Ultra Pro Entertainment: tBR Company of the Week
The evolution of a 70 year old company
Ultra PRO International LLC ("Ultra PRO") was founded in 1952 with the idea of keeping your prized possessions safe. As a privately-held, family-owned company with head offices near Los Angeles, California, we have been designing and manufacturing top quality products since 1952, and our brands are recognized for their high quality standards and design innovations.
With humble beginnings in photo albums and photo pages, the company quickly grew a reputation for keeping valuables safe. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, with the rise of sports card collecting, the company added storage solutions for these valuable items, quickly expanding into the growing market of sports memorabilia storage.
Then, in 1995 during the significant growth of collectible and trading card games, the company added another product - gaming card protection. As the first company to develop products specifically for games, this product propelled the company into a new level of success and an entire line of gaming accessories.
Again, watching the continued growth of tabletop gaming as a hobby, Ultra PRO expanded to include an Entertainment division at the end of 2016. With the acquisition of Jolly Roger Games, and later Playroom Entertainment, this new division of Ultra PRO incorporated established roots in tabletop gaming and began building a new division focused on the creation of tabletop games. For the last 4 years, Ultra PRO has continued the development of award winning hobby, and family friendly, tabletop games.
This year, with the quarantine and lockdown, people have been under even more stress, and with an outlet like tabletop gaming, we are hopeful that these great games we have put so much time, passion, and love into, provide a little respite from the chaos.
This year has been an eventful one for good reasons as well! We recently received news that 3 of our recent releases are Academics Choice award winners; Burger Academy, Trading Faces, and Right Turn, Left Turn. All 3 of these games are not only fun to play for all ages but provide an educational benefit! Burger Academy provides the basic foundations for coding and logic under the guise of a puzzley-type game of making burgers to order! Trading Faces aids children by helping them with the basics of emotional intelligence by learning to read facial expressions, and Right Turn, Left Turn helps directionally challenged players by having them move around an assortment of cards using directions that constantly re-orient to the player.
These and many other great games in our catalog can be found in our online shop at ultraprogames.com. We also market and sell our products through Amazon and a top-tier network of over 150 distributors and customers in North America, Europe and Asia, which in turn supplies our products to thousands of hobby shops, toy stores and other retailers worldwide.
From these humble beginnings nearly 70 years ago, we have grown into offices in California, Ohio, and Rotterdam, (the Netherlands), while continuing to make products here in the United States as well as internationally. We’re excited to have come this far and can’t wait to see where the next chapter takes us!
