Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
Speaker 1: tech are you? So? Just this past weekend, I was
Speaker 1: invited to attend an event called the Southern Fried Gaming
Speaker 1: Expo here in Atlanta, Georgia. I attended as media. So
Speaker 1: big thanks to the Expo for allowing me to come
Speaker 1: in and check it out. I really appreciate it. This conference,
Speaker 1: this convention, this gaming Expo is founded in twenty fourteen
Speaker 1: by a group of pinball and arcade enthusiasts, and it's
Speaker 1: an annual event in which gaming fans from across multiple
Speaker 1: platforms and genres all come together and they can trade
Speaker 1: and buy and sell and play games. That includes all
Speaker 1: sorts of games like you've got your pinball and your
Speaker 1: arcade machines. Many of those arcade machines are quite obscure,
Speaker 1: like you could call them classic titles because they date
Speaker 1: back to like the seventies and eighties. But good gollie,
Speaker 1: I ran into ones that I had never heard of before.
Speaker 1: And I've played a lot of arcade games, but you
Speaker 1: also have console games there, you've got tabletop games. It's
Speaker 1: kind of a mecha of gaming and a great community too,
Speaker 1: really interesting group of folks who are wandering around and
Speaker 1: playing different games, and the expo includes many different activities.
Speaker 1: You know, of course, you can do all the playing
Speaker 1: and buying, selling and all that sort of stuff, but
Speaker 1: they are also panel discussions ranging from history lessons to
Speaker 1: advice on how to maintain a machine of your own
Speaker 1: or even design one if you were so inclined and
Speaker 1: like elements of game design, which is pretty cool. They
Speaker 1: had musical performances and occasionally professional wrestling. There are vendors
Speaker 1: selling game adjacent stuff like clothing or dice towers, or
Speaker 1: source books or jams and jellies. It was a fun event.
Speaker 1: I really did enjoy my time there, but it got
Speaker 1: me thinking I should do an episode on the evolution
Speaker 1: of the pinball machine. Now I have done an episode
Speaker 1: about pinball. There was a classic episode of Tech Stuff
Speaker 1: where I covered it, but I feel like the subject
Speaker 1: actually needs a deeper dive and we'll need a couple
Speaker 1: of episodes to cover because pinball has a history that's
Speaker 1: really fascinating. You've got the evolution of mechanical, like purely
Speaker 1: mechanical machines to electro mechanical pinball machines up to modern
Speaker 1: day electronic and computer based pinball machines. When I say
Speaker 1: computer based, I mean the micro controllers and stuff are
Speaker 1: overseen by a fairly simple computer, but a computer nonetheless
Speaker 1: in some modern pinball machines. But obviously you also have
Speaker 1: pinball games that are computer games, right, like simulations of
Speaker 1: pinball machines. That's kind of a different thing. I'm not
Speaker 1: really going to talk about that. So let us dive
Speaker 1: into the fascinating story of pinball, because it's also got
Speaker 1: a lot of politics and crime and moral panic wrapped
Speaker 1: up in it. Now. The story itself is tricky to
Speaker 1: tell because pinball is one of those things that evolved
Speaker 1: rather organically from other activities, and I maintain it's largely
Speaker 1: a matter of opinion as to what constitutes the first
Speaker 1: pinball machine, Like there are a lot of contenders that
Speaker 1: could potentially claim that title, and I think it all
Speaker 1: depends on what components need to be there for you
Speaker 1: to call it a pinball machine, Like what does a
Speaker 1: pinball machine actually need to have for it to be
Speaker 1: considered an actual pinball machine. Would it need to have pins,
Speaker 1: not all pinball machines do. Does it need to have flippers?
Speaker 1: Does it need to have a ball presumably a coin
Speaker 1: slot like a score keeping system? What is it? But
Speaker 1: whether we can definitively proclaim a specific instance as the
Speaker 1: first pinball machine or not, we can still talk about
Speaker 1: its origins. So before there were pinball machines, there were
Speaker 1: lawn games. Now, some of these games shared a resemblance
Speaker 1: to golf, which required an awful lot of land to
Speaker 1: play on. Most people did not have a lawn large
Speaker 1: enough to have a golf course on. Golf dates back
Speaker 1: as far as the fifteenth century, with King James the
Speaker 1: Second of Scotland famously outlawing the sport in fourteen fifty
Speaker 1: seven because he really needed to get the Scots, you know,
Speaker 1: trained up for war, but they were too busy golfing.
Speaker 1: So golf was seen as a distraction and something that
Speaker 1: unseerious people would pursue, and Jimmy's ban on golf would
Speaker 1: serve as one of the earliest, if not the actual
Speaker 1: earliest record of the sp itself golf getting banned. So
Speaker 1: it really is like pinball, But that's that's getting ahead
Speaker 1: of myself. Anyway, lawn games became popular, and there were
Speaker 1: lots of different variations, like you had bowls, you had croquete,
Speaker 1: you had baci. But these games still required you to
Speaker 1: actually have a lawn and they weren't great options if
Speaker 1: the weather happened to be unpleasant, which it could be
Speaker 1: in places like northern Europe. So what if you could
Speaker 1: create games that evoked certain elements of lawn games, but
Speaker 1: they were designed in such a way that they could
Speaker 1: be played indoors, Then you'd have a Eureka moment. This
Speaker 1: was what inspired the invention of parlor games like bagatel.
