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Collecting Beyond Pinball - Pinball Expo 2024 - Larry Bieza, Phill Emmert

Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2024)·video·58m 33s·analyzed·Oct 19, 2024
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

Veteran collectors showcase classic arcade game history and mechanical design at Pinball Expo 2024

Summary

Phil Emmert and Larry Bieza, veteran arcade and pinball collectors with 40+ years of experience, present a curated tour of classic arcade games at Pinball Expo 2024, spanning from 1937 to 1955. They discuss the mechanical design, historical context, designer legacies, and collecting appeal of games including the Rockola All-Star World Series, Chicago Coin Around the World Trainer, Genco Two-Player Basketball, United Star Slugger and Derby Roll, and Keeney Submarine. The presentation emphasizes the engineering brilliance of early arcade designers, the evolution of cabinet design, and the survival of mechanically superior games in the collector market.

Key Claims

  • Godly Mermaid purchased for $275 in the early days now brings about $20,000

    medium confidence · Larry Bieza describing his early collecting experience and the appreciation in game values over time

  • Larry Bieza produced the Pinball Price Guide from 1993 to 2007

    high confidence · Direct statement: 'For about 14 years, from 1993 to 2007, I produced the Pinball Price Guide'

  • Harry Williams was a Hollywood set designer before entering the arcade/pinball business

    medium confidence · Phil Emmert citing Dick Buchel's books on arcade history: 'Harry Williams was actually a Hollywood set designer back in the day'

  • Pinball machines at $16.50 killed the large arcade game market in the late 1920s, despite arcade games costing $300

    medium confidence · Phil Emmert explaining the market shift: 'these games were you know 300 dollars to buy one of these games... pinball came out for 1650 a couple years later it just basically killed large arcade games'

  • Chicago Coin Basketball Champ at CanCan Wonderland in St. Paul has over 250,000 plays without failure

    high confidence · Larry Bieza: 'I have one of these on the floor at CanCan. It has over a quarter million plays just at that location. It has basically never failed for me'

  • United invented the Formica playfield around 1949 with the first puck bowler, which became industry standard

    medium confidence · Phil Emmert: 'Formica playfields actually were driven by united back in the day they came out with the first puck bowler back around 1949'

  • Lyden Durant was convicted of tax evasion in the 1950s due to high game revenues

    medium confidence · Phil Emmert: 'Sadly, he got nailed for tax evasion in the 50s because he was making so much money on these games, he tried to hide some of it'

  • A historical arcade in Colorado Springs has operated a Chicago Coin Basketball Champ continuously for approximately 75 years

    medium confidence · Phil Emmert: 'historical arcade near where i am in colorado springs... they've got one that they've been operating there for i think 75 years'

Notable Quotes

  • “I realized that not only did I collect games, but I've also collected friends, and a lot of those people are at this event this weekend.”

    Phil Emmert@ 0:55 — Reflects the community-building aspect of arcade/pinball collecting beyond the machines themselves

  • “The mechanical aspects of this game are just absolutely genius, and if you record three outs, once that third out's recorded, One of the balls will drive down through the trough system, activate a micro switch, and it turns the game off.”

    Phil Emmert@ 8:52 — Highlights the sophistication of 1937 electromechanical design and automatic game conclusion mechanics

  • “I love this game. And I said, Harvey, what do you think about that two-player basketball you built? And he's like, I don't remember that game.”

    Phil Emmert@ 15:56 — Illustrates how rapidly designers were producing games in the 1950s, creating hundreds without time for reflection

  • “Because they were designing a new game every month or two months, coming up with a new idea, a new game. So they didn't have time to really look fondly back on what was to be a great game in the future.”

    Phil Emmert@ 16:05 — Explains the high output and innovation pace of 1950s arcade manufacturers

  • “It took in the nickels. It constantly made the money. I have one of these on the floor at CanCan. It has over a quarter million plays just at that location. It has basically never failed for me.”

    Larry Bieza@ 16:37 — Demonstrates operator profitability and long-term reliability as key survival factors in arcade history

Entities

Phil EmmertpersonLarry BiezapersonHarry WilliamspersonRob BurkepersonJerry CosipersonGeorge MinerpersonHarvey HeisspersonLyden Durantperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Lyden Durant's tax evasion conviction in 1950s demonstrates extraordinary profitability of United arcade games during boom period

    medium · Phil Emmert: 'He got nailed for tax evasion in the 50s because he was making so much money on these games'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Deep collector appreciation for understated, undervalued games like United Derby Roll and Chicago Coin Hockey Champ

    high · Phil Emmert recommends Derby Roll: 'it's a little undervalued. So if you can find one, I would certainly recommend it.' Similar praise for Hockey Champ

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Chicago Coin rapidly copied successful cabinet designs from competing manufacturers (Bally World Cup Soccer cabinet design reused for Hockey Champ)

    high · Larry Bieza: 'if you go 10 months earlier Valley World Cup soccer came out and took the industry by storm... Chicago coin said let's steal their cabinet idea'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Early arcade designers rapidly iterated games (monthly/bi-monthly cycles) at high volume with limited time for reflection or pride in individual creations

    high · Phil Emmert on Harvey Heiss: 'They were designing a new game every month or two months... So they didn't have time to really look fondly back'

  • $

    market_signal: Arcade game survival strongly correlated with operator profitability and mechanical reliability, not just design innovation

    high · Phil Emmert: 'The games that you hardly see any of our games that got trashed because they weren't making money they didn't keep them around but these games survived'

