Skill Shot: A Brief History of Pinball

We, the audience for computer games, frequently don't think of them as belonging to the same medium as sports, tabletop games, or party games. But all of those types of art and entertainment are sub-categories of a single form. Under many definitions, all games have mechanics, goals, and other similar features. So, by learning about non-video game games, we also learn about video game games. Each subtype of game has unique lessons to teach us, but pinball has a very special connection to entertainment software as it was both a precursor to arcade computer games and a competitor with them.

Prehistory

An abridged version of pinball's history should probably start with sports like bocce or bowls, which involve rolling or hitting balls along the ground.^[1] You'd project them through hoops, into holes, at falling targets, or towards other balls. A version of bowling was played as early as 3200 BC in Ancient Egypt. But closer to home, ball-based lawn games were practised in late medieval Europe, with bowls existing as far back as the 13th century and the family of sports known as ground billiards dating to at least the 14th.^[2] Henry VIII was an avid gamer in his day and enjoyed lawn bowls, among other recreations.^[3] During the middles ages, indoor versions of the aforementioned sports arose, resulting in games that could be played on the floor of pubs, like bowling and shuffleboard.^[4][5]

Over time, classic ball sports were shrunk down to fit on a single table. A tabletop version of ground billiards existed in 15th-century France.^[6] And there's a lot of bowling in bagatelle, an amusement in which players use a cue to hit a ball up a table avoiding wooden pegs and aiming for holes.^[7] Bagatelle became fashionable in the French nobility and military after it took pride of place at a party attended by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1777.^[8][9] Some of the French soldiers backing up the colonists in the American Revolutionary War took whole bagatelle tables with them, helping popularise the game in the states.^[9] It's how we got this drawing of Abraham Lincoln playing a proto-pinball table:

Bagatelle diverged into variants like Germany's adorably-named stosspudel and Japanese Billiards, which, as you can tell from the title, was also European.^[10][11] Bagatelle designers started replacing those bulky, splinterable wooden pegs on the board with strong, slim metal pins.^[7] These rebellious piercings would become the pins for which pinball was named. A turning point came in 1871 when British inventor Montague Redgrave (great 19th-century guy name) filed the US patent "Improvement in Bagatelle".^[12][13] Many sources erroneously claim that the reason Montague's patent was groundbreaking was because it introduced the idea of launching the ball with a spring mechanism instead of a cue.^{[1][9][14][15][16][17]} This is not true. The German Historical Museum has a Japanese Billiards table from 1750 that houses a spring launcher.^[11][18] However, Montague's patent did secure that launcher for American business interests and also provided copy protection for a sloping table (instead of a flat one) and a bell dome that rings when hit: the modern bumper in the making.^[13]

It's a hop, skip, and a jump from here to what we know as pinball, but I want to stop for a second to pay attention to how un-American the origins of the hobby are. Pinball gets labelled as quintessentially U.S., bound up in the history of 70s and 80s youth, quarters jangling in their pockets as they searched for something to do after a long day of high school. In a Motherboard documentary, pinball restorationist Mike Hooker describes the machines as "uniquely American, it's like a hamburger".^[19]

This is not to take anything away from people who find comfort in American culture, but rich countries get rich by placing themselves at the epicentre of importing and immigration. That's trade. Therefore, I'm not sure there's an all-American anything or an all-British or all-French or all-Austrian anything. The national identities of Western nations are often, maybe always, lathed in retrospect. And the customs and fashions that comprise their identities have been indelibly affected by foreign hands. Coca-Cola's flavouring was extracted from a tropical Africannut, the Statue of Liberty is French, hamburgers are named after a German city, and pinball was stosspudel.

