Stern Electronics

Stern Electronics was a pinball and arcade-game manufacturer based in Chicago. Sam and Gary Stern formed the company after buying the assets of Chicago Coin — a Chicago manufacturer founded in 1932 that had defaulted on its bank loans — in a late-1976 foreclosure sale, taking on the factory and inventory without the debts, and began production under the Stern Electronics name in early 1977. Early releases such as Stampede and Rawhide used leftover Chicago Coin parts and shipped in both electromechanical and solid-state versions. By 1978 Stern Electronics had converted to solid-state electronics and was building roughly 150 pinball machines a day.

Meteor, released in 1979, became the company's best-selling pinball machine, with more than 8,000 units produced. Flight 2000 followed in 1980, a wide-body machine that combined speech and multiball play with its own ball-locking and launch mechanism. Other pinball titles from the era included Galaxy and Cosmic Princess. In 1980 Stern Electronics also moved into arcade video games with Berzerk, a shooter that became the company's biggest hit outside pinball, followed by Frenzy in 1982.

Sam Stern died in 1984. Stern Electronics closed in early 1985, after the arcade video game crash of 1983 cut deeply into its business. Gary Stern briefly kept a smaller operation going afterward under the name Pinstar, selling pinball conversion kits, before that venture folded as well. Stern Electronics is a separate company from Stern Pinball, Inc., which Gary Stern founded in 1999 after buying Sega's pinball division — the two share the Stern family name and a Chicago-area lineage, but 14 years and several other companies separate them.