Once again, our always-curious, ever-resourceful Sales and Marketing Manager Jesus Lopez, has taken a deep dive into something we take for granted. This time, pinball machines!
- Pinball got its start in France, dating back to the 1700’s in a game called Bagatelle, which was basically croquet but on a board with wooden pins and a ball that was devised as a way to play croquet but not out in the rain
- However, it wasn’t until 1871 when Montague Redgrave from Ohio turned an old Bagatelle game into the first pinball game, after making some serious improvements, like a coiled spring, a slope, more marbles, etc
- Much like cool
nerdspeople do n movies and video games, a lot of pinball machine developers of the late 80’s into the 90’s machines included a cow or a cow reference hidden somewhere as part of the game
- SEGA released Apollo 13, which was a one-of-a-kind multi ball mode, where 13 balls are released into the playfield at once, more than any other pinball game in history
- Some pinball machines, like the Munsters pinball machine, will give you a fun “midnight madness” round if you’re playing a game and midnight strikes, sometimes leading to a chaotic multiball round to wake you up and keep you playing
- The best selling pinball machine of all time is Bally William’s Addams Family from 1992, and I’m sure we can thank Anjelica Houston for that
- During the great depression (when is that over, btw?) low-cost entertainment was in high demand, so coin operated machines like pinball became hugely popular in the 1930’s
- However, in the late 1930’s, the US government started seeing pinball as gambling, as companies were making machines that actually cashed you out when you won, which was against gabling laws, so they were banned from the early 1940’s until 1976!
- In New York, the pinball ban was EXTRA dramatic… just weeks after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia issued an ultimatum to the city’s police force stating that their top priority would be to round up pinball machines and arrest their owners. La Guardia proceeded to spearhead massive Prohibition-style raids in which thousands of machines were rounded up in a matter of days, before being dramatically smashed with sledgehammers by the mayor and police commissioner and then dumped into the city’s rivers… wtf
- Something I never really noticed before, but because pinball was illegal for so long, it became a symbol of youth and rebellion around this time period, hence the Fonz regularly playing pinball in “Happy Days” or when The Who’s “Tommy” pinball-wizard theme rock opera album came out in 1972, pinball was still banned in much of the country
- Shockingly, pinball is still illegal in some places… just a few years ago, Nashville, Tennessee overturned its ban on children under 18 playing or even STANDING within 10 feet for a pinball machine… and to do this day, it’s illegal to play pinball on Sundays in Ocean City, NJ
- Famous for such notable pinball titles as High Speed, Black Knight, and F-14 Tomcat, designer Steve Ritchie was also the “Finish Him!” voice actor in the classic video game Mortal Kombat
- There is still ONE company in the US that builds pinball machines, and this is where most of the new machines come from- Stern Pinball factory in the Chicago suburbs, where workers assemble everything, mostly by hand
- 1979 Williams “Gorgar” was the first talking pinball machine with an 8 word vocabulary
- How about some songs about pinball? I already named one up above….
- Pinball Wizard by The Who
- And don’t forget this rad rendition of Pinball Wizard too, by Sir Elton John
- The first song that randomly came to mind was Olympia, WA by Rancid, as they mention playing a lonely pinball machine in the first verse
- Reggie and the Full Effect also came up, as in the song Everything’s’ Okay he wants to go play pinball and hopefully he’ll get to drive her car too…
