Chicago Coin Machine Mfg. Co.

Chicago Coin Machine Co. was a Chicago pinball and arcade game manufacturer founded in 1932 by Samuel H. Gensburg and Samuel Wolberg, who had previously run a trade-in business for used coin-operated machines. The company released its first table, Blackstone, in 1933, then found wider success with Beam-Lite in 1935, one of pinball's earliest games with an illuminated playfield, which sold around 5,000 units. Its 1947 flipperless game Kilroy sold 8,800 units and held the record as the industry's best-selling pinball table into the 1970s. In 1957 the company took the corporate name Chicago Dynamic Industries, keeping Chicago Coin as its product label, and in 1959 it merged with Genco Manufacturing, a rival founded by Gensburg's brothers.

Through the 1960s, Chicago Coin built its business on electro-mechanical arcade games. Its 1969 driving game Speedway, a licensed North American version of the Japanese title Indy 500 by Kasco, sold more than 10,000 cabinets and helped cement the US quarter as the standard price per play; the game later influenced Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, who worked at an arcade that ran it. As video games emerged in the early 1970s, Chicago Coin moved into the new format with titles such as TV Ping Pong (1973), and the move drew a 1974 patent lawsuit from Magnavox over the Magnavox Odyssey.

Chicago Dynamic Industries ran into financial trouble in the mid-1970s and defaulted on its bank loans, and its lender foreclosed on the company's assets. In December 1976, Gary Stern and his father Sam Stern bought the Chicago Coin division's assets and used them to found Stern Electronics, Inc., which began producing pinball machines under its own name in 1977. The sale closed out a run of more than four decades for Chicago Coin as an independent pinball and arcade manufacturer.