Stern Electronics

Stern Electronics was founded in 1977 in Chicago by Sam Stern and his son Gary Stern, built atop the assets of the old Chicago Coin company, a storied but faltering amusement maker. The Sterns were pinball industry veterans, and the new company quickly established itself with a line of solid-state pinball machines including Stars, Meteor, and Nine Ball, competing head-on with Bally, Williams, and Gottlieb in the medium's silicon-age revival.

Stern's lasting fame, though, came from video. In 1980 it released Berzerk, a maze shooter in which the player fled and fought squads of hostile robots room by room. Berzerk was a technical and cultural landmark for its use of synthesized speech: the robots taunted players with digitized lines like "Intruder alert!" and "The humanoid must not escape," among the earliest and most memorable voices in arcade history. Its sequel Frenzy expanded the concept with destructible walls and interactive elements. Stern also distributed and produced other coin-op titles during the boom.

Riding both pinball and video, Stern Electronics was a genuine force in the early 1980s coin-op trade. But the company was hit hard from both directions as the decade turned: the arcade video crash of 1983-84 collapsed demand while the pinball market simultaneously slumped. Unable to weather the twin downturn, Stern Electronics ceased operations around 1984-85. The story had a coda, however, for Gary Stern went on to found Stern Pinball in 1999, which became the last major manufacturer of pinball machines in the world and carried the family name forward into a new century.