Fascination Int. Inc.
Elk Grove Village, IL · 1977–1979
About
Fascination International, Inc. — originally Fascination Ltd., founded in August 1973 as National Computer Systems, Inc. by Bob Anderson and Bob Runte — was a pinball manufacturer based in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. The company sold one of the earliest cocktail-table video games in October 1973 before turning to pinball, and in 1977 it entered an exclusive arrangement with Allied Leisure Industries of Hialeah, Florida — a deal Allied later credited with helping fund its own recovery from a Chapter 11 reorganization: Allied engineered the cocktail-format pinball hardware, and Fascination released the finished games under its own name.
The first of these was Roy Clark "The" Entertainer, a two-player cocktail pin licensing country entertainer Roy Clark, released in September 1977. Circa 1933 followed in February 1979, and the Greek-mythology-themed Eros One later that year, both built on the same solid-state cocktail hardware and differentiated mainly by artwork and playfield rules. A planned follow-up, Eros II, reached prototype stage by November 1979 but was never put into production.
Fascination's run as a pinball manufacturer did not extend past 1979. After the company failed, Anderson and Runte formed Ram, Inc., which acquired Fascination's assets and launched a new pinball manufacturer, Astro Games, also in Elk Grove Village; that venture went bankrupt within months.
From Fascination Int. Inc.
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