Mirco Games Incorporated

Mirco Games Incorporated was formed in Phoenix, Arizona, in December 1973 as a subsidiary of electronics company Mirco Incorporated, built on the assets of Arizona Automation, a foosball-import business started in 1970 by Richard Raymond and John Walsh. Mirco's foosball tables and a line of Pong-style video games such as Challenge (1974) funded the company's early growth.

In 1975, engineer David Nutting brought Mirco a microprocessor pinball concept that Bally had passed on developing further. A team of former Motorola engineers built it into The Spirit of '76, shown at the industry's Chicago trade show in October 1975 and shipped that November, widely credited as the first commercially available pinball machine to run on a microprocessor, ahead of Bally's own solid-state debut, Freedom, in December 1976. Mirco had no prior pinball manufacturing experience, and technical defects forced a halt in the machine's early production run after a reported 140 or so units had sold. The company returned to pinball in 1978 with the cocktail-table model Lucky Draw before being sold to Amstar Electronics in 1980.