The Making of Modern Pinball

Through the 20th century, the pinball we know doesn't so much pop into existence as it does fade in. The machines took root in the 1930s U.S during the Great Depression.^[20] A coin-operated bar game provided an inexpensive thrill for people, especially those who might be out of work and have a lot of leisure time to fill. Keep in mind that was before our homes were whole entertainment complexes. The companies that would become synonymous with pinball were settling into the scene during this era and had names like Gottlieb and Bally.^[21] Lights and electronic sound devices began to appear on tables alongside the old chimes of bells.^[13][22][23] The first electrified pinball table was Pacific Amusements's Contact, from 1933, which introduced the electronic bell and electromagnets, which telekinetically propelled the ball.^[23][24]

The inclusion of lights and sound was as much a marketing strategy as it was art. Traditionally, amusements had needed customers to engage them first or had carnival barkers drawing attention to them. But flashing and chirping away in the corner of a bar, the pinball machine could be its own barker. Video games would learn plenty from pinball and slot machines, including the benefits of making units pulse with attract modes and audacious sound effects, all of it yelling, "Pick me, pick me". Those flashes and shouts would coalesce to create the delightfully cacophonous atmosphere of the arcade.

Making speakers and bulbs surge with energy also meant introducing circuitry to games. Shocked Frankenstein-like to life, pinball machines were pioneering the use of electronics in entertainment appliances, specifically in cabinets that would be placed in bars and arcades, laying the groundwork for the first arcade video games.^[24] But for an arcade video game, you need solid-state electronics: the electronics of semiconductors. Semiconductors, metals that neither entirely conduct nor resist a charge, are the basis of modern computers. They are what diodes and transistors are made from. Without those parts, you can't store data or perform logical operations in bulk unless you want your computer to fill a whole room because vacuum tubes were as big as lightbulbs, sometimes bigger.

But on our pinball timeline, it's the 1930s, and the transistor won't be invented until 1947. Even then, it will take years to enter regular production. And microprocessors, the computer chips that act as the brains for our modern devices, won't arrive on the scene until the 1970s. That's why it takes until the 1970s for us to get video games as a movement and not just a few isolated experiments or arcade novelties. For the same reason, solid-state pinball tables (remember, that's the tables with semiconductors) won't arrive until the 70s.^[24][25][26]

Between the invention of pinball and the eve of the transistor, the hobby knew a life that commercial video games never have: they were electronic without employing integrated circuits. In this "electro-mechanical" era, pinball machines are more technologically comparable to an old rotary phone than to a games console. They erupted with the analogue charm of filaments, wires, and solenoids. For a long time, a more modest component was also slowly gaining ground in the space: the flipper. There'snoshortage of sources incorrectly reporting that Gottlieb's 1947 production, Humpty Dumpty, was the first table with flippers.^[14] Even Gottlieb's official website repeats this myth and then goes on to say that it's the flippers that make pinball pinball, implying that they invented the hobby.^[27] Not that they've let the success go to their heads or anything.

Humpty Dumpty did debut the first electro-mechanical flippers, but you can find purely mechanistic flippers at least as far back as 1932 with Hercules Novelty's Double Shuffle.^[23][28] George H. Miner's Base Ball let the player press a button to have a mechanical bat hit a ball. Arguably, that's a pinball machine with a flipper, and he designed that in 1928.^[29] Still, Humpty Dumpty became influential because it was a compelling argument for the power of electricity in pinball. It also helped popularise the flipper, even if its competitors didn't all see the genius of it immediately.^[30]

Besides adjusting the strength with which you launch the ball or tilting the table (a technique that wasn't part of the intended original design of the game), early pinball in the Bagatelle style offered the player no way to control the path of the ball. It's only with flippers that you can catch the sphere before it drops into the loss zone and redirect it back onto the table. And the flippers are your sole option for hitting targets from below. So, without those little levers behind the glass, pinball was a game of chance.

When flippers arrived, the sport could, for the first time, rigorously test timing, reflexes, intuition for physics, and comprehension of rules. All skills that video games will later measure. The flippers also returned pinball back to the skill-based roots of those lawn and pub games it drew from. Because you can keep pushing the ball back up the table with the flippers, you can also have longer, more substantial play sessions, which will be another key feature of video games. I'm not even convinced that we should classify the random pinball and the skill-based pinball as the same game. They are poles apart.