Speaker 1: So in many ways, bagatel is similar to billiards or pool.
Speaker 1: It'splayed on a table. Those original tables were quite large,
Speaker 1: they were level, they were flat, right, they had no
Speaker 1: mechanical elements at all. So the table had little divots
Speaker 1: in it, and you would play bagatell with balls, and
Speaker 1: you would use acoustic similar to billiards or pool, and
Speaker 1: you would hit the ball toward these little divots, each
Speaker 1: of which had an amount of points associated with them.
Speaker 1: In some ways, I think a bagatel is similar to darts.
Speaker 1: You've got a playing field with specific areas representing specific
Speaker 1: point values, and your goal is to accumulate points by
Speaker 1: firing a projectile at that playing field. Now, toward the
Speaker 1: end of the nineteenth century, a chap with the name
Speaker 1: Montague Andrew Elijah Redgrave came up with an idea to
Speaker 1: enhance the old bagatel design and to miniaturize it. You know,
Speaker 1: not everyone had space in their parlor for a dedicated
Speaker 1: gaming table that was close to the size of a
Speaker 1: billiard's table that just wasn't within everyone's you know means.
Speaker 1: So Redgrave thought it might be keen to make a
Speaker 1: Bagatelle table that was small enough to fit on a
Speaker 1: normal tabletop, kind of like one of those small pinball
Speaker 1: kits you sometimes see that are like a fifth the
Speaker 1: size of a normal pinball table. Like a toy pinball
Speaker 1: game is kind of similar to that. So this begatel
Speaker 1: board would be played on an incline, so the top
Speaker 1: of the playing field is an inch or two higher
Speaker 1: than the base of the playfield. So the player would
Speaker 1: need to shoot a ball, which would now be a
Speaker 1: little marble sized ball instead of like a pool ball
Speaker 1: sized ball. Shoot a ball up the playfield and then
Speaker 1: the ball would naturally roll down this incline, and this
Speaker 1: time you would have little holes in the playfield that
Speaker 1: would represent points, but you would have pins pi ns
Speaker 1: pins surrounding these holes and only allowing the ball to
Speaker 1: pass through in certain points. Otherwise the ball would just
Speaker 1: bounce off the pins and go somewhere else. So the
Speaker 1: pins are kind of guarding the holes, and only a
Speaker 1: ball coming in at the right angle is going to
Speaker 1: actually make it into the whole and thus score whatever
Speaker 1: the points happened to be. Redgrave created a plunger in
Speaker 1: order to propel the little marbles up the playfield, and
Speaker 1: he used a metal spring for the actual plunger. So
Speaker 1: if you pull back on the plunger, it would either
Speaker 1: compress a spring or it would stretch out a spring,
Speaker 1: depending upon how you designed the plunger. But this way
Speaker 1: you store potential energy. Right once you release the plunger,
Speaker 1: the spring quote unquote wants to get back to its
Speaker 1: normal shape. It'll spring back to its normal shape and
Speaker 1: thus pull the plunger forward, strike the ball, and knock
Speaker 1: the ball up the playfield. These boards were very simple
Speaker 1: and purely mechanical systems. The only mechanical element actually was
Speaker 1: just the plunger. That you would use to fire the
Speaker 1: ball up the incline to start the whole process. Everything
Speaker 1: else was passive. There were no flippers, there were no bumpers,
Speaker 1: there were no crazy gimmicks. There was no progressive score
Speaker 1: a keeping system. There was no way to manipulate the
Speaker 1: ball once you release the plunger, unless you were to
Speaker 1: nudge or tilt the table. You could do that, but
Speaker 1: you weren't supposed to, and so you could argue that
Speaker 1: this game was largely a game of chance. Now you
Speaker 1: could have a general feel for how far back you
Speaker 1: should pull the plunger before releasing, so there was some
Speaker 1: skill involved, but that was the best you could do,
Speaker 1: and the wild wins of fortune would carry the game onward.
Speaker 1: Monty Redgrave would file a patent for his tabletop bagtel
Speaker 1: game in the eighteen seventies. It would be a bit
Speaker 1: before we get to something really resembling what we think
Speaker 1: of his pinball, but some basic components, like the pins,
Speaker 1: the balls, the plunger, those were already present in this early, early,
Speaker 1: early iteration. Again, keeping score was the responsibility of the players.
