4/07/2005
The Game Gallery Proud To Distribute For ICE
Like a celebrated person whose exact birth date and time of arrival gets recorded inhistory books, the very first Chexx hockey table shipped out the door of ICE’s suburban Buffalo plant at 11:45PM on Feb. 3, 1983. This single event not only marked the entrance of a nonvideo sports game into a video-oriented business, but the beginnings of a brand new coin-op game factory that would stick around rather than simply dip its toe in the water and run like so many others in those times. Over these past 20 years, ICE would grow and go on to make and market one of the most important and diverse product lines in the history of the coin amusement business. From a machine roster that counted this one, single game in early 1983, the company today has nearly four dozen different machines in its active catalog…“active” meaning that if you want a new one, you can order and get it. The partners who launched that first production model of this “under-the-dome” ice hockey table, Ralph Coppola and Jack Willert, called their company Innovative Concepts in Entertainment, hence the acronym ICE.