Although, if you mention flippers to someone, they're going to imagine two large paddles at the base of the board near the centre with their hinges on the edge closest to the walls of the table. That's not how machines in the late 40s wore their flippers; tables had flippers further from the drain, distant from each other, and facing outward. As we can see from the official video game of pinball manufacturer Zaccaria, even into the 80s, there were tables that had small flippers not centrally located or not grouped into twos.

The premise behind a lot of tables with flippers was not that you would dribble and shoot the ball until you dropped it but that the game was still basically about either getting lucky or unlucky. The ball would bounce off of a number of objects that would score you points and then would either fall out or land on one of the flippers. There, a fast-fingered pinball bandit could bounce it up for more points. If the ball landed near a flipper, it was something like a free spin rather than the start of true play. Again, the tests of talent were introduced with time.

It's obvious why a business owner might want a game of chance in their bar, pharmacy, or arcade, but there's revenue to be made with the skill-testing pinball too. It is potentially profitable partly for the reason that many carnival games are: the physics are unintuitive. Watching the sport being played, you'd think that you would be able to control the ball much better than you can. But the direction it moves when you hit it is not just dependent on where along the flipper the ball was when you flicked it but also the angle it approached the flipper from. Tiny changes in positioning of the ball at one point in the game can drastically alter the events that follow. Unlike many carnival games, however, there's no hidden catch to the mechanics of pinball. You're not seeing a misleading setup, you're seeing the physics as they are, and as it turns out, physics are complicated.

Because you have a small ball and a top-down view on the board, pinball tables also provide a lot of physical interactions to explore within a small real-world space. Carnival attractions wander into town, get played once or twice by most people, then leave. But a pinball game sits in the same place where the same people are going to play it repeatedly. It needs to be able to keep producing new experiences across all those play sessions. It must be easy to learn but hard to master. They're characteristics you'll later see in video games.

Pinball as Politics

This point that pinball is a game of skill was actually politically freighted, at least in the mid-20th century U.S where the medium came of age. Pinball machines are coin-operated, and some earlier tables and arcades gave cash payouts for successful play.^[31][32] But if you're putting your money into a machine with a random chance of winning a currency reward, that's gambling.^[33] There are a lot of reasons lawmakers don't like gambling: negative social stigmas, religious prohibitions, concerns about gambling's associations with racial minorities, and the possibility of addiction.

Politicians have long waged war on addiction, again, because of stigma, as an excuse for increasing police budgets, or out of a genuine sense of care for a community, but also because addiction reduces the supply and quality of labour, lowers the number of active consumers in a market, and can be expensive to treat. I can't tell you how much each of these factors motivated any legislature during any one period, but we can agree that when politicians redlight gambling, it's due to some combination of these complications. In the case of pinball, you also had a game popular with minors, so if it was a form of gambling, that would make the machine owners and manufacturers responsible for child gambling. Not a great look.

There were other bones that politicians had to pick with pinball manufacturers. The pinball factory capital in the mid-20th century was Chicago, a city in the pocket of themob.^{[20][33][34][35]} New York City mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, also argued that the manufacture of the machines consumed metals that could otherwise be turned into weapons and ammunition for World War II.^[33] Bally would actually make aircraft parts for the allies. And there were a lot of adults in a flap over pinball turning kids into layabouts wasting all their pocket change in seedy dives. Yet another thing pinball did in arcades before video games: create a moral panic.^[33][35]

Mayor La Guardia described pinball tables as "evil contraptions" and, in 1942, banned them from the city. Police raided candy shops, arcades, and other venues, effectively dragging out pinball machines in cuffs. The NYPD held a photo op with La Guardia where they smashed the machines with sledgehammers.^[35] Other cities like Portland, Salt Lake City, Milwaukee, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, and Los Angeles followed suit.^[33][35] Heroin was contraband, cocaine was contraband, and so was Double Shuffle. In many metropolises, you could walk into a bar with a handgun, but not a bar with Flipper Cowboy in it.