Speaker 1: There was no progressive score keeping system, so you had
Speaker 1: to like write it all down because the wooden board
Speaker 1: could not do that for you. One thing that would
Speaker 1: be a contributing factor to pinball eventually becoming a scandalous
Speaker 1: activity is that some bars and pubs and things of
Speaker 1: that nature, some shops would have bagatel boards where you
Speaker 1: could play and you would pay a certain amount of
Speaker 1: money and you would get a certain number of balls
Speaker 1: for however much you paid. Typically we're talking like pennies
Speaker 1: for like five balls or something, And if you were
Speaker 1: to rack up a high enough score, you might win
Speaker 1: yourself a free drink. So you'd pay the bartender, get
Speaker 1: a bunch of balls, try and get your best score.
Speaker 1: And this element of chance in the game made it
Speaker 1: lean a little bit on the side of gambling. So, yes,
Speaker 1: there was some skill to this too. It wasn't entirely
Speaker 1: up to chance. Using just the right amount of finesse
Speaker 1: to plunge a ball so that it's more likely to
Speaker 1: go where you wanted it to go was part of it.
Speaker 1: But a lot of that stuff really was up to chance, right, Like,
Speaker 1: you could be really careful and still things might go
Speaker 1: poor simply because of maybe there's a defect in the ball,
Speaker 1: maybe there's a chip in the playfield. There could be
Speaker 1: anything like that. So this means the games were tiptoeing
Speaker 1: up to being classified as gambling, just as slot machines
Speaker 1: would turn out to be. Okay, we're going to take
Speaker 1: a quick break to thank our sponsors, but when we
Speaker 1: come back, we'll talk more about the early days of
Speaker 1: proto pinball. We're back now. I'm sure there were no
Speaker 1: shortage of folks who created variations on Bagatel, like there
Speaker 1: were probably lots of knockoffs and copies and iterations of Bagatel.
Speaker 1: But the next bit that I feel is really important
Speaker 1: for our exploration of pinball is the inclusion of coinslots.
Speaker 1: So Bagtel for the longest time meant that you would
Speaker 1: have to go and pay somebody who would keep the
Speaker 1: balls like locked away, and they would give you the
Speaker 1: balls for a game of Bagatel, and then you would
Speaker 1: bring the balls back afterward, like you would write down
Speaker 1: your score, maybe bring the bartender over to see your score,
Speaker 1: and then try and get some beer out of it
Speaker 1: or whatever. But this was an activity that would benefit
Speaker 1: from automation. We talk a lot about automation on this
Speaker 1: show and how it can be bad, but sometimes it's good,
Speaker 1: you know, if you don't want to have to keep
Speaker 1: track of a bunch of marbles while your clientele are
Speaker 1: playing Bagatel. Then this is a good development, which is
Speaker 1: that the introduction of the coin operated slot game. I
Speaker 1: did an episode about the history of vending machines which
Speaker 1: stretches back surprisingly far. There are records of an ancient
Speaker 1: design by Hero of Alexandria back in the first century
Speaker 1: of the Common era. For example, a hero proposed a
Speaker 1: device that, in exchange for a deposited coin, would dispense
Speaker 1: holy water. Some pretty clever system of a pan and levers,
Speaker 1: and so when you inserted a coin, that coin would
Speaker 1: fall onto a pan and weigh it down, and this
Speaker 1: would put pressure on a lever. The lever would open
Speaker 1: a valve and let the holy water out, but then
Speaker 1: the pan would eventually tip over far enough for the
Speaker 1: coin to slide off of it into a repository, and
Speaker 1: when freed of the coin's weight, the pan would come
Speaker 1: back up again and the lever would close the valve
Speaker 1: and the water would stop flowing, which is pretty neat.
Speaker 1: We don't know if anyone ever built one of those things,
Speaker 1: but the design seems like it would work. But the
Speaker 1: real era of the coin operated vending machines would be
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century. The eighteen hundreds, folks began to build
Speaker 1: machines that would dispense stuff ranging from books to stamps
Speaker 1: to later on stuff like postcards and food. Finding a
Speaker 1: way to connect the insertion of a coin with the
Speaker 1: operation of the device was the real trick, but by
Speaker 1: the late nineteenth century it was really becoming a thing.
Speaker 1: One company in the United States that was in the
Speaker 1: coin operated machine business was a Detroit Bay Least operation
Speaker 1: called Kale Brothers Manufacturing Company. That cillle So Kale became
Speaker 1: known as an amusements manufacturing company, building coin operated devices
Speaker 1: like test your Strength games, gum vending machines, slot machines,
Speaker 1: and yes, coin operated Bagatel tables. So again, early on
Speaker 1: we see an association of proto pinball machines and less
Speaker 1: respectable means of amusing oneself. So the Kale brothers themselves,
Speaker 1: August and Adolph, they formed the company in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds, though August had previously operated his own company,
Speaker 1: and some of his work kind of bleeds over between
Speaker 1: these two organizations, including this Bagatel game. I'm sure they
Speaker 1: made many more models than just one. The one I
Speaker 1: could find was called log Cabin, which itself went through
Speaker 1: several iterations. The first version of log Cabin was kind
Speaker 1: of boxy. It looks sort of like a picture frame,
Speaker 1: like it was a rectangle. Later versions, however, would have
Speaker 1: an arched upper border, so you'd have a curve at
Speaker 1: the top instead of you know, hard angles, and that
Speaker 1: curve was a nice curve that a ball could follow
Speaker 1: if you were to plunge it up the playfield. Now,
Speaker 1: the game was kind of like plinko. You know, you
Speaker 1: would launch a ball to the top of the table
Speaker 1: and again the ball. The table was an incline so
Speaker 1: that the ball would roll toward the bottom of the playfield,
Speaker 1: and there were pins all along the way, which would
Speaker 1: you know, change the way the ball would fall. Eventually,
Speaker 1: a ball would nestle into a slot at the base
Speaker 1: of the board, and there was also a hole at
Speaker 1: the very top of the board. If you got a
Speaker 1: ball in the hole, you would win yourself a dollar.
