Williams Electronics

Williams was founded in 1943 in Chicago by Harry Williams, an engineer and prolific pinball designer who had already patented the tilt mechanism. For decades Williams Manufacturing built electromechanical pinball machines and novelty amusements, a solid but unremarkable member of Chicago's coin-op establishment. Its transformation came at the dawn of the 1980s, when it plunged into video games with spectacular results.

Williams' first video hit, Defender (1980), designed by Eugene Jarvis, was a fiendishly difficult side-scrolling shooter with a bewildering array of controls that nonetheless became one of the highest-grossing arcade games of its time. It was followed by a run of classics: the twin-stick maelstrom Robotron: 2084, the flapping medieval duel Joust, Stargate, and Sinistar with its menacing digitized voice. For a few years Williams was arguably the most inventive video-game studio in the arcade.

As the video market cooled, Williams returned to its roots and dominated pinball's silicon-age renaissance. Through its own line and the Bally brand it acquired in 1988, it produced the best-selling pinball machines ever made, including The Addams Family, Twilight Zone, and Medieval Madness, pushing the medium with dot-matrix displays and elaborate rule sets. Yet the parent company, renamed WMS Industries, saw far richer margins in casino slot machines and video gaming. In 1999 Williams abruptly shut down its pinball and arcade division to focus entirely on gambling equipment, ending a fifty-six-year run in games. The corporate entity lives on in the slot-machine business, but the Williams that made Defender and Medieval Madness was gone.