NYC enacted the ban nine years after prohibition ended, so cities were used to using a heavy hand to decide where you spent your disposable income. Speaking historically, new games have long fomented fears of moral decay and banning games because of their association with gambling or rowdiness is not that unusual. There is awholehistory of restricting gaming and gambling that you can go off and read about. Henry VIII didn't just play bowling; he made it illegal for the commoners to do it.^[3] I also really like this quote from a 14th-century London mayor:

"There is great noise in the city caused by hustling over foot balls from which many evils may arise".

Talk about gatekeeping gaming. Of course, in outlawing pinball, major American cities also gave themselves the problem that they'd made pinball cool. The hobby was now counterculture; The Who would go on to write a song about it. Still, it's harder to participate in counterculture when its materials are illegal. Operators responded to the stink eye on their products in part by changing the cash payouts for extra balls within the session. If tables couldn't give rewards external to the game, they could award prizes that were internal. The evolution of pinball from peg-on-board games to hand-eye coordination tests also had a key role to play in their legalisation. The flipper was political.^[30]

In 1974, the California Supreme Court declared pinball a game of skill rather than chance, relieving it of its status as gambling. This ruling overturned its ban in sunny Los Angeles, but other cities remained stuck in their ways.^[36] The saviour of the sport would be Roger Sharpe, a G.Q. editor who had been obsessed with pinball since seeing a friend balancing a burger, fries, soft drink, and a cigarette at the same time as playing a table.^[37] An absolute circus act. After rising through the ranks to become one of America's dabbest hands at the game, he caught the interest of the AMOA.^[35]

The Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) was founded in 1948 to argue that jukebox makers shouldn't have to pay music royalties and came to act as a sort of ESA for the "out of home entertainment industry". In 1976, the AMOA sent Sharpe to New York City Hall.^[33][37] In front of a watchful council, he not only told representatives that pinball was a game of skill; he showed them it was. He announced the path he would force the ball to travel when pulling back the plunger on Gottlieb's Bank Shot, and it took it.^[36]

If you can command the path of a ball, that's the opposite of it moving randomly. And if it's not random, it's not a game of chance. In the only documented instance of someone playing pinball so well that it changed the law, the New York City Council voted unanimously to overturn the ban. Sharpe would go on to testify in front of more legislatures, and after New York, the other cities fell like dominoes.^[32][34] Although, it is also relevant that by the mid-1970s, you do see a socially liberalising U.S. and a more free-market approach to business, so that may have played a role too. But the sense of relief was shortlived. It took the better part of four decades for pinball to move back home into many major population centres, and as soon as it did, a more popular man moved in next door: video games.

The End of an Era

The video game renaissance wasn't all bad news for pinball. The competition from entertainment software pushed pinball to up its standard. Tables got more modes, flashier graphics, and more statement theming to hold their own against their animated and technologically-complex sparring partners. Many of the pinball machines now considered the best ever designed, like The Addams Family, Black Knight, and The Twilight Zone, hit arcades in the 80s and 90s.

Video game developers and pinball manufacturers also weren't mutually exclusive. Many of video games' chubby hogs, such as Sega, Capcom, and Data East, would also manufacture pinball rigs like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kingpin, and Time Machine. Pinball moguls like Williams, Gottlieb, Stern, and Midway would develop and publish video games. They were all part of the shared amusement space. Most of us know Midway's Mortal Kombat, Cruis'n, and NFL Blitz, but more foundational work was done by Gottlieb, which developed Q*Bert in 1982. And don't forget Williams, which broke the mould with Defender (1981), Joust (1982), and Robotron: 2084 (1982). All seminal action games. Midway games was also a subsidiary of Bally, before Bally was bought up by Williams. So, some of these companies merge into each other.

But for all the shared success of pinball and video games, nothing could ameliorate the fact that video games were eating pinball's lunch.^[2][35] Pinball didn't have the animated characters or functional worlds of video games. Their action couldn't extend beyond the frame, and they were limited by what was possible with the electro-mechanical. Video games could wholly transform what was inside their view window and react more vibrantly to player input. Pinball machines also have unique advantages over video games that we'll get to, but as it turned out, the public at large saw pinball as playing second fiddle to computer entertainment.

