Petaco

Petaco S.A. traces back to 1958, when Juan Paredes Hernández and his partners began building pinball machines by hand in a small Madrid workshop. The company was formally incorporated in Madrid on March 16, 1962, by partners including Paredes, Adolfo Morilla Suárez, and Julio Marroquín Bartolomé. Its early business centered on building Spanish versions of Gottlieb tables such as Olympics and Mini Cycle under an arrangement with the American manufacturer, adapted for local production and player tastes. Eulogio Pingarrón, who joined the company in 1962, became its lead designer and worked on these adaptations before taking over the prototype department.

In 1972 Petaco moved into original designs, starting with Comodín, and around the same time it introduced Recel as an export-only brand name for foreign markets. Petaco's designs sold under both names through the rest of the decade, including the Criterium series and titles such as Fortune, Icarus, and Torpedo!!. Pingarrón left the company in 1977 amid disagreements with management and founded his own company, Peyper. Rafael Domínguez Hernández, Petaco's technical director from January 1975, designed the company's System III electronics, which powered its solid-state machines starting in 1978; he left in January 1982 to found MAC.

Petaco released its last pinball machine, The Flipper Game, in 1980, then shifted its factory toward video arcade games, which it kept building through 1983 — along with one final pinball prototype, Super Missil, that never reached release — before winding down. The company was legally dissolved in 2002. Paredes died in a car accident near Seville in September 1987; Juegos Populares, the pinball company he had founded afterward, closed not long after. In the 1990s the revived Petaco name appeared on a small number of machines built by Sleic, which had registered the lapsed trademark, though not as a continuation of the original firm.