About
Quetzal Pinball is an independent Spanish pinball manufacturer and design studio based in Murcia. Founder Antonio Ortuño began developing his own custom pinball control platform, the QPC, in 2009, and announced his first machine, Captain Nemo Dives Again, in 2012. Based on Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," Captain Nemo was among the first pinball machines to embed an LCD display directly into the playfield. Quetzal built the roughly 30 planned units largely by hand with help from Spanish assembly partner STR Pinball, a run that still hadn't been completed as of 2020.
Around 2015, Ortuño left his job as a computer programmer to design pinball full time. Working again with STR Pinball, he unveiled Tokyo Perfect Drift in December 2018 in Petrer, Spain: a single-level, four-flipper, no-ramp game built around Japanese drift-racing culture. The following year, at the Pinball Expo near Chicago, Quetzal showed Super Canasta, a modern reinterpretation of Canasta '86, a basketball-themed machine originally built in the 1980s by Madrid manufacturer Inder.
Bitronic, a Spanish maker of gaming and slot machines for over 25 years, commissioned Quetzal to adapt Super Canasta into an operator-friendly commercial product, removing drop targets and pop bumpers for reliability. The result, Super Hoop, was revealed publicly in January 2022. Bitronic built an initial run of 100 units for distributors in Europe and the US, then began a second production run of 300.