So, pinball companies began going under or getting bought up. Remembering that the New York legalisation was only in 1976, Chicago Coin went bankrupt in 1977. It was bought by Gary Stern, starting Stern Electronics Inc., but it stopped manufacturing tables in 1985. In 1986, Sega buys out Data East Pinball, and was in turn bought out by Gary Stern in 1999 to form Stern Pinball, a company distinct from the long since deceased Stern, Inc. Gottlieb was bought by Columbia Pictures in 1977, which was then bought out by Coca-Cola of all people in 1983. Their factories fell dormant the following year. Premier Technology bought Gottlieb's assets in 1984 and began making Gottlieb tables anew, but by 1996, the money had run out, and Gottlieb was again dead.^[27] In the same year, Capcom Coin-Op bit the dust, having existed for just 18 months.

Bally got bought up by Williams in 1988, but you already know that part. You want to know what happened to Williams. In August 1999, the New York Times said that Williams figured that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, and was releasing experimental pinball-video game hybrids. By October, the NYT was reporting Williams had shut down its pinball division. Three of the four big pinball manufacturers (Williams, Bally, and Gottlieb) had given up the ghost, ending the golden age of the hobby. An equivalent event in video games would have seen a 90s where companies like Nintendo, Sony, and EA went under. Ideally, you will have read these two paragraphs listening to the outro from Derek & the Dominos's Layla.

New machines do still come out all the time; the medium is currently considered to be going througha revival.^[35] Maybe that's because we're floating just the right distance from pinball's heyday for it to have been forgotten and rediscovered. It could also be because more people are looking for tangible pastimes in an increasingly digitised world. It's definitely in no small part because pinball is fucking cool. But the medium is also enduring a preservationcrisis.^[19]

Pinball tables were only so accessible, to begin with. A proper machine will run you several thousand dollars, meaning that, for most players, owning one, let alone a whole collection, is out of the question. Therefore, enthusiasts are reliant on local businesses to host them. But pinball machine components are constantly taking a beating, and anyone who's owned a printer can tell you that devices with moving parts are high maintenance. So, a lot of businesses will be reluctant to stock these high-cost machines with niche appeal that might need specialist repair, especially when there are more popular alternatives. Alternatives being what pushed pinball to the fringes in the first place.

If a venue operator is considering a pinball table, they're also more likely to purchase a recent release than one of the classics. Not many people are going out in the evening looking for a cold beer and a 1940s amusement device. And when the industry underwent its dramatic shrinkage, it meant that replacement parts for older tables were no longer being manufactured. There are not many people qualified to fix classic pinball tables, which is worrying when according to repair tech, Mike Hooker, many retro pinball tables are especially prone to breakage because they were designed for short lifespans. Hooker says the idea was that people would see a new machine in a bar or drugstore, play it for a short spell, and then tire of it, so the owner would switch the machine out for another. Therefore, they weren't built to last.^[19]

There is a parallel between classic pinball tables being abandoned to rot and the destruction and degradation of early film. The Library of Congress reports that 75% of silent films were lost. In the cases of both pinball and film, you had creative works that were considered novelties in the early days, and so, were treated carelessly, with people realising too late that they'd discarded items of cultural value. The name of bagatelle, that precursor to pinball, has an etymological root in the Italian noun "bagatella", meaning somethingfrivolous or "a trifle". That's how pinball has been thought of for most of its history, even by some of the companies writing that history.

Yet, where video games once stole pinball's oxygen, they now carry some hope of immortalising the rare and ailing tables. Remember, if you can represent it on a screen and in code, and have a computer-based interface for it, you can simulate it in a video game. But we shouldn't get too carried away with the idea of video games as a mind upload system for pinball. A lot of pinball video games aren't trying to recreate existing tables, and even when they attempt to emulate physical products, their tributes may fall short of the real thing, physics being a common area of discrepancy. The creation of professional simulations of pinball tables also requires customers to be willing to pay for those tables. However, the hobby is in this mess because of the limited consumer interest in them, especially in the older tables that most need preserving. So, even on the computer, many table replicas aren't going to be viable commercial products.

