avenue in Melrose Park, Illinois — a building that would later house Sega Pinball and then Stern Pinball.

The division's first machine, Laser War, shipped in May 1987 and was the first pinball machine built with digital stereo sound, with roughly 2,569 units produced. Data East went on to specialize in licensed titles, producing games based on Back to the Future, Star Wars (1992), Tales from the Crypt (1993), Jurassic Park (1993) — whose motorized T. rex toy grabbed balls during a timed round — and The Who's Tommy Pinball Wizard (1994), among others. The company also pushed display technology forward: 1991's Checkpoint was the first pinball machine with a dot-matrix display, and 1994's Maverick introduced the first full-size, 192-by-64 DMD. By the early 1990s, Data East was the second-largest pinball manufacturer in the world, with about a quarter of the market.

Pinball sales fell sharply industry-wide in the early 1990s, and in late 1994 Data East sold its pinball division to Sega, which continued the operation as Sega Pinball with Stern still at the helm. Sega exited the business in 1999, selling the division back to Gary Stern, who founded Stern Pinball on the same Melrose Park site.