Genco
Genco Manufacturing Co. · Chicago, IL · Made pinball 1931–1959
- Games on file
- 28
- Earliest on file
- 1948
- Latest on file
- 1958
Games
About
Genco Manufacturing Co. was a Chicago pinball and arcade-game manufacturer founded in 1931 by brothers Louis, David, and Meyer Gensburg. A fourth Gensburg brother, Samuel H., started the rival Chicago Coin Machine Company the following year, putting two branches of the same family in competition for the next three decades. Genco's early machines, including the flipperless Buster Ball (1931), were typical of the pin games common to the pre-war coin-op trade.
After World War II, Genco moved into flipper games. Its 1948 release Triple Action was the company's first title with flippers; working under longtime Genco designer Harvey Heiss, Steve Kordek is widely credited with the two-flippers-at-the-bottom layout the game introduced, a departure from Gottlieb's six-flipper Humpty Dumpty the year before that became pinball's standard playfield arrangement. Beyond pinball, Genco built a wide catalog of coin-op amusements — baseball and gun games, bowling machines, and novelty pieces such as the animatronic fortune-teller Gypsy Grandma (1957) — and by the 1950s was a major producer of shooting-gallery gun games.
The two family firms came back together at the end of the decade: Genco merged into Chicago Coin in 1959, ending its run as an independent manufacturer after nearly three decades in business.
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Page updated October 2026 · Suggest a correction