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.176

0:00
I'm Phil Emmer and I've been a collector for 40 plus years. Larry and I both started when we had hair. So from that standpoint, it's just a hobby that has given back to me. I was able to at one point get involved with Coin Operated Collectors Association, COCA. I served as the president of COCA for four years. Through all of my career, I've done everything I could to learn more, trace and track history on these games, and give back, writing articles, and doing things that are supportive of the hobby. And it's just something that I've had conversation even this weekend with people that said over time, I realized that not only did I collect games, but I've also collected friends, and a lot of those people are at this event this weekend. For me, it's just a chance to go through and maybe point out some of the machines that are particularly enjoyable to me, some of the features, some of the history, and hopefully share that with people that are maybe more entrenched in the pinball world than this might open their eyes to doing something in the arcade world.
1:25
Are we good? That's better. Hey, everybody. My name is Larry Baiza. I've been in the collecting pinball and amusement arcades for 40 years. Rob Burke introduced me to, I had an interest in fireworks back in the day. I was in a professional fireworks organization, and Rob invited me to go to his first pinball expo. And so I went there, really enjoyed that, and it kind of awakened me to the idea of collecting games. I got started, and that was going crazy. I became very interested in the history of games, so I'm very steeped in that. As I acquired more and more games, I started tracking down operators and going and buying up their old stock, which really was a fun experience back then. But as I got too many games, my house was packed, my storage was packed, as some of you have that same problem. I ended up becoming a dealer on games, partially because I sold a Godly Mermaid back in the day. It was one of the early games I had bought for $275, and they're currently bringing about $20,000. So I realized something is wrong here. I don't know what I'm doing. So for about 14 years, from 1993 to 2007, I produced the Pinball Price Guide. A lot of you may be familiar with that. It was a pretty good popular item, and it actually helped inform the hobby, so I was happy to be a contributor to that. Also produced a Penny Arcade Price Guide back in the day.

“The games that you hardly see any of our games that got trashed because they weren't making money they didn't keep them around but these games survived”

Phil Emmert@ 17:55 — Explains the correlation between operator profitability and game survival in the collector market

  • “This being one of them the interesting thing on the cabinet so we think about the coin op industry and how people were always jumping on to whatever else was popular and if we go 10 months earlier Valley World Cup soccer might be familiar to some of you guys that game came out and took the industry by storm”

    Larry Bieza@ 28:36 — Shows rapid market copying behavior in early arcade industry, reusing successful cabinet designs

  • “So you think of an operator trying to go to on a route and deliver one of these games or manipulate one of these games really difficult so basically virtually all the of these survivors that have been found don't have the lower cabinet anymore”

    Phil Emmert@ 30:12 — Demonstrates how poor cabinet design decisions led to game loss and explains survival patterns in the collector market

    • Dick Buchel
    person
    Dizzy Deanperson
    Rockolacompany
    Chicago Coincompany
    Gencocompany
    United Manufacturingcompany
    Williamscompany
    Keeneycompany
    International Mutoscopecompany
    CanCan Wonderlandcompany
    Coin Operated Collectors Associationorganization
    Pinball Expoevent
  • $

    market_signal: Cabinet design problems (e.g., Keeney Submarine's hollow base) directly led to game loss and survivor rarity in collector market

    high · Phil Emmert: 'virtually all the survivors that have been found don't have the lower cabinet anymore people threw pinball legs on the side'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Pinball machines at $16.50 displaced large arcade machines at $300 in late 1920s, fundamentally restructuring the arcade market

    medium · Phil Emmert: 'games were 300 dollars... pinball came out for 1650... it just basically killed large arcade games for the market'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Rockola All-Star World Series game featured 1930s MLB players as marketing draw but minimal formal licensing; pride-based participation model

    medium · Phil Emmert: 'These players that had their names involved in this game were simply there because it was a prideful situation for them to be included'

