Zaccaria

Zaccaria began as the venture of three brothers from the Bologna area — one a carpenter, one an electrician, one a barista — none with any background in designing games.^[1] They entered the trade at a peculiar moment. A 1965 Italian law had outlawed pinball as a form of gambling, and Bologna’s artisans answered with a workaround: machines that rewarded the player only with extra balls rather than cash, which kept them within the law and seeded dozens of small local manufacturers.^[2] When an economic crisis pushed up the cost of the American machines Italy’s operators depended on, the brothers found their way in through refurbishment rather than design, buying up worn imported tables and reskinning them with fresh artwork — an idea suggested to them by a friend, Lorenzo Rimondini.^[3] In those unbranded early years the shop went further than new paint, rebuilding American games outright, among them Gottlieb’s 1973 Jungle Life.

The copy-shop business grew quickly, and the brothers formally established the company under the Zaccaria name in 1974, based just outside the city, by which time they had already moved from freshening other makers’ cabinets to building original machines; the first game to carry the name was Strike, a single-player Electromechanical table on a bowling theme.^[4] Much of the line’s identity came from Rimondini, the self-taught artist behind most of its games, who drew each backglass and playfield by hand in pen and ink.^[5] From 1975 the firm began to export — first across Europe, then to Japan, Australia and the United States.^[6]

Zaccaria’s rise coincided with pinball’s shift from relays to circuit boards, and where many of the copy-shops that had multiplied under the 1965 loophole could not make that leap, Zaccaria was one of the few Italian firms to carry through the transition to Solid State play, its business running on into the early 1990s.^[7] By then it counted among the most important pinball companies the industry had produced,^[1] with a catalogue of more than forty distinct games known for vibrant artwork and inventive playfields.^[8] Its designers worked the new electronics hard: Pinball Champ, the company claimed, was the first machine anywhere to address its players in four separate languages.^[9] Late in the 1980s the firm regrouped under the name Mr. Game before pinball production wound down.^[10]

Zaccaria’s machines never lost their following. Long after the factory fell silent they became among the most sought-after games of their era, and the company’s catalogue found a second life in officially licensed digital recreations that carried the games to PC and console players.^[11]