Taito

Taito was founded in Tokyo in 1953 by Michael Kogan and built a handful of its own pinball machines in Japan during the 1960s, including the electro-mechanical Crown Soccer Special (1967), before pivoting to coin-operated video games. It took the name Taito Corporation in 1972 and released Space Invaders in 1978. Pinball under the Taito name, though, became almost entirely a Brazilian story.

Taito do Brasil began as a São Paulo import agent founded in 1968 and was reorganized in 1972 under Abraham "Abba" Kogan, son of the Japanese founder. It first imported and assembled foreign pinball hardware, but rising import duties and a 1976 restriction on electronics imports pushed it to manufacture domestically. Most of its machines were Brazilian re-themes of established American designs — Cavaleiro Negro after Williams' Black Knight, Oba Oba on Bally's Playboy playfield, and the top-selling Cosmic after Stern's Galaxy — alongside a few originals such as Shark.

The company built an estimated 25,000 pinball and arcade machines in all before winding down in 1985 through an orderly liquidation, rather than a bankruptcy, after founder Michael Kogan's death in 1984 left the Japanese parent less invested in its subsidiaries.