    • 2:47
    Around 2008, I kind of slowed down on pinball. I was also a dealer for 20 years at Pinball Expo, buying and selling games and parts. After that, I kind of slowed down on pinball a little bit and got a bigger interest at that point in penny arcade games and the history of arcade games instead. I started going crazy on arcade games and filled my house with those. And so that evolved into now I operate Classic Arcade Games at a venue called Can-Can Wonderland in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I'm from. We have 150 games on the floor. I'm one of the people involved with keeping those running and having people enjoy their time discovering these new old games. I've also jumped into designing my own games now. I've built six one-of-a-kind games for Can Can Wonderland and hope to continue doing that as well. We're always very involved in the history of games, and so here we're to talk about arcade games today. So, Phil, why don't you get us going on the first game? okay first up is the 1937 rockola all-star world series game and so it's mid-30s and rockola has just had a huge hit with the 34 world series pinball which you can see on display here at the event and they're trying to figure out what the next big thing is going to be so at the time Harry Williams was working for Rockola well Harry had acquired from George Miner the all of the rights the the tooling and all of the things the patents necessary on the all-american baseball that had existed late 20s into the early 30s and so he said why don't we take a look at this so he and George Miner who was the original designer got together they did an upgrade to a men on base unit that they brought into play for the game and they moved forward with it. Harry was still there in 36 as production was getting underway but by the time the game actually came to the marketplace he had moved on. This game the first thing you notice as you walk up to the game is this incredible cabinet. Well Rockola was making jukeboxes so having a cabinet like this was not a difficult task, but it is just spectacular. You've got inlaid veneer. You've got this burled butt up veneer in the door. I mean, it in itself is just a spectacular display piece to walk up to. Then you view the actual game. It's a nickel game. It has on the play field all of the defenders that a typical baseball team would have. It's got a scorecard over here that shows you the 18 players involved. Now, the 18 players were all all-stars from Major League Baseball in the 1930s. The only name that really came to surface in the production and promotion of the game was Dizzy Dean, a pitcher for the Cardinals, and they had Dizzy at the show when they introduced the game, and people were allowed to interact with him. You could play the game. They were giving out souvenirs that included miniature baseball bats, little pennants, scorecards, and a pin that said, I beat Dizzy Dean at the 37 World Series. So that in itself was pretty interesting. And I don't know, and I've never seen, Larry, you might know, was there any contractual agreement today? There's licensing tied to everything. And I think these players that had their names involved in this game were simply there because it was a prideful situation for them to be included. So you've got a game that you pitch bat, traditional type game. It's often referred to as the robot baseball. And basically the way it works is there's a slow RPM motor in there with a drive belt that operates the mechanical aspect of introducing the ball. The ball comes up a tube, and the umpire is positioned directly behind the pitcher. And there's a hole in the umpire's chest. The pitcher has a cup.
    6:45
    What's that? You want to go to the video? Give us a second. One second. So there's a cup there. The pitcher comes forward to pitch the ball. The pitcher sits on a cam with 15 different positions, so he's not always throwing the ball directly over home plate, sometimes in, sometimes out. If you swing and miss, the umpire, as the ball returns through the trough system underneath, the weight of the ball will activate the umpire's right arm to go up and signal strike. If you take a pitch that's off the plate, the umpire's arm will go up and signal ball. One of the most ingenious things is that if you swing at a pitch that you can't hit and it's off the plate, the impact of the bat will still trigger. Then the ball, there's a gate that closes, the ball's redirected, and it goes down and the umpire signals strike. I mean, the game is just mechanical magic. And it's one that I think over time we've seen the escalation in value, a lot of it driven by the pure coin-op collector, but also baseball memorabilia collectors because of the historical aspect of the players that are involved. Let's show some videos.
    7:56
    So here's the umpire, the pitcher, ball comes up, boom, strike. and here in the scoreboard you can see that it records strikes it records outs and it also advances players if you get in this case a double then the ball when the next double comes that ball moves along and it puts one run on the board it's changing up who the batter is i mean there's so much going on i often describe this as a machine that is often just as fun to watch and witness as it is to actually play the game. So the ball will advance, and once you get three strikes, the balls will drain, and one of those will appear in the outs. If you get four balls, the fourth ball will disappear, and then it comes down in like a walk. You get a runner on first. So the mechanical aspects of this game are just absolutely genius, and if you record three outs, once that third out's recorded, One of the balls will drive down through the trough system, activate a micro switch, and it turns the game off.
    9:06
    Amazing game, and certainly my favorite. Yeah, it's one of my favorites too, Phil. I'm always deep in the history, so I'll be covering a little slight amounts of history in some of the games too. Harry Williams, and some of this came from Dick Buchel, an author that was famous for his books on cleanup history. Harry Williams was actually a Hollywood set designer back in the day, and he had that sense of visual sense that really came forward in a lot of his games. he bought a number of games from the amusement machine corp in 1929 which was the company george minor created to build this game so george actually built these early on in 29 but the problem was there when these games came out pinball was coming on and pinball when these games were you know 300 dollars to buy one of these games that's making a penny or a nickel and a pinball came out for 1650 a couple years later it just basically killed large arcade games for the market it became all pinball but uh harry started with these games before in the in the late 20s and then eventually brought it back with george through rockola later on um yeah yeah it's a fabulous game it's a fabulous game if you've not had a chance to play it certainly track one down and get that opportunity and if you have a chance to buy it don't miss it all right so we're going to move on to uh my favorite game uh chicago coin around the world trainer uh 1953 this game was built uh the designer of this game at chicago coin his name was jerry cosi i love the stuff this guy did his name will come up again in the future um so if we think about the time 1953 to just kind of give people information on that in the very early 50s kiddie rides became the thing everybody was making kiddie rides just a giant business in that they showed up at every supermarket every uh every business and so Chicago coin says we need to get into this and Jerry's idea at Chicago coin was to say well people are traveling a lot by planes now let's try to replicate that experience of flying around the world so that's actually what he built with around the world trainer let's go to the video on that so as ten-cent play which is pretty expensive back then we see the map of the world is lit up and we've noticed the light on there if you noticed on Chicago is the number one lighted insert in there, of course, the home of these great beams. So a light beam comes out the front of the ship, and you need to guide that to hit the various lit inserts on the back of the world. You can see we're flying around. I'm flying with one hand holding a camera, so a little tricky here, but I had a pretty good score on this one, actually.
    11:37
