Segasa

Segasa was founded in Madrid on March 25, 1968, as Sega, S.A. (Service Games Sociedad Anónima), by shareholders connected to Sega Enterprises of Japan, including Martin Bromley, Richard Stewart, and Raymond Lemaire, who had also founded Sega itself. Spanish law at the time capped foreign ownership at 50 percent, so the company operated under Spanish management from the outset. In 1973 it moved into a factory in Parla, on the outskirts of Madrid, and entered pinball manufacturing through a joint venture with Seeburg, then the owner of Williams Electronics, building licensed reproductions of Williams designs; according to former CEO Eduardo Morales Hermo, Williams president Sam Stern personally set up the production line.

In 1976 the company introduced the brand name Sonic for its pinball exports, to keep them distinct from Sega's Japanese-made products, and began releasing designs of its own rather than Williams copies. Titles from this run included Faces, Casino Royale, Joker's Wild, Mars Trek, Prospector, Cannes (reissued as Mónaco), Jai Alai, Bird Man, Butterfly, Cherry Bell, and Night Fever, with the company reporting export levels as high as 90 percent of production. Spain's pinball market collapsed at the start of the 1980s, and Segasa built no new pinball for five years.

Production resumed in 1985 with Odin De Luxe, a licensed version of Peyper's Odín built on the same hardware, followed in 1986 by Solar Wars and by Gamatron, a table whose design it acquired from Pinstar, the company Gary Stern ran between the closure of the original Stern Electronics and the founding of Data East Pinball. Pole Position and Star Wars followed in 1987, the latter roughly five years ahead of Data East's own licensed Star Wars table. Hang-On, based on Sega's motorcycle-racing arcade game, was Segasa's last pinball machine, released in 1988. The company continued making arcade and gaming machines afterward; Eduardo Morales Hermo, who had joined in 1968, became CEO in 1986 and bought out the founding American shareholders in 1994. The company filed for a suspension of payments in Madrid in April 2002, sold its remaining assets to Austria's Novomatic in 2004, and was effectively wound down by around 2005.