Speaker 1: The bottom pockets had values ranging from absolutely nothing up
Speaker 1: to fifty cents, and it cost five cents to play
Speaker 1: the game. You would get one shot per play. But
Speaker 1: we still don't have any flippers. We don't have any
Speaker 1: electro mechanical components to talk about. Heck, with log Cabin,
Speaker 1: it was a lot about luck, so we're definitely close
Speaker 1: to gambling here. What's more, this is how things would
Speaker 1: stay for around three decades. It wouldn't be until the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties when we'd actually get the word pinball at all. Like,
Speaker 1: you could argue that log Cabin was a pinball machine
Speaker 1: even though there was no like flippers or other mechanical elements. Besides,
Speaker 1: you know, the plunger and flippers would take like half
Speaker 1: a century to get there. So in the nineteen thirties
Speaker 1: we're skipping way ahead. Because while there were lots of
Speaker 1: other tables made over the following decades, they weren't different
Speaker 1: enough to really merit inclusion. So by the nineteen thirties
Speaker 1: you get to a company called the Bingo Novelty Company,
Speaker 1: which produced a purely mechanical proto pinball machine called, fittingly enough, Bingo.
Speaker 1: The game had a coin slot, it had a plunger,
Speaker 1: It had no other mechanical components, at least none that
Speaker 1: I could see, And if you put a coin in
Speaker 1: the slot, it would give you the chance to shoot
Speaker 1: five balls up the playfield. And these balls could settle
Speaker 1: into one of five holes surrounded by pins, so you
Speaker 1: had to have the ball land just right to go
Speaker 1: into these holes. Otherwise they'd bounce off and rolled down
Speaker 1: to drain at the base of the playfield and you
Speaker 1: would lose them. The promotional material for Bingo proclaimed it
Speaker 1: to be a game of skill. I suppose if you
Speaker 1: were very, very good with the plunger, you could make
Speaker 1: the argument that it was a game of skill, and
Speaker 1: maybe you could shoot the ball so it landed in
Speaker 1: the appropriate holes. I assume those holes were associated with
Speaker 1: the letters of Bingo, and that the main goal was
Speaker 1: to get one in each hole. That's just a guess.
Speaker 1: The pictures I've seen have all been at an angle
Speaker 1: where I really couldn't see the playfield very clearly, so
Speaker 1: it's hard to say exactly what the goal was. But
Speaker 1: it was a game that was rather popular that One
Speaker 1: interesting thing about Bingo is that the Bingo novelty Company
Speaker 1: would partner with a young manufacturer to produce the machine
Speaker 1: because demand was higher than what the novelty company could supply.
Speaker 1: Was a company called Gottlieb, which would become famously connected
Speaker 1: to pinball machines moving forward. It would become one of
Speaker 1: the big names in pinball production. Another early game was
Speaker 1: called bally Who. This one also involved using a plunger
Speaker 1: to shoot a ball up a playfield, where it could
Speaker 1: roll down and hopefully land in one of the holes
Speaker 1: guarded by pins to earn a high score. Again, some
Speaker 1: proprietors would award prizes to those who achieved a high
Speaker 1: score you know that was above a certain given level
Speaker 1: in the game. One neat component in bally Who is
Speaker 1: that upon receiving a coin, the floor of the playfield
Speaker 1: would kind of drop out, and that would allow the
Speaker 1: balls that were already nestled into these little holes to
Speaker 1: drop through and thus roll down and be ready for
Speaker 1: your next round of play. So I thought that was cool,
Speaker 1: Like it was a way of clearing the playfield without
Speaker 1: having it be open access. Right, the earliest Bagatel games
Speaker 1: were into the air. You could reach in and move
Speaker 1: the balls around if you only wanted to, and then
Speaker 1: obviously that would lead to the potential for lots of
Speaker 1: hanky panky, Like you could just say you got a
Speaker 1: high score and all you did was put the balls there,
Speaker 1: kind of like in Young Frankenstein with the dart playing scene.