    You've got the motor of the compressor running, so it's like the motor of a plane, just the experience of running this thing around and tipping up and down. it. It's just a great thing. If we look at the upper corner, it's a one-minute game, so you've really got to move fast, hitting the different cities, and just a great experience. It gives you a score as a rating as to how well or how well you did do it. Yep, on the upper left is ratings for the various scores that you obtained, and I was successful to make it around the world and this and i and i made a ranking but um it's one of those games where you can continue to get better at and always improve your score so uh just a really fun game to play um there's not a lot of these left sadly i think with the maintenance of the game and we think about a wood cabinet being left outdoors potentially uh kind of destroyed a lot of the game so there's there's still some left out there and it's just an amazing game if you get a chance to try it yeah and it really combines amusement park ride with an arcade game unlike like anything else that I think is out there. Yeah, agreed, agreed. Let's jump on to the next one.
    12:47
    Genco's two-player basketball, the Ginsburg brothers. In the early 50s, the arcade amusement business was kind of quiet. Bowling and bowling alleys swept the country, and there were a tremendous number of bowling machines, both the puck style, the ball style, that came to the market. But a lot of the machines that had been out in the 40s were kind of limping along and staying active in the market. But in 1954, Ganko came out with what they identified as a two-player basketball. It's a really attractive, upright cabinet. It has scoring features in here that you basically are either a home team or a visitor team. It was made available in novelty play and then certainly in a replay. and it's got scores that are here underneath your designated basket. So they did a color-coordinated. Green was the home team. Red was the visiting team. And you then were trying to score when you got the ball, and the game introduces a ball alternating, coming up this tube, shifting side to side. It's often referred to as the mannequin player with the lobster claw-type hands that captures the ball, turns back, and then you try to score, in your basket for the points assigned, and then the other player gets that opportunity as the ball goes his direction, it will randomly light these upper baskets for your side and the visitor's side. And if you're able to score in the upper basket, you get the random point assessment, and typically the ball will fall down and land in your basket, and you get those points as well. Not always the case, but certainly a game that's challenging and one that gives you 15 shots and you playing head As we go through all of these games today I certainly always going to be more fond of games that are two because I really like that competition head Should we go to the video Phil Yeah, let's do that.
    14:50
    So in this game, you see there's some of the bulbs might be out. It's a varied scoring, so when we make a basket, the points change for the next time you make that basket. Now there's a buzzer going off, so we're shooting for the 10-point shot, which is that very tallest basket at the top. Not successfully, unfortunately. But it's great for competition. And if you miss your top basket, typically you may score in the other person's basket because of that. One thing I'll say about the game, this is my particular game.
    15:21
    Many versions of this you see, or most of the games you see on the market of the two-player basketball, have a home and visitor indicating which basket they should shoot into. We noticed they're color-coded. The green player should be shooting in the green baskets and the red in the red. But they felt a need later on to label the baskets because people possibly didn't understand which baskets they were supposed to shoot at, and it tried to make it more clear for them. This game was designed by Harvey Heiss back in 1954.
    15:49
    He was one of the designers at Genco. I met him at Pitbull Expo many years ago, and I was so excited about this game. I love this game. And I said, Harvey, what do you think about that two-player basketball you built? And he's like, I don't remember that game.
    16:03
    Well, we think about the number of games these guys put out. They were designing a new game every month or two months, coming up with a new idea, a new game. So they didn't have time to really look fondly back on what was to be a great game in the future.
    16:15
    Let's move on. Basketball champ, Jerry Cosey, who did Around the World Trainer, also designed Basketball Champ, another one of my favorite games. This game is a staple of the classic penny arcade. These things survived into the 70s at regular arcades. And why? Because it was built like a battleship. It took in the nickels. It constantly made the money. I have one of these on the floor at CanCan. It has over a quarter million plays just at that location. It basically has never failed for me. Just an amazing game. And you can see Genko essentially kind of stole from this game wisely seven years later to create their version, which admittedly their version to me is probably a better game because of that competitive thing. But this is just a really solid game. One other thing I'll point out on this is we notice the artwork up at the top. Maybe you can see a little bit the round-headed character, the two players up on the back glass. You can see it down below too in the artwork. These round-headed characters were kind of a staple of Chicago coin in the late 40s early 50s a lot of their games had those same characters with the with the roundhead bill yeah i think it's just sort of that quintessential arcade game it's just got this soft glow as you approach the game and the dependability factor is just off the charts we have a historical arcade near where i am in colorado springs and they've got one that they've been operating there for i think 75 years and it's still there and still operates it's a great game and just going back to the genco and this game um there's a lot of both of these games around uh and i think that speaks to the dependability of the game but also to the fact that operators could continue to make money on these games the games that you hardly see any of our games that got trashed because they weren't making money they didn't keep them around but these games survived uh they're great great pieces um let's move on phil all right star slugger from united united you know as we talked about machines coming in in the mid 50s well this was certainly their contribution they had the opportunity to go to school on williams because williams brought the pitch and bat baseball game that traditionally we all know it has a base cabinet unit the head it has ramps it has buttons to operate the bat but they had the opportunity in witnessing what Williams was doing. Well, one of the challenges Williams games had was that they had a silkscreen play field and United came to the market with a silkscreen for Micah. And the durability is allowed for those games to still surface today and have really a pretty phenomenal condition on the play field. It's got great graphics on the side of the cabinet to reflect a baseball theme. It's just an impressive game. It's got these big wood legs. It's got all this wood trim up and around the cabinet and certainly on the lower, the control panel. I mean, it's just a very impressive game just to walk up to it. What they have here is the recognition that it's a two-player game primarily. So you've got a pitch button for each player standing shoulder to shoulder. And then each player, as you pitch, then you have the ability to also bat with a weak, a medium, and a hard bat strength to try and elevate the ball to the best of your ability. The game has scoring elements here in the back of the game that are single, double, triple, and there are also certainly out holes on the play field. Behind the ramp area here, there is an area that you can drop a ball in that will initiate three singles, which basically then loads the bases. If you're able to go up, there's the lower ramp, the middle ramp, and the upper ramp. Those accrue at one point, two point, three point, or three runs, I should say, for the game itself and then any of the players that you might have on the play field. There's a small little attract mode here called the super home run. And, Larry, I think you've owned this game for a