Sega Enterprises, Ltd.

Sega Enterprises, Ltd. took its name in 1965, when Nihon Goraku Bussan acquired Rosen Enterprises and adopted the Sega brand. The company started building pinball machines at its own factory in Tokyo in 1971, beginning with Winner, which it showed to distributors that August. It had been importing American tables until then; Winner was the first machine Sega engineered itself.

Sega kept manufacturing pinball in Japan through 1979. Ali Baba and Galaxy followed in 1973, and Rodeo and Big Together in 1976. That spring the company ran a National Flipper Tournament built around Rodeo, with qualifying rounds in seven cities and a final in May; more than 13,000 players entered.

The Tokyo operation has no corporate connection to Sega Pinball, Inc., the Illinois company that built licensed tables from 1994 to 1999. That business came out of Chicago Coin by way of Stern Electronics and Data East, and Sega bought it in 1994. The two share the Sega name and nothing else.