That leaves much of the archiving work up to unpaid developers, but with no money, it's hard to make a 1:1 realistic recreation of anything. And we know that in video games, copyright is often the enemy of licensing, so even trying to preserve tables in paid video games is a shaky strategy. The problem is double-layered. Developers have to license all tables from manufacturers, but then, over time, pinball has become increasingly based on properties the manufacturers are licensing out from other firms. With the hobby's nicheness, it's not like there are Scrooge McDuck vaults of money to pay for all this IP, and even rich studios like Rockstar and Activision have had copyrights in games lapse.

So, many newer tables don't get added to pinball sims, and even retro tables can be lost, as they were in Pinball Arcade. Pinball Arcade was the only video game officially archiving a bunch of the Bally/Midway machines, but it jettisoned its 61 Bally/Midway tables in 2018 after the IP-holder declined to relicense them. Video game pinball was never the same. There's also a physical presence that you get with a table in front of you that a conventional video game recreation can't deliver. VR can help with that, but VR is currently an expensive technology with a relatively small install base, and touching your game controllers won't feel like touching the machine.

Video game preservation is not in a great place. It's a family quilt of legally grey ROMs, flash and mobile titles that were never plaster cast, and live service content that it's unclear whether we can ever save. But at least video game clients can be copied. They're built into technologies that were made for the replication of data, and that isn't everything you need to preserve a medium, but it's a big help. With pinball, not only do software replicas suffer from all the shortcomings all video game preservation does, but you really do need the hardware and not just software for the full experience. Because of pinball's status as a forerunner to arcade games, if we don't preserve pinball history, we don't preserve video game history. But pinball is also worth rescuing for its own sake.

The medium has a traditional appeal, and there's a 3Dness to pinball that you don't get in video games outside of virtual reality. If video games typically appear on the screen, pinball tables appear carved into it, hollowed space falling away, and objects rising to meet you from behind the glass. Pinball also wears its mechanisms on its sleeve in a way that video games rarely do, and it's a kick seeing what elaborate contraptions make their way into tables.

Williams's Medieval Madness has a castle setpiece at the far end, which you break into with the ball. By striking the entrance to the fortress, you can cause its drawbridge to lower and portcullis to rise. Dutch's Big Lebowski has a window in the middle through which you can see a bowling lane. In one of the table's minigames, you can use your pinball to knock down the pins. Stern's Godzilla has a model skyscraper on the table, and if you shoot the balls into the right spot, it springs them up onto the roof of this building. As you complete goals, an action figure Godzilla attacks the skyscraper, causing it to fall, floor by floor, towards the ground. Once it is entirely destroyed, the balls fall down onto the table, activating multiball. Cool.