long time, and you've gotten that hold twice, right? So it's very difficult, but it's always there to try and attract you. they utilize the pop-up running mechanism in the head williams had done that as well they went a little bit further with a molded plastic set of players not only the players that are in the field but the players that pop up and run the bases as opposed to williams having a flat cardboard surface you've got the ability with the super home run to get 100 runs you've got 30 runs if you can get all three of the ramps lit so it gives you opportunities to again score runs and then hopefully initiate replays just again an overall classic classic arcade game yeah just a great game um united was formed by harry williams again who always comes up in cleanup history and linden durant they were good friends in that period they ended up separating after the war harry went his own way but they were always remained friendly we could see the the three-dimensional man running unit that's in this and the two dimensionals and williams they were sharing that information patent information it wasn't a big deal they were friends with each other um i look at the guy on the side this little smiling guy that he he keeps saying to me i hit a super home run larry why can't you hit any it drives me crazy 20 years i've owned probably 25 years i've owned that two super home runs how about video just a little bit of pitch and bat on this video nothing too significant but you get a sense of will be running there let's see here get a sense of pitching and batting the triple decks it's um it's a commanding piece it's about close to seven feet long and uh you really feel that when you get those hits those upper decks it's just such a great there we made lower attack when we brought a few players home we at one point apiece for those guys so um yeah i think it's a just a amazing game one you should really search for the formica playfields actually were driven by united back in the day they came out with the first puck bowler back around 1949 and that hit the industry by storm and formica became the this long wearing surface to keep those things going uh my next game is united derby roll another united game this is actually one of my very favorite two-player games it's one of you guys should search out if you can they're not priced very high so it's really a one that a collector can get into um lyden durant again designed he was he was an industrial designer designed a lot of the games at united uh very well-dressed guy when this guy showed up at the coin op shows he came up driving a cadillac or a packard back in the day had the stick pin in his tie manic manicured hands he was just the real dandy in the business kind of showing people that He had a lot of money. Sadly, he got nailed for tax evasion in the 50s because he was making so much money on these games, he tried to hide some of it. But that's the Chicago way, I guess. Horse racing has been huge in coin-op for a long time. This is a great example of horse racing in the coin-op biz. Like Star Slugger, it has the Formica playfield. On this one, you roll balls. There's a small rubber ball you roll. We can see that on the flyer there sitting on the playfield. and you'll roll that ball down the field. There are a number of lanes at the back of the field that will advance a horse a certain amount. Now, the cool thing about this, and I'm not sure, Dave, this would be maybe a thing to research, would be when the flash system first came in, because we're talking 1955 here.
    23:51
    You'll see them on the video. There's a sequence of three lights here for each of the two players. It lights number one, then number two, then number three. and when you throw the ball through the lane right when the ball enters this end lane whatever light is lit of the three that's the horse that will advance so we think about the skill of playing this the goal in this is to get your horse to the finish first before your opponent if you can target it to always hit that lane when the number one horse for example is running you will the number one horse will win the race and you get a thousand bonus points on the score here they were they added to your score so it's a very challenging game a great competitive two-player game i love it a lot yeah and like you said the horse racing theme we've talked about sports and that was certainly a part of the sports segment that we've seen carried throughout pinball and arcades forever and yeah again two-player game i love it yeah so we can see the flashing sequence there and a ball roll and there it is 100 points and we see the horse advancing there's one other function on there that's the rear lights and if you hit the rear light that gives you 100 bonus points that's 10 jumps of the horse to move him forward so i always want to shoot for the lit lane and then time it to advance a certain horse again i highly recommend this game if you guys get a chance to buy one.
    25:13
    Next, Phil. Hockey champ. Well, apparently budget was maybe a little bit tight that year because they decided not to put any graphics on this game. Typically you would see something that reflects the theme, and this one comes without. It's an interesting game. It's a two-player game exclusively. There's no way to put this in one-player mode. The way the game works is you introduce coin, the game starts, You have control of your end of the ice, your opponent on the other end. It's red team against blue team. There are two buttons, and each button, the right button, controls your player's right side and then your goalie. And the goalie basically has an extended hockey stick behind him. All of these really operate the same as a flipper would be on a pinball machine. So your effort is to try and coordinate the timing as the ball, which serves as the puck, comes to your individual player, whether you're on this side or that side, the other button controls the opposite side of your players, and the same thing for the person on the other end. The game introduces a ball at a time. It comes out from this side. It kicks it one way for one play and then the other direction for the next play. It's a timed game. It's not a ball count game. You are given three periods and each period is designated with a buzzer. So you know you've moved from first period to second period. And then as you get to that third period, you know time is running short to try and make the maximum score. I've seen the game in three different versions. They have these larger buttons, they have one with smaller buttons, and then they have one with a paddle that was in the center. And I'm suspect that the paddle became problematic because in a lot of electromechanical games, when people activate a switch, they think the harder they push a button, the harder the reaction is to that effort. and I was suspect that the paddle often got broken off because people thought the harder they hit it, the harder the shot would be. A couple of good players in this game can really have a skill for moving the ball back and forth, and we've got some video that shows you exactly how that works.
    27:39
    So you've got the ability to try and protect goal. You can adjust the players. There are a couple of set screws in their base, so you can move them if you want them a little more on goal. or if you want them to shoot perhaps down the side so you can kind of set up the game from that standpoint. Again, for mica surface, so you don't have any wear issues, but a game that two-headed, two-player, I think is very fun. And a game that's probably a little bit, I think, like Larry said about the United horse race, it's a little undervalued. So if you can find one, I would certainly recommend it.
    28:15
