Sankyo Seiki

Sankyo was a Japanese coin-operated amusement manufacturer whose machines carried the 三共 (Sankyo) name on a wide range of arcade equipment from the 1960s into the 1980s. Pinball was a brief part of that catalog: its earliest documented pinball, Big Race, appears in a Japanese machine directory by 1969, followed by New Big Race in the early 1970s, with a handful of games sold in Japan.

Sankyo's best-documented machine was The World Series, a one-player electro-mechanical baseball game built around a playfield diamond, where small balls simulate runners advancing base to base as the player scores hits. It first turned up in Japanese trade listings around 1972 and was reissued in 1976 with new backglass artwork under the name New World Series; Sankyo displayed it that October at the 14th Japan Amusement Machine Show in Tokyo, and no new Sankyo pinball title is documented after 1976. Pinball reference databases identify the maker as Sankyo Seiki, the precision-equipment company founded in Suwa in 1946 and known today as Nidec Sankyo, though that company's own corporate histories make no mention of an amusement-machine business.