Speaker 1: So that was something that had to be addressed. So
Speaker 1: you would typically have like a sheet of glass, a
Speaker 1: pane of glass separating the player from the playfield, and
Speaker 1: maybe in one little section you would be able to
Speaker 1: retrieve the balls, but otherwise you were not able to
Speaker 1: physically manipulate where the balls were got to make the
Speaker 1: cheating a little difficult at least. So there's a short
Speaker 1: video of bally Who in action. It's on YouTube if
Speaker 1: you want to watch it. It's on a channel called
Speaker 1: Balin von Stahl b A L E n v A
Speaker 1: N S t a L. And the game again is
Speaker 1: called bally Who, so you can actually see it played
Speaker 1: and it's pretty simple, but it certainly is protopinball anyway.
Speaker 1: A ton of other similar games would come out in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, providing entertainment to cash strapped folks who
Speaker 1: were navigating the Great Depression. You might say, like, wow,
Speaker 1: these things seem really simple, but you have to remember
Speaker 1: at the time the number of outlets accessible to most
Speaker 1: folks was pretty limited as far as entertainment goes, and
Speaker 1: money was in tight supply for a lot of families.
Speaker 1: So finding something that was relatively inexpensive and diverting was
Speaker 1: a big deal. Around nineteen thirty three, some designers began
Speaker 1: to incorporate electric batteries into these machines, and these would
Speaker 1: usually power pretty simple elements, a lot of noisemaker elements
Speaker 1: like buzzers and bells, that kind of thing which would
Speaker 1: signal scoring and draw attention to the table, but other
Speaker 1: than that, they weren't really powering any components that would
Speaker 1: materially affect the play. This was also around the time
Speaker 1: that the term pinball began to pop up and be
Speaker 1: used to describe these machines. Gottlieb produced a table in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty four called Register, which featured a progressive score counter. Finally,
Speaker 1: players would not have to keep track of their own
Speaker 1: scores and just add everything up in their heads. So
Speaker 1: the score was displayed as a kind of dial, and
Speaker 1: there was a needle that would keep track of the score.
Speaker 1: The needle will just physically point to whatever score value
Speaker 1: the player had achieved at that point. Now, one problem
Speaker 1: that proprietors were running into was that some people were
Speaker 1: willing to break the rules in order to try and
Speaker 1: get a high score. They would bump or nudge a table,
Speaker 1: or they would outright pick the table up and tilt
Speaker 1: it to try and guide balls into the higher scoring sections.
Speaker 1: And considering some places were paying out for high scores,
Speaker 1: I guess you could understand why this was happening, but
Speaker 1: it was a problem. So how do you make sure
Speaker 1: people aren't cheating in order to win a prize or
Speaker 1: even just to set a high score. Enter the tilt sensor. Now,
Speaker 1: some sources cite Harry Williams as the inventor of the tilt.
Speaker 1: His name is also associated with pinball because the Williams
Speaker 1: manufacturing company would end up making a lot of pinball machines,
Speaker 1: and in fact you hear things like Bally and Williams
Speaker 1: and Bally Williams and that sort of stuff. But at
Speaker 1: least some pinball historians say that a game that came
Speaker 1: out of a company called Rockola may have been the
Speaker 1: first to have a tilt sensor. Others say it was
Speaker 1: Gottlieb's Broker's Tip game that had it, But all of
Speaker 1: them had very similar approaches to being able to detect
Speaker 1: a tilt, So the way the sensor worked was really genius.
Speaker 1: It was a very simple mechanical approach. Typically, you would
Speaker 1: have a cup and inside the cup, you would mount
Speaker 1: a little pedestal, and this would be level to the floor.
Speaker 1: The pedestal would have maybe a little kind of shallow
Speaker 1: bowl at the very top of it, a very very
Speaker 1: shallow bowl into which you would place a ball, and
Speaker 1: if someone were to rock the machine, the ball would
Speaker 1: get knocked off of this pedestal, and that would indicate
Speaker 1: that there was a tilt. Some of the games, the
Speaker 1: Rocola game in particular, had very very clever ways of
Speaker 1: doing this. With a Rocola game, the ball was actually
Speaker 1: being held against a little tab that connected to a
Speaker 1: sign that indicated the game was legit, and underneath the
Speaker 1: ball was a plunger, a spring mounted plunger that was
Speaker 1: keeping pressure on the ball, keeping it in place against
Speaker 1: this little plate that held the legit sign in place.
