Midway Manufacturing

Midway Manufacturing at a Glance

Midway Manufacturing started in Chicago in 1958 as a maker of arcade amusement games before being bought by pinball manufacturer Bally in 1969. The company entered the video game market early with Winner in 1973 during the Pong boom. For years, they relied on imports, contractors, and Bally subsidiaries like Dave Nutting Associates rather than building their own internal design teams. An internal team finally formed around 1980 or 1981 to create Kick-Man. Their peak production happened in the 1970s when they released 26 games, followed by 10 titles in the 1980s and just one game in the 1990s. The publisher is no longer active, with their last known release being WWF WrestleMania: The Arcade Game in October 1995. The data shows a heavy focus on arcade hardware with all 37 titles available on PlayPile found on that platform. They also had a smaller presence on older home computers like the Commodore C64 and Super Nintendo. Their genre output is dominated by arcade shooters with 12 games in that category, followed closely by general arcade entries at 20. Sports and racing games make up smaller portions of their catalog. Quality varies significantly across their library. The average IGDB rating sits at 65.8 based on only four rated titles. Three of these received good scores between 60 and 79, while one title scored poorly below 40. Their highest-rated games include Space Invaders from 1978 with a score of 78.3 and Pac-Man from 1980 at 78.6. Solar Fox also performed well with a 75.2 rating in 1981. In contrast, their final release, WWF WrestleMania: The Arcade Game, received a very low score of 31.2. This suggests that while Midway produced some solid classics in the late seventies and early eighties, their later efforts struggled to maintain quality. Their output slowed drastically as they moved into the nineties, leaving them with only a single title to their name during that decade.

Release Timeline

Rating Distribution