Test Your Fate: History of Pinball Machines

Pinball is an arcade game in which points are scored by manipulating a steel ball to win points or in more modern machines build a story. Modern pinball machines include a storyline in which players have to complete certain objectives in a certain fashion in order to complete the story such as earning high scores in different ways. Points are earned when the ball strikes different targets on the playing field. Many feature a drain at the bottom protected by flippers which when used stop the ball from falling and the game being over.

Pinball machines were developed from traditional outdoor games such as bowls and ground billiards, when these were moved indoors they became games such as table billiards. In France during the 17th-century billiard tables where narrow tables with wooden pins at one end which players would shoot balls at with a cue from the other (see figure 1). As it was time-consuming to re-set the pins once they had been knocked over they were eventually fixed to the tables and holes in the bed of the table became the targets. Players would hit the ball off the pins to achieve the harder holes, with a standard version of the game becoming known as bagatelle.

In 1871 British inventor Montague Redgrave was granted a patent (#115,357) for 'improvements in Bagatelle' due to his use of the spring launcher (see figure 2). Montague's version of the game was wildly used until the 1930s when electrification and active bumpers where introduced. Pacific Amusements produced the game Contact in 19933 which had an electrically powered solenoid to propel the ball out of a bonus hole in the middle of the playing field (see figure 3). Harry Williams, designer of Contact later formed his own company Williams Manufacturing. Electric lights soon became standard on all machines due to competitors trying to keep up. By 1932 there where around 150 companies producing pinball machines mainly in Chicago, with Chicago being the centre of pinball manufacturing ever since.

Flippers (see figure 4) where introduced in 1947 through Gottlieb's Humpty Dumpty which was the first game to add player controlled flippers to keep the ball in play for longer. Triple Action was the first game to feature two flippers at the bottom, however the flippers faced outwards unlike modern pinball machines.

During the 1970s solid-state electronica and digital displays (see figure 5) were introduced due to the introduction of microprocessors. The first solid-state pinball machine is believed to be Mirco Games' The Spirit of 79. However the video game boom of the 1980s signalled the end in the boom for pinball machines as arcade's started to replace pinball machines with video games such as Pac-Man and Space Invaders. However pinball saw a comeback in the 1990s due to more complicated mechanical devices and more elaborate displays being introduced. However this was short-lived as the industry took a downturn towards the end of the 1990s. After the closure of many large manufacturers in 1990s smaller independent manufactures started to appear in the early 2000s, this growth has continued at a steady rate.

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