Midway Manufacturing Co.

Midway Manufacturing Co. was founded in 1958 in Franklin Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, by design engineers Henry "Hank" Ross and Marcine "Iggy" Wolverton, who had previously worked together at United Manufacturing Co. The new company built electromechanical amusement games for the coin-op trade, including target rifles, driving simulators, and shooting games, and also released a handful of pinball machines under its own name, among them Flying Turns in 1964.

Bally Manufacturing bought Midway in 1969. Midway kept operating under its own name through the 1970s, still occasionally producing pinball, including Rotation VIII in 1978, but its business increasingly centered on arcade video games, most notably its 1978 license of Taito's Space Invaders for the U.S. market. In 1982, Bally folded its pinball division into Midway, and the combined company took the name Bally Midway. That year it also released Baby Pac-Man, a hybrid cabinet pairing a maze video game with a small pinball playfield.

Williams Electronics Games, through parent company WMS Industries, bought Bally Midway in 1988. Williams kept pinball production under its own name, while the arcade side reverted to Midway Manufacturing and moved its headquarters from Franklin Park to Williams's Chicago offices. Midway dropped the Bally name from its games in 1991, became Midway Games Inc. in 1996 as it entered the home console market, and was spun off as an independent company by WMS in 1998. Midway Games filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2009, and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment acquired most of its assets, including the Mortal Kombat franchise.