Speaker 1: And if the ball were to fall off of that
Speaker 1: plunger because someone was shaking the machine too hard, then
Speaker 1: the ball would no longer be holding that play in place,
Speaker 1: and the little sign would switch to say tilt, which
Speaker 1: would indicate to the proprietor, oh, whatever score this person
Speaker 1: achieved is not legitimate because they tilted the machine in
Speaker 1: order to do it. That was the whole purpose of
Speaker 1: these tilt sensors in the first place was just to indicate, hey,
Speaker 1: this is not a valid score, so do not award
Speaker 1: this yahoo a beer or a dollar or whatever it
Speaker 1: might be, because they cheated in order to get it. Now,
Speaker 1: as time would go on, this very simple mechanical approach
Speaker 1: would get replaced by electro mechanical devices, so often they
Speaker 1: would use things like leaf switches. These are very lightweight
Speaker 1: metal contacts and if they come in contact with each other,
Speaker 1: if they touch each other, they complete a circuit and
Speaker 1: then you get a tilt or a tilt warning. That's
Speaker 1: usually for side to side or up and down. There's
Speaker 1: also another type, a pendulum type, where you have a
Speaker 1: pendulum rod and it's mounted in such a way that
Speaker 1: it's inside the circumference of a metal ring. And typically
Speaker 1: the rod doesn't touch the ring, but if you were
Speaker 1: to shake the machine, the rod could start swaying, and
Speaker 1: if it comes in contact with the metal ring again,
Speaker 1: it completes a circuit and you get a tilt or
Speaker 1: tilt warning. Now, before I go on tilt, we need
Speaker 1: to take another quick break to thank our sponsors, and
Speaker 1: then we'll talk more about the evolution of pinball. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back. And at this point in our history, we've
Speaker 1: got plungers, we've got balls, we've got a tilt sensor,
Speaker 1: and then we would get bumpers. Still no flippers, but
Speaker 1: bumpers would come next. Now I cannot swear that it
Speaker 1: was the first machine to do so, but Bolo, a
Speaker 1: game from the Patient Novelty Manufacturing Company in nineteen thirty six,
Speaker 1: included bumpers. Now, these were passive bumpers, meaning they didn't
Speaker 1: bump back like with modern pinball machines. These are the
Speaker 1: things that, when the ball comes in contact with them,
Speaker 1: will knock the ball in some other direction, typically with
Speaker 1: great force, assuming that the bumpers are tuned properly. But
Speaker 1: these bumpers, Bolo's bumpers, they were passive. They were spring mounted,
Speaker 1: so they would you give when't being hit by a pinball,
Speaker 1: but they would spring back too. These bumpers look like
Speaker 1: bowling pins for Bolo. They are mounted on little rods
Speaker 1: that in turn were attached to the springs, so yeah,
Speaker 1: they'd move around if you hit them. A company that
Speaker 1: would be called Bally, this is also another big name
Speaker 1: in pinball, would essentially copy this idea for a game
Speaker 1: that they called Bumper, and like Register, Bumper would also
Speaker 1: have a progressive score component, but use light projection to
Speaker 1: show it to the player. The score would remain on
Speaker 1: the back box of the machine after play, and it
Speaker 1: would only clear once a new game was ready to begin,
Speaker 1: so that way you could have a score stay up
Speaker 1: and show someone like if you hit a high score
Speaker 1: or whatever. This also says that we're at a point
Speaker 1: where we're getting backboxes on these machines, which was a
Speaker 1: new development as well. Still no flippers though in fact,
Speaker 1: the first pinball machine record I could find that featured
Speaker 1: a pinball machine with player controlled flippers would be Humpty Dumpty,
Speaker 1: which was produced by Gottlieb and released in nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 1: So that's nearly half a century of these various amusement
Speaker 1: machines before we would even get to flippers. And for
Speaker 1: those of y'all who have never played pinball, the flippers
Speaker 1: are little controllers that let you propel a ball back
Speaker 1: up the playfield, and good players can get a feel
Speaker 1: for where the ball needs to be on the flipper
Speaker 1: in order to direct the pinball to a specific target
Speaker 1: on the playfield. Great players can manipulate the ball and
Speaker 1: pass it from one flipper to another, assuming that it
Speaker 1: has multiple flippers in the first place, all in order
Speaker 1: to get specific shots. Humpty Dumpty slippers, there are six
Speaker 1: of them, range from the top third of the playfield
Speaker 1: to the middle to the bottom third of the playfield,
Speaker 1: but they are not at the very base, which is
Speaker 1: where you would find them in modern pinball machines. Right.
Speaker 1: Most modern pinball machines have a pair of flippers at
Speaker 1: the base of the playfield, just above the ball drain,
Speaker 1: and they're spaced far enough apart so that the ball
Speaker 1: can pass between the flippers if the angle is right.
Speaker 1: Humpty Dumpty has flippers facing toward the outer walls of
Speaker 1: the playfield, so kind of like in the opposite orientation
Speaker 1: of where you would expect them based on where flippers
Speaker 1: appear today. And like I said, there's six of them,
Speaker 1: and if the ball gets below your bottom two set
Speaker 1: of flippers, you're pretty much stuck. An engineer named Harry
Speaker 1: mAbs gets the credit for thinking up the flippers, and
Speaker 1: these devices helped reinvigorate interest in pinball, but only in
Speaker 1: certain places, because by this time authorities in some cities
Speaker 1: were cracking down on pinball machines, saying that they promoted
Speaker 1: gambling and delinquency, that kids were spending too much time
Speaker 1: and money on pinball games instead of doing wholesome things
Speaker 1: like studying, or running errands for their parents, or getting
Speaker 1: drafted and sent off to war. In fact, the trouble
Speaker 1: began pretty early on here in Atlanta, Mayor William B.
