SEGA's Mysterious Jukebox [EN]

In many official coverages of SEGA's hardware history, an important machine often brought up is their SEGA 1000 Stereo Jukebox. In the 1950s, SEGA had been locked in a three-way battle in Japan over jukebox sales and distribution. SEGA had the rights to Rock-Ola machines, while Taito had Seeburg and V&V Hifi dealt in Wurlitzer jukes. The three companies seem to have been roughly even with each other in this market, so the men running SEGA came up with a plan to get ahead: They already had factory space for their slot machine business, if they could repurpose some of the space to manufacture cheap jukeboxes, that would give them a huge advantage on price as well as service, as there were no domestically mass-produced jukes in Japan at this point in time.

These cheap, smaller jukeboxes were perfect for previously untapped locations like lobbies, cramped coffee shops, and apparently even airports. The problem with digging up information on these is that there's no known contemporary photos or footage of them at any location, and anecdotes towards them are few and far between. This has led some to believe the jukeboxes are a hoax altogether!

I can say confidently that these machines did at least exist in some capacity. SEGA kept a unit in storage for many years, eventually moving it into their lobby for a time. This unit is presumably the same one used for color archival/promotional photos that I would guess were taken at some point after 1999.

If you take a look at SEGA's online histories here or here, you'll notice they list July 1960 as the month that the SEGA 1000 was brought to market. The info sign next to the display unit at SEGA headquarters gives a 1960 year of origin. Famitsu DC's publication "SEGA Arcade History" gives 1960 as the juke's year in its excellent coverage of early SEGA and japaneae amusement history. And even an internal SEGA publication, the magazine Harmony, lists the July 1960 date in a retrospective contained in the November 1993 issue.

I'm making a big point about this date because I believe it is simply wrong, SEGA did not manufacture the SEGA 1000 Stereo Jukebox in 1960. Rather, I believe this is actually the timeframe that SEGA began selling its foreign predecessor.

West Germany

According to SEGA "friend of the family" Freddy Bailey, in the late 50s SEGA founder Marty Bromley had secured use of some of Günter Wulff's factory space in Berlin, West Germany to assemble slot machines as part of SEGA's push into Europe. Freddy has shown off a SEGA Bell unit with a GÜNTER WULFF manufacturer plate, and Marty's daughter corroberated a Berlin factory being part of the early SEGA world.

In early 1959, Wulff started a sister company, Beromat, focusing on the manufacture of a line of jukeboxes, a new endeavor for the company that mostly dealt in gambling and amusement machines. In February they announced two models for their inaugural Harmonie line: a standing model with 200 side selection and a wall mounted unit with 120 sides. Advertisements the following month provided a visual for these jukes, and the March issue of Automaten-Markt ran an article covering a visit to Beromat.

In February 1960, Beromat went to a trade show in London, showing off their jukes while trying to secure international distributors. The machines at the show had new STEREO badging that also made their way into new, full-colour dual-page ad spreads that also featured the new dedicated standing 120-selection model. In May, they attended a coin-op fair in Barcelona, and according to Freddie (whose parents had worked with Wulff), the Japanese patent for the Harmonie and its vertical playback mechanism was either filed or granted April 25th that year.

This is where SEGA re-enters the picture. When Nihon Goraku Bussan (Utamatic Inc) and Nihon Kikei Seizo (Sega Inc) were founded in June 1960, they immediately took over the distribution and manufacturing, respectively, from the old SEGA Japan which had been disbanded mere days prior. And thanks to an ad clipping republished in Automaten-Markt's June 1962 issue, we know that Utamatic handled the Japanese distribution of Harmonie jukes.

I mentioned at the top that SEGA had been competing with Taito and V&V in the field of imported jukebox sales and service, but in 1961, the Japanese economy was booming and the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Trade decided to tighten up on imports to help push domestic independence, declaring a new import limit of 1,000 jukeboxes (alongside other sweeping limits) for the following year. While amusement machines were taking off, with Taito and Sega and Rosen Enterprises constantly expanding into new dedicated game corner or gun corner locations as well as leased space in other venues such as movie theatres, this hard limit on imported jukes provided impetus for domestic companies to start developing their own offerings.

SEGA Engineering

This finally brings us back to the SEGA 1000 Stereo Jukebox. I'm sure you've noticed the visual similarity to the wall-mounted Harmonie model, complete with optional stand with speaker, though to really push the price lower the SEGA version was reduced to a 48-selection model. All the sources I found agree that SEGA engineered their juke themselves, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that Wulff's company assisted to some degree, or supplied tooling to do so.

So the final order of business is, when was the SEGA 1000 Stereo Jukebox developed and sold? The range of time between the import restriction and the german article mentioning the juke's existance is mid-1961 to mid-1962. Thankfully, there's a scan of a page of Asahi Evening News that will further narrow things down:

The post on X that I sourced the pepakura photo from actually gives a 1962 date for the SEGA 1000, though that may have been the first yearly catalog it appeared in. This is the only SEGA source I've found from the 70s onward that doesn't parrot the 1960 date, at least.

Aftermath

Interestingly, 1962 was actually the final year that Beromat produced the Harmonie line, and jukeboxes in general. Sega instead distributed Löwen jukes as an option for the latter half of the '60s. The SEGA 1000 was sold until at least 1967, and wasn't shown in the 1970 company profile. Momentum from the SEGA 1000 actually pushed SEGA into becoming the dominant record distributor in the early 70s, allowing them to exert pressure over prominent record labels to shorten the length of pop singles.

Günter Wulff became a director at Club Specialty Overseas, Inc (formerly SEGA Panama), SEGA of Japan's parent company prior to the buyout by Gulf + Western. After continued success producing slot machines, his company was sold to Bally in 1972.

The Japanese ad clipping republished in Automaten-Markt is the only document I know of that has Utamatic's branding on it. I am eager to pinpoint its source in hopes of finding more, or a possible SEGA 1000 ad, but being overseas severely limits my options. Likewise, Japan only seems to have online records for patents from 1990 onwards, so verifying the Harmonie patent is beyond my ability for now.

I'd like to give a special thanks to Greg McLemore and the International Arcade Museum Library for access to the Automaten-Markt volumes, to Freddie Bailey for humoring my questions, and a huge ありがとうございます to you for reading! My research into SEGA topics like this has taken years already. If anyone has knowledge of further sources to look into, I'd be glad to hear about them!