Year: ~1966
Company: Gottlieb [presumed]
American pinball machines played a very large part in post-war Japanese arcades. First purchased used from GI bases, and later imported directly, they often took up a significant portion of Japanese arcades from the 1950s to 1970s. I have not been including them in this archive because they are so relatively common. At some point, I should at least document the pinball machines that were most commonly imported and when, but that feels like very low priority.
There are a handful of USA machines that are unique to Japan, however, and I believe this is one of them.
Matador appears in a 1966 Senyo Kogyo catalogue, and appears to be a renamed version of Gottlieb 1956 game Toreador.
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| 1956 Toreador by Gottlieb (archive) |
I have asked with some of the most knowledgeable pinball collectors in the USA that I know of, and no one has ever heard of a "Matador" version of Toreador.
Did Gottlieb make the alternate backglass? Did someone in Japan?
If Gottlieb made it, was it made for the Japanese market, or for a different part of the world and then some also came to Japan?
People might be familiar with how games that seem identical have different names, like an Add-A-Ball versions vs the Replay versions. Sometimes games get a new name for a local market when a game with that name is already existing, or perhaps does not translate into the local parlance well.
Some of the earliest examples of pin games getting a rename are early bingo and gambling pins, when local authorities would create laws against the machines by name. Often, those were very DIY affairs.
Given the nature of the Japanese amusement machine industry mid-1960s, a Japanese imported would have to have a very good reason to rename a machine from Toreador to Matador, and that would be done so at significant expense. It is still a possibility.
It was suggested that perhaps Toreador had a colloquial meaning in Japan, but I've found no evidence of that. A game called Toreador, Spain came out in Japan in 1972 and that makes me doubt there was anything wrong with the name itself.
We have seen other cases where American machines/parts were brought in and reworked into a new title, but those all involved more changes than a basic rename upon the same backglass design.
For the time being, this will remain a mystery.
I wonder if 東洋プレーイングマシン (Toyo Playing Machine) were involved in this? They certainly had the factory to make new pinball backglasses.
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