The story
Stern Electronics was formed when Sam and Gary Stern bought the assets of Chicago Coin in December 1976. Sam previously owned half of amusements manufacturer Williams between 1947 and 1964, when he sold his stake to the Seeburg Corporation. Gary had trained under his father at Williams, and from 1973-1976 the two ran the company. Stern Electronics, Inc. acquired their core inventory by purchasing Chicago Coin's assets at bankruptcy sales. As a separate company, they did not assume any of the debt Chicago Coin had amassed. All the stock in this new company was held by Gary Stern and his brother David Stern. In September 1977 Stern acquired Universal Research Laboratories after they went bankrupt a few months earlier. Universal Research Laboratories manufactured circuit boards for Bally pinball machines, and then reverse engineered these for Stern, who were then sued by Bally. An agreement to pay royalties was reached which by September 1981 totaled $700,000.
The first two games released by Stern were Stampede and Rawhide, pre-existing games from Chicago Coin with updated Stern branding. They produced their first solid-state pinball machine, called Pinball that year. By 1978, they had switched over to fully solid-state electronics for their games, building up to 170 pinball machines a day. In July 1980, Stern acquired the jukebox production assets of the bankrupt Seeburg Corporation for $1.5 million. Stern sought to increase sales in the declining jukebox market by modernizing machines with the addition of screens and customizable displays. In late 1980 Stern purchased the August J. Johnson Co., a Bensenville, Illinois based cabinet manufacturer.
In 1980, as a response to the increased popularity of video games across American arcades, Stern Electronics developed and manufactured Berzerk, which sold 20,000 cabinets, and stopped producing pinball machines in 1982. However, Stern became one of many victims of the North American Video Game Crash of 1983. They received financial support to continue operations from machine distributor Al Simon and sold Seeburg in March of 1984. In late 1984, Sam Stern died and Stern Electronics closed on February 1, 1985.
On March 16, 2023, Atari SA announced that it had acquired the intellectual property rights to 12 Stern Electronics titles, including Berzerk and Frenzy.
From Wikipedia’s article on Stern Electronics, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3