    Yeah, Chicago Coin and hockey kind of went together. Jerry Cosi my favorite designer he also designed goalie some might be familiar to some of you guys goalie was another fantastic performing game for the industry and so Chicago and over the years made at least four spinning type hockey games this being one of them the interesting thing on the cabinet so we think about the coin op industry and how people were always jumping on to whatever else was popular and if we go 10 months earlier Valley World Cup soccer might be familiar to some of you guys that game came out and took the industry by storm and if you look at the compare the cabinet of belly World Cup and this one it's very close together so Chicago coin said well let's steal their cabinet idea and maybe we'll get as big a sales on hockey champ as well all right next game up is Keeney submarine this 1941 let go back to 1939 for a minute international mutoscope came out with fighter um a gun game you looked into a tube and fired at attacking planes again took the industry by storm there were sky fighters everywhere was the biggest game they ever made and everyone else jumped on the gun bandwagon because of course the war was coming potentially and everybody wanted to be ready and so gun games became the thing kini was a console slot maker back in this period. They made a lot of large wood cabinet slot machines, and they made a few arcade games, but not very many, and this is one of the great ones. Very large cabinet. If we look at this, to describe it, that lower, so this is about seven feet tall, okay, when assembled. The lower cabinet is a hollow cabinet with no floor in the bottom of it. So if we think about taking a two-wheel dolly and putting it underneath here and trying to tip it, it'll tip the whole game over right you you kind of can't do that and it's a two-piece system the base and the top so you think of an operator trying to go to on a route and deliver one of these games or manipulate one of these games really difficult so basically virtually all the of these survivors that have been found don't have the lower cabinet anymore people threw pinball legs on the side because that's something they could deal with so it's kind of a design problem that maybe had something to do with how few of them still survived. Let's go to the video on this. I love the format. So we're thinking a wartime thing. We have firing guns. We're shooting steel balls across of a glass play field, okay? And what we're shooting at is a submarine that we can see rising up in the distance. The goal is to hit all three of the targets in the back. We can see hits lighting with the red, green, and yellow targets. We get 100 points for each of those that we hit. once we've hit all three of them then it's a hundred or a thousand points after that for every hit we need to make until it submerges once it submerges we're back to reset we have to start over again so really a great challenge just to hit them as fast as we can and uh just so fun to shoot and still see those steel balls flying across the play field i really love this game yeah it's phenomenal and the interesting thing is as we've gone through this presentation we've try to utilize original advertising flyers that were sent out to try and promote the machines themselves and the particular flyer that was reflected here with the model wearing a 1940s era swimsuit they certainly knew the market these were this was an industry that was dominated by men and as i go through my flyer collection larry would have seen the same there are often these sort of uh you know somewhat risque if you will attract mode elements that were incorporated and they did the same here but again just a phenomenal game to have a chance to play yeah great game all right phil uh urban k batting practice all right well they at least had the budget to be able to bring together some art although i'm not particularly fond of the angular art that we saw in the late 60s but that was what they used here so irving k was primarily known as a pool table company But over their existence, they did generate a few arcade games, and this was probably their most successful one. Batting practice was a name that we knew from the 40s when Scientific made a pitch and bat. Well, actually, I would more often refer to this as a ramp game, and that's the same thing that they had done at Scientific, was a ball is introduced down this ramp. I've never really understood licensing to the point where a lot of the same names got reused and there didn't ever seem to be issues. So they brought their version batting practice to the marketplace. It's a 10-cent game. For 10 cents you get, and the machine can be adjusted to give you either a 15-pitch game or a 20-pitch game. I tell people that, and I own this game, and I tell people that of all the machines that I own, I believe this one requires the most skill because it's a lot of the baseball pitching bats. You can miss hit the ball and it can bounce off the side and rebound and maybe get a triple or a double or something like that. This game is all about baseball. When the ball comes down and off that ramp, it's really exciting to be able to free fly the ball that you've hit in this three and a half foot section up into the scoring ramps. There are four ramps in this game. The lower's one, the second's two, the third run, and then fourth run. So you can score runs, but if you're early, you're going to hit the ball into the right side of the glass, the plexiglass. If you're late, you're going to hit it to the left side, and you're not going to get the benefit of a rebound. So your hand and eye coordination and strength is required because there's a gun-type handle here with a trigger, and the harder you pull that trigger, the harder the mechanical bat operates to be able to hit the ball and drive it up into the scoring ramps. It's got an option on the game to provide you double score on various pitches. So we can take a look at the video as to how this game plays.
    34:40
    typically on this game those plastic men get destroyed on the play field by hits yeah and to me they always look like army men that i played with when i was a kid but they are baseball players headless army men phil yes great game and as we've talked about in some of the games this is one that i also think is somewhat undervalued but a desirable game to add to a collection because it is a lot of fun to play and very challenging to play successfully yeah totally um i would ask everyone not to look for this game because i'm still trying to find one myself so let me get one first um go back a little bit in history on this uh the ramp game the ramp baseball game was actually done initially by a company named atlas indicator back in 1928 they made a very early version they wisely put aluminum characters on the play field and they survived a lot better um i owned one of those at the time um this is a slightly better version of the game i think uh keeney also made one called texas leaguer in the 30s and of course scientific which phil referred to made one the exact same name betting practice i believe that was in the 40s yeah in the 40s yep and interestingly enough when irving k brought this game out it just so happens the gentleman that designed the scientific was working at irving k so why reinvent the wheel we had success before let's redo this game and this is the version that they did there you go um here's a game that i absolutely love i have five of these for some crazed reason uh mr top gun uh was made by a company named taylor engineering as we can see on the ad there taylor engineering was uh founded by a man named john gibbs john gibbs uh had his first success with a game called fascination some of you might be familiar with the the oceanside amusement parks running a fascination game was a roll down game and you'd hit certain colors or numbers and then you'd win prizes um so he graduated from that and to make another game which was really intended for amusement parks to a great degree a coin operated game though mr top gun was kind of a talking robot that would challenge you to gunfight him it was original let's go to that's a little bit so this is one of the show photos it was originally built as a again for carnival as a cork shooting pistol game you would actually a co2 cartridge in the pistol you would push in a cork provided by the concessionaire and then you would take shots at the guy and try to hit him before he shot you that became very kind of untenable games that get jammed co2 at runoff was very expensive actually the game itself was very expensive this was in 1961 this was 1250 dollars which was like four or five times another arcade game again he was angling toward the amusement park market but it it showed up at a lot of other locations um let's go to the gameplay on this one oh here's another industry shot this was one for like a shopping center someone could set this up as an individual they provided this little town town square kind of situation and we got see up above there's a scoring indicator with a clock involved with that that's part of the game okay so let's go to a video so I'm putting in my quarter and he's he talks to you now there's your pistol shoots a light my light beam.