Speaker 1: Hartsfield waged a war on pinball. Now, if you've heard
Speaker 1: the name Hartsfield before, chances are you either live in
Speaker 1: Atlanta or you had a layover at the Atlanta Airport,
Speaker 1: which is partly named after him. It's also partly named
Speaker 1: after Maynard Jackson, a different Atlanta mayor. So anyway, on
Speaker 1: June twentieth, nineteen thirty nine, the newspaper here in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: the Atlanta Constitution, reported that Hartsfield had outlawed pinball within
Speaker 1: the city. Parent and teacher organizations had been pressuring council
Speaker 1: members for this outcome for quite some time, proclaiming pinball
Speaker 1: to be the source of all wickednesses children, which is
Speaker 1: only a slight exaggeration, y'all, Like I'm I'm poking fun here,
Speaker 1: But there was a lot of moral panic about pinball.
Speaker 1: One councilman named Ea Minor said, quote, these machines, which
Speaker 1: you can find on every corner in the city, are
Speaker 1: tending to encourage a moral degeneration among our children. End
Speaker 1: quote starts to sound like the music man right where
Speaker 1: you're talking about how the kids are hanging out in
Speaker 1: the pool hall and becoming total degenerates. So yeah, pinball
Speaker 1: was viewed as a CD sordid distraction. Ea Minor would
Speaker 1: even get more heated about pinball in that article I
Speaker 1: was talking about. I swear I did not make up
Speaker 1: this next quote. It's actually in the Atlanta Constitution newspaper.
Speaker 1: It goes, quote, these machines lead to gambling and stealing
Speaker 1: and killing and eventually to a rope around the neck
Speaker 1: for someone. End quote. Good golly, Ea, you thought pinball
Speaker 1: was the first step on a path that ultimately would
Speaker 1: lead to capital punishment. All right, So what would happen
Speaker 1: if you happened to be the proprietor of an establishment
Speaker 1: within the city limits of Atlanta and you allowed one
Speaker 1: of these sin machines in your place of business, Well,
Speaker 1: you would face a fine of two hundred dollars, which
Speaker 1: was a heck of a lot of money back in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine and also quote thirty days in the
Speaker 1: stockade for either owning or possessing a pinball or similar
Speaker 1: machine end quote. So this band didn't just cover pinball machines,
Speaker 1: it also covered stuff like slot machines. Seventy five years
Speaker 1: later to the day the Southern Fried Gaming Expo would
Speaker 1: go live. So the Southern Fried Gaming Expo's first day
Speaker 1: of operation was seventy five years after pinball had been
Speaker 1: officially outlawed in the city of Atlanta. Clearly it has
Speaker 1: since been rescinded, but that's just at least now. Arguably
Speaker 1: the most famous war on pinball was what happened in
Speaker 1: New York City, and another famous mayor was behind that.
Speaker 1: LaGuardia also a guy whose name is used for an
Speaker 1: airport in the city where he was mayor. So in
Speaker 1: January nineteen forty two, this is after Atlanta has already
Speaker 1: outlawed pinball. So don't say we're not progressive. We could
Speaker 1: be restrictive far before the Yankees get to it. But
Speaker 1: in January nineteen forty two, LaGuardia passed a ban on
Speaker 1: pinball machines in New York City and even directed police
Speaker 1: departments to raid various businesses that were known to have
Speaker 1: pinball machines inside them. Now, whether you believe LaGuardia and
Speaker 1: other leaders around the United States genuinely felt pinball was
Speaker 1: an immoral invention that needed to be wiped out, or
Speaker 1: you happen to be a little more cynical and you
Speaker 1: think this was just a way for a politics to
Speaker 1: score points with their base without you know, actually doing
Speaker 1: anything really challenging, like facing down organized crime. Well, the
Speaker 1: end result was that pinball machines in many major cities
Speaker 1: across the United States were made illegal. Now, this and
Speaker 1: the impact of World War Two, which required a lot
Speaker 1: of manufacturing companies to convert their operations to support war efforts,
Speaker 1: not to mention shortages on raw materials, would mean that
Speaker 1: very few pinball machines were actually getting made in the
Speaker 1: late thirties to mid forties. But even that didn't stop
Speaker 1: pinball manufacturers from making and innovating machines entirely. They still did.
Speaker 1: The flippers being introduced in the late forties were a
Speaker 1: really big part of innovation in pinball machines because with
Speaker 1: more control, pinball could be positioned as a game of
Speaker 1: skill rather than as a game of chance. However, it
Speaker 1: would take nearly three decades for a definitive case to
Speaker 1: settle that matter, and we'll get to that one in
Speaker 1: the next episode. In the meantime, you had engineers like
Speaker 1: Steve Kordak, who would design pinball machines for multiple companies
Speaker 1: throughout his life. He also introduced some new innovations in pinball.
