Gary Stern of Stern Pinball standing by a new WrestleMania pinball game at CES 2015.
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Stern Pinball thrives on nostalgia for pinball and new demand from ‘barcades’ (video)

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 1 min

Gary Stern has been making pinball machines for decades. At Stern Pinball, he’s busy keeping up with demand for pinball machines, which have become very sophisticated under the hood and are newly popular in places like bars with classic arcades.

We caught up with Stern at the 2015 International CES, where his nostalgic pinball machines stood out in a sea of futuristic technology. Hidden among the the latest tech toys was a booth that took us back to the old pastime from the days before video games. Stern has lived his entire life around pinball games, as his father owned Williams, the pioneering pinball company. And Stern started Stern Pinball in 1986. He sold his Melrose Park, Il.-based firm to Sega in 1994 and then bought it back in 1999.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.