    38:42
    So this game operated on a tape system, one of the early tape systems, two-track tape system back in the day, and there were actually two tube amplifiers in there as well. So one audio channel fed to one amplifier, one to the other, and depending if you hit him or he hit you, it would cut out one of the two amps that was running, allowing the other soundtrack to come through. We notice on the bottom there, you kind of see the bottom of the picture is that marquee. I have it down by the ground. It was actually a two-second clock, and this is another thing that really makes this a great game.
    39:16
    If we think about it, as soon as he says draw, that clock starts. You have two seconds to draw and shoot him. If you don't get it within two seconds, he gets you. You're dead. So it actually lights Top Gun if you shoot him on the clock or Boot Hill if he's successful. And the fun thing about this is you're always then racing against the clock. I want to draw as fast as I can for three chances against him to try to get the hits. so I want to get the best time I possibly can shoot him as fast as I can so you try to beat your old record and you end up missing him and and he gets the victory so uh really fun game Dave you had something quick continuous tape system that that's correct there were actually three different sequences before it repeated so some great dialogue from from the guy i remember playing one of these at a western frontier town near where i grew up so very fun yeah yep okay let's move on williams 10 strike they made the replay version called 10 strike they made the novelty version called 10 pins we had gambling issues and replay was certainly an issue in a lot of communities so the industry had to fulfill by continuing to produce novelty games we talked about how in the early 50s bowling was certainly big in this country and evans was a manufacturer that did a few arcade things they did some gambling devices they actually even made jukeboxes and they made a 10 strike in in the late 30s 1939 and it was such an explosive sales success for them that they contracted with Rockola and then Rockola made a version called Ten Pins and those were skirted cabinets they were five frame for a nickel games they had a glass enclosure with a curved front glass they're artistically they're just very beautiful games when we got to war Rockola stepped aside everybody stepped aside and on the back side Rockola no longer continued to produce their version. Evans, however, still did. They made their version, although it changed over the course of the 40s up until 1950. And that mid-50s segment that we've talked about when all of the industry was responding, Williams decided, hey, let's bring this game to market. Changes that they made would be that it's a 10-frame game as opposed to 5-frame. It's a two-player game. it's potentially the only downside of this is it scores 20 points for a spare and 30 points for a strike it does not provide traditional bowling score but it's still very fun and challenging game they went to a plexi type dome as opposed to the glass which i'm sure was less fragile for the game to be moved and set up you've got a control knob on the left that you can move the player to aim to get your best shot, and then the control knob on the right to go ahead and bowl. I think we've got some video on this, don't we, Larry? Yep.
    42:29
    Now, this is Larry's jumbo version, so it's a 7-foot alley. They made it in a 5-foot alley and a 7-foot, and the jumbo is a little more challenging because of the extra distance that you're trying to get to hit the pocket.
    42:49
    okay oh you're right you got the strike yeah i love this game phil um very fun to play i love that the play that the player is up on the play field through glass so you can see them there's some later versions where the players down in the play field by their companies i don't think that's as effective a game um yeah i have the jumbo version um seven feet long phil what what version do you have five footer so mine's longer than phil right moving along i absolutely love sega cowboy uh sega in the in the let's say late 60s to early 70s prior to that they were kind of copying some american designs to to some effect um but then they kind of came into their own and they made these highly well-designed games this one is just the amount of stuff in here to create the effect they wanted is just amazing to me this might not be familiar to too many of you guys So the premise here is you a cowboy riding and you throwing a lasso to capture the steer That the way it goes down let go a little bit forward so in order to create the lasso at least the throwing part of the last so what they said is we need to create a blacklit string with a scissors motorized motorized driven scissors assembly to throw out that last so we got to physically actually do it which is like crazy but they accomplished it here with this mechanism and then we can see if we look forward we can see the rope from in the distance we can see the rope from the uh let's see that's the black lit rope but then that whole assembly is then mounted on this unit which is driven by another motor that rotates that whole lasso to throw it at four different positions depending on where the steer is and where you're throwing uh just a crazy complicated game but the visual on it is great let's go to the visual so we watch when we start this game we have our shadow of our cowboy and here's our cowboy's now riding the horse he's rocking back and forth his arm is lit that's rotating the last so the last will swing through the air and now he throws and the loop disappears it runs out towards the uh steer um we have a video or not video like a zoetrope type projection system that shows the uh the cow being last so we could see i think we'll last so one more time but he's pretty uh pretty tricky it's hard to capture i think we get him near so the sound effect of the of the cow falling and uh i just love this game for how creative they were creating this effect real simple game just one push button wherever you push the button wherever the lasso is above you that dictates which way the rope will actually go so just just a fantastic game sega was great the stuff that they brought to the market where they reintroduced game themes that we'd known before and then this is something that we'd never seen before yep yep okay ringer phil all right ringer williams you know probably not the most well-known theme tossing horseshoes but they did a really great job with this game it's a two-player game can be played as a single player but in two-player mode it's very competitive you know as i've watched um this game get played i i just have that realization that the designer must have thought hey, what's a game that we can have on the market that somebody can play one-handed while they have a beer in the other hand? Because it just has that look and feel to it. It's a very fun game. You've got the ability, as we've talked about, to go head-to-head. Scoring options are three different scoring options as far as whether you're close, whether you've got a leaner, whether you've got a ringer. The game projects different opportunities when you get ringers going throughout the game to give you higher scores for those ringers. but a game that Williams did. And it's gotten a lot of attention in the collector's market recently. And gosh, it almost seems like a game that somebody should bring back to the market. Larry, what do you think? Imagine that, Phil. I love this game so much. I started a company with Tom Taylor to start producing the same format, spin wheel games that people can enjoy with one beer in their hand. Booth 135 downstairs on the floor, everyone who isn't aware, We have the games available for people to play. I'm actually throwing down a challenge. I played this game so many freaking times that I think I'm pretty good. If you come over and play and you beat me, you win $20 straight up. Come on over and take a chance. I love to compete. Let's go to the next one. We're going to move it along a little bit.
    47:27
    Oh, that's the spitter on the ringer. You'll see when you play. Helicopter Trainer came out in 1967. I love this game. It is one of the best one-player games, in my opinion, because of the skill level involved. It was actually patented by a Vietnam War pilot, Colonel Richard Brown.
    47:44
