The Zaccaria brothers have moved in the tiny Republic of San Marino and founded Tecnoplay, which distributes amusement machines, builded under under license, in Italy.The Zaccaria name will appear in a few products of Mr.
The main production site of Zaccaria become the site of Mr. In 1988, Zaccaria is bought by Alfredo Cazzola.There were some bootlegs running on hardware made (at least partially) by this firm: they should be works made by unknown manifacturers, using some part of Zaccaria hardware. Zaccaria has never copied video games illegally.But they were not bootlegs, the project was original, just the idea was "stolen." His first original games, in fact, they were more or less faithful reproductions of success of other companies.He had already begun to distribute video games from America under license.In 1978 it started to build electronic pinball machines (the first one was Winter Sport), and then video games.Manufacturer of electro-mechanical pinball for decades, it has been for a period the fourth largest manufacturer worldwide (after Bally / Midway, Williams and Gottlieb) and the first outside USA.Brothers Zaccaria were named Natale, Marino and Franco you can found their initials in the company logo.Fratelli (bros.) Zaccaria, Calderara di Reno (Bologna) was the tycoon of Italian game industry.This might also have been a result of the company’s UK background, seeking the customers of pubs across Britain. TAI might have been ahead of the curve with a bartop offering of arcade games, seeing an opportunity for casual gameplay on the counters of watering holes.
TAI made their own (very well made) cabinets and offered games in both an upright version and (unusual for the time period) bartop versions. More interesting than the actual game was TAI’s unique arcade cabinet designs. Astro Fighter was common fodder for arcade game bootleg PCB’s sometimes going under the names Astro Attack, Astro Fire and Star Fighter.
(Some versions of TAI's Astro Combat have also been reported as bootleg Tank Battalion games from Namco) Astro Fighter is one of a countless number of space combat games of the era, TAI’s version is built on lesser hardware than the original game causing some variations in sound and gameplay quality. Astro Combat is actually a unauthorized bootleg (or a grey market PCB rebranded for the USA without a proper license) of the Data East arcade game Astro Fighter. The first mention I could find of TAI’s arcade game ambitions were in the form of a 1980 flyer advertising an arcade game titled Astro Combat.
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