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Pinball has come a long way since Henry VIII used it to revolt against the British in 3200 BC. But the centuries-old history of pinball-like games is proof that whatever slings you might try to fire at it, there's something enduring about the appeal of knocking a ball across a table into targets. Pinball preservation is not in great shape, and as a community that has benefitted from the discoveries of that medium, I'd recommend we put some attention on that problem and lend pinball a helping flipper where we can. Nonetheless, pinball lived through being blamed for the corruption of the youth, it survived being outlawed, and it survived having all but one of its major manufacturers go out of business. You might be able to kill individual pinball tables, but pinball as a medium is forever. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Farr, D. (2009). Encyclopedia of Play in Today's Society, Vol 2. SAGE Publications (p. 480).
2. Azzarito, A. (2020). The Elements of a Home: Curious Histories Behind Everyday Household Objects, from Pillows to Forks. Chronicle Books (p. 13).
3. When Bowling Was a Sport Reserved for Royalty by Lauren Young (March 2, 2017), Atlas Obscura.
4. Miller, M. (2012). Bowling. Shire Publications (p. 15).
5. Menke, F.G. (1969). The Encylopedia of Sports, Fourth Revised Edition. A.S. Barnes & Co. (p. 824).
6. Diehl, D., Donnelly, M.P. (2011). Medieval Celebrations: Your Guide to Planning and Hosting Spectacular Feasts, Parties, Weddings, and Renaissance Fairs, Second Edition. Stackpole Books (p. 105).
7. The Long and Unpredictable History of Pinball by Tim Stevens (January 14, 2023), DesignNews.
8. Eliassen M. (2009). Encyclopedia of Play in Today's Society, Vol 1. SAGE Publications (p. xxxv).
9. Bagatelle Wizard Instead of the Pinball Wizard by National Museum of American History Staff (October 31, 2012), National Museum of American History.
10. Schmeller, J.A. (1872). Bavarian Dictionary: Collection of Words and Expressions That Appear in the Living Dialects as Well as in the Older and Oldest Provincial Literature of the Kingdom of Bavaria, Especially Its Older Countries, and either Not at All or Not in Today’s General German Written Language Are Common in the Same Meanings. Oldenbourg (p. 382).
11. Untitled by Deutsches Historisches Museum Staff (September 16, 2021), Facebook.
12. Bueschel, R.M. (1996). Encyclopedia Of Pinball: Whiffle to Rocket 1930-1933, Vol. 1. Silverball Amusements (p. 8).
13. Montague, R. (1871). Improvement in Bagatelle. United States Patent Office.
14. The History of Pinball by Maris Bellis (September 21, 2019), Thought Co.
15. Untitled by Pacific Pinball Museum (February 14, 2019), Facebook.
16. Pinball in America by The Strong National Museum of Play (Date Unknown), Google Arts & Culture.
17. The History of Pinball by Video Amusement Staff (Date Unknown), Video Amusement.
18. Game Table With Three Ball Games by Wuselig (September 8, 2007), Wikimedia Commons.
19. The Pinball Doctors: The Last Arcade Technicians in NYC by Motherboard (January 11, 2018), YouTube.
20. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol. 1. (p. 2).
21. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol. 1. (p. 145, 147-149, 151, 156, 157, 161, 163).
22. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol. 1. (p. 141, 164, 171).
23. Editor in Chief: Dave Harfield (Full Credits on p. 97). How It Works, Issue 8 (2009). Imagine Publishing (p. 65).
24. Frauenfelder, M. (2013). The Computer: An Illustrated History From Its Origins to the Present Day. Carlton Books Ltd. (p. 160).
25. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol. 1 (p. 227).
26. Boasberg, L., Haber, B., Pierson, D., Magazine Staff (Listed on p. 3) (1978). Play Meter, Vol. 4, No. 11. Skybird Publishing (p. 5, 7, 29, 45).
27. Gottlieb History by Robert A. Fesjian (October 11, 2015), Gottlieb Development LLC.
28. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol. 1 (p. 58).
29. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol. 1 (p. 12).
30. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol, 1 (p. 183).
31. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol. 1 (p. 57).
32. The Unexpectedly Seedy Past of the Pinball Machine by 99% Invisible (October 8, 2014), Slate.
33. How the Mob Made Pinball Public Enemy #1 in the 1940s by Allison McNearney (November 14, 2021), The Daily Beast.
34. Pinball: From Illegal Gambling Game to a Classic Pastime | American Obsessions by Vice (March 24, 2015), YouTube.
35. That Time America Outlawed Pinball by Christopher Klein (August 23, 2018), History.
36. PINBALL EXPO 2006 by Anonymous (2006), Pinball News.
37. Pinball Used to Be Illegal and a Chicago Man Changed That in One Shot by WGN News (June 3, 2019), YouTube.

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.

This is totally awesome!

@gtxforza: Thank you.

This was an interesting read. Good work.

This was a great read! I'm honestly not sure if I've ever played a real deal pinball table, but they've always intrigued me.