Speaker 1: One of those was the drop target. So these are
Speaker 1: little physical targets. They usually look like things like white
Speaker 1: squares with a target painted on them, or like a
Speaker 1: decal on them or whatever. They're not always white, but
Speaker 1: that's a very common coloration for these drop targets. And
Speaker 1: when they're struck, they drop down into the playfield and
Speaker 1: there's an electronic switch that causes them to pop up again,
Speaker 1: presumably when the player has achieved some task or when
Speaker 1: the game resets. Kardak also introduced multi ball play. This
Speaker 1: would be in the early sixties when he introduced this.
Speaker 1: So multi ball is exactly what sounds like. It's when
Speaker 1: a player suddenly has to contend with more than one
Speaker 1: pinball in play at the same time, typically because they
Speaker 1: have done some sequence of targets that have unlocked. This
Speaker 1: multi ball. Cordeck may also be the first person to
Speaker 1: relocate the flippers to the bottom of the pinball playfield,
Speaker 1: just above the ball drain, which is again sort of
Speaker 1: the standard location for most pinball machines today. At this stage,
Speaker 1: we're in the true electro mechanical era of pinball machines.
Speaker 1: More innovation would follow, so in our next episode, I'll
Speaker 1: talk more about the inner workings of these electro mechanical
Speaker 1: pinball machines, and we'll also transition toward solid state electronics
Speaker 1: thanks to a little invention called the transistor. We'll also
Speaker 1: talk about how the actual game elements of pinball would evolve.
Speaker 1: Like early on, pinball games were all about just kind
Speaker 1: of random bouncing around with a ball, hitting various obstacles
Speaker 1: as it inevitably made its way toward a ball drain.
Speaker 1: But over time you would see introduction of all sorts
Speaker 1: of stuff like ramps and other elements that would would
Speaker 1: allow you to strategically go about playing a game. And
Speaker 1: then in turn, the games became more sophisticated, where it's
Speaker 1: not just they had more features, it's that game designers
Speaker 1: would say, what if we made a mode where someone
Speaker 1: had to complete features in a specific order, and if
Speaker 1: they do so, they unlock a new element of play
Speaker 1: with this game. And then we eventually get to the
Speaker 1: introduction of things like wizard modes. We'll talk all about
Speaker 1: that stuff in our next episode and kind of chat
Speaker 1: about how that evolved over time, and just like the
Speaker 1: pinball machines themselves, this evolution was very organic and gradual.
Speaker 1: I don't think you can point to a single pinball
Speaker 1: machine and say this is where it all changed. There
Speaker 1: are certain machines that are iconic and known for their modes,
Speaker 1: like Adam's Family is a great example, and I'll definitely
Speaker 1: talk about that in the next episod. But I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that you can just easily point at any one
Speaker 1: machine and say this is it, because there's always going
Speaker 1: to be an earlier machine that had at least some
Speaker 1: of those elements present. And it becomes kind of a
Speaker 1: judgment called to say, all, right, at what point are
Speaker 1: we saying this is where mode play became a thing.
Speaker 1: But it's led us up to modern day, where there's
Speaker 1: some pinball machines out there that on a mechanical level
Speaker 1: are not maybe that complicated, but if you're looking at
Speaker 1: gameplay level, if you wanted to maximize your score. They
Speaker 1: get incredibly complex, sometimes to their own detriment. But we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about that, and we'll also talk about
Speaker 1: the case that convinced New York City officials to reverse
Speaker 1: their decades long ban on pinball machines. Other places would
Speaker 1: follow suit, although I think at least in a few
Speaker 1: regions laws about pinball are still technically on the books,
Speaker 1: they're just not enforced. But yeah, we'll talk about how
Speaker 1: pinball emerged from its reputation as being, you know, the
Speaker 1: dark side of the force, as EA Minor would have
Speaker 1: had us think. So that's it for this first episode
Speaker 1: about pinball. Like I said, Wednesday's episode will go further
Speaker 1: into the pinball story. Thanks again to the Southern Fried
Speaker 1: Gaming Expo for having me out. I was there kind
Speaker 1: of low key. I wasn't like chatting with people. I
Speaker 1: was really in observation mode. But I was really impressed
Speaker 1: with what I saw. I got to play a lot
Speaker 1: of really fun games. Maybe I'll talk about some of
Speaker 1: those in the next one too. Also, if anyone from
Speaker 1: STERN is listening, how do I get one of those
Speaker 1: jaws pinball machines? Because good Gravy. That's like my favorite
Speaker 1: film of all time, and that machine was incredible. All right,
Speaker 1: enough of that, Enough of that, That's not what this
Speaker 1: show is about. This show is about celebrating tech in
Speaker 1: all its forms, at least all the forms that are
Speaker 1: are worthy of celebration. I hope all of y'all are
Speaker 1: doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1: Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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