With decades in the amusement industry, Frank Pellegrini was posthumously inducted into the Amusement Industry Hall of Fame at the recent Amusement Expo.
He was fresh out of college when he started working in sales for Bally Midwest, while simultaneously beginning his first business venture. Pellegrini owned and operated three video arcades. It was this experience and insight that led him to invent and patent the use of debit card systems in video arcades.
Pellegrini also worked with Konami, where he was involved with some of the company’s most successful arcade games. He traveled to Japan to supervise their engineering teams while negotiating all character licensing for titles including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons.
He designed, developed and manufactured many popular arcade games with his brother, Ed, including Police Trainer, Pub Time Darts, Capcom Bowling, Bozo’s Buckets, and the Regatta CD jukebox.
After five years working with Sega, expanding that company’s presence in Latin America, Pellegrini left to join his brother at Team Play. Together, they produced several award-winning games including Star Trek Voyager, Fishbowl Frenzy and Launch Code.
He passed away in 2021 after contracting Covid-19. “I had the pleasure of not only knowing him for over 35 years as an industry colleague, I also had the honor of working with him at Sega,” said AAMA Executive VP Pete Gustafson. “His integrity was beyond reproach. I found him to be wickedly intelligent and incredibly generous, someone with an acerbic sense of humor that could lighten a board room regardless of how intense the conversation taking place may have been.”
RePlay Publisher Eddie Adlum, too, recalled a memory: “Frankie Pellegrini and I hooked up one day when the Southern California distributors were having their post-AMOA show open houses. Since I lived in that city, I had my car parked down on Pico Blvd. by Bettelman’s place and we both hopped in and took off to Betson’s to show our faces down there. Frank was with Konami then and the ad guy. So, I took the opportunity to ask what ad he intended running in our next issue. He said he hadn’t figured that out yet. So, to give him a chance to figure that out, I started driving real slow down Pico Blvd. After a mile or so, he caught on to the game and told me to repeat an ad he’d run with us before, which was still valid. Then we took off for Betson’s.”