The complete rise of the company that defined pinball and arcade gaming.

From early classics such as Contact to groundbreaking machines like High Speed, Williams captivated arcade audiences with a wide-ranging lineup of high-quality pinball games. The arrival of video games propelled the company to legendary status, driven by blockbuster hits including Defender and Joust. By the end of the 1980s, Williams had become the largest coin-operated game publisher in North America. Its acquisition of Bally/Midway marked the start of another prolific era, producing major successes such as Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam, along with the best-selling pinball machine of all time, The Addams Family.

Spanning nearly six decades, the history of Williams is defined by ambitious risks, technical innovation, and a steady stream of influential games that shaped both pinball and arcade video gaming. Featuring interviews with more than 40 former designers and executives from Williams, Bally, and Midway, as well as research drawn from hundreds of contemporary news reports and documents, this book offers a detailed chronology of how a small company evolved into a coin-op powerhouse. Thirty pinball machines and 26 video game classics are examined in depth, with direct insight from their creators, alongside the broader story of the events that shaped one of gaming’s most important publishing houses.

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