    And it's kind of a modernized version of some games that came before. A fellow named Eldon Dale, the Dale Gun fame you might have heard before. He created an airplane version so many years before that. But anyways, Richard Brown came up with it. It was built actually in Omaha, Nebraska.
    48:01
    Became super popular. So the premise on this is you're flying around hitting different pillars with a wire sticking out of the helicopter, but you're piloting the helicopter. It does a great job at that. Built by Amusement Engineering Company in Omaha.
    48:16
    This game, again, took the industry by storm for an out-of-town game, an outside-of-Chicago game, and they started drilling in Chicago. Midway ended up getting the rights to make them internationally initially, and then they actually took over the entire market for U.S. production as well. And they started building them eventually as this game and then eventually as Whirlybird, which they came out with and later Chopper.
    48:42
    Oh, yeah. Yeah, let's do that. I'm not sure of the Brownlee ones. A Williams did Space Pilot. A lot of different versions. Oh, boy.
    48:58
    there's that one guy came up with a new one that beach one whatever it's kind of interesting so we're piloting around with our two joysticks one is up and down and one's forward and back trying to do a one-handed here uh pretty challenging for this game but we fly the little wire spring-loaded wire sticks out the side and then we hit it and then we move on to the next target and the wire as we can see the little wire that's available that i'm shooting for on the next target they get narrower and narrower as you go so make it harder and harder the score and of course you're racing against the clock so real fun game again one of those quintessential type arcade games that i won't say brings us to the end of our presentation because we could certainly go on for much more but in respect for the time schedule that we were given we'd like to at least maybe allow for any questions that might surface to see if we can handle that and let us know anybody have questions so we'll go to questions for everyone though all right yes
    49:57
    what specific is specific games or oh well it really depends on the company i think typically like on like a ringer let's say i would assume is in the three four thousand range something like that um and pinball it's applicable to pinball pinball was probably more popular but they were making more pinballs right so pinball run might be 1500 or something like that or an arcade might be more 600 or 800 it really depended on the time frame what time of of in the in the run you know it's in the 30s some might be very high production some will be low production and i think survivability as we've talked about with some of these games massive cabinets that made it tough to store them and for them to be transported so some of the games that were a little bit easier to move about probably had higher survivability so so uh phil yeah walter always hoped i'd find someone who'd answer this question the first time i ever played pinball was in july of 61 and it was a baseball game would it be self-evident what game that would have been well i've collected baseball games for a long time and i have you know that traditional pitch and bat game and people that come and play it say oh, I remember playing this game. The problem is they made pitch and bat games for, what, 40 years? So although the concept of ball comes out from under the flap, bat controls, that concept is delivered for all of that time. But the theme changes from whether they were single player or two player. They made six-player versions of pitch and bats. So, yeah, I don't know that it would be evident just from that standpoint. Well, he's saying 61. Was it World Series was 61, Phil? 62. Yeah.
    51:49
    57 was official baseball, right? Official baseball, 57. Yeah. Walter, if you come downstairs, I still have a couple of copies of my pinball price guide, or sorry, my arcade price guide. I got a free copy waiting for you, and you can look up all the games and try to find it. I'll say to anyone else, with 135, Skyscraper Novelty, I have some old issues still of some of my pinball price guides. If you want a little nostalgia, I'm giving them away for free. Come by, get an autographed one, or just take one home for a reference. Still pretty useful once in a while if you have a pocketbook that can tell you the dates of when the games were made.
    52:23
    Next question. I had one over there. Hang on, Dave. Go ahead. We'll wait for the mic. All right. We'll get Dave through. To add to the comment about production numbers, I know that in the 50s and 60s, at least the pitch and bat baseballs, which is what I've studied the most, had a higher list price than pinball. And, you know, they were only being sold in the spring. So that would be a couple reasons why the production numbers would be lower on those game types at least. Yeah, I think, and the interesting thing about, if we think about arcade games through the entire period, the cost of making them was higher. You pinball, virtually all the parts in pinballs were the same every year. They just reconfigured them a different way. They had a certain number of motors they could use, a certain number of coils they could use, and they were stuck into those price formats. They had to work with what they had, whereas almost every arcade game, they had to start from scratch to build a new game. They're always different, so many different motors and parts. One of the things the operators always shared with me, baseball games had a survivability because it was an easy game to have on location. People could walk in, walk up, understand, pitch the ball, hit the ball, three outs, game over. It wasn't hard for them to be able to understand how to play the game. And so that's one of the things that virtually kept some kind of a pitch and bat in arcades forever.
    53:51
    Exactly. Yep. Same premise. I think we had a question over here. Yeah, I was just curious. Is it the same business model as now where these machines were bought through a distributor and they were shipped from the distributor to the arcade?
    54:07
    I didn't quite get the question. Or were they bought directly from the manufacturer? No, not back in that day. It was an operator who they called Jobbers back in the day. That was a common name for them. The operator would go to the distributor and buy directly from the distributor. The distributors got the games from the manufacturer. And I was just curious on the pricing of like from penny arcades to nickel arcades to dime, right? Like what was the kind of time frame there of when that progression happened? Well, that's a good question. We probably have to do some research. I mean, I would say that the penny probably carried through until – well, the penny was a thing in arcade games, a staple in arcade games until the late 20s. It started going to nickel play on these large baseball games and arcade games. 37 was was a nickel but then we think about as soon as pinball came along and let's call it 32 that was all penny games because it was 16 for a pinball and 300 for a baseball game well the baseballs didn't survive anymore everybody produced pinballs for a penny so penny was the thing again for a long time but um probably in 37 38 the economy started coming back then everybody started going to quickly to nickel play um dime play uh early late 50s i would say early 60s mid to late 50s somewhere in there right yeah shuffle alleys actually got that going they were so hot that they could charge more money for those so you're right dime play for for for those came in sooner and then quarter play was probably just for quarter for actually one play was probably really uh in the with at the digital era probably right around 75 78 79 yep yeah brags that their periscope game the one that's seven feet wide eight feet deep was going out at straight quarter in 1968 and you know they were saying look at how much money we can get per play because it's so impressive. Could be. Anything else quick? I think we're about out of time. We got one more? Okay. One more question.
    56:20
    Just to jump on that, Sega Periscope was the initial $0.25 per play push, and that was a coordinated press junket they did to push operators in that regard. But my question, real quick, is roll-down games. I love roll-down games. You almost never see them.
    56:36
    I'm curious, did they not sell a lot back in the 50s? We get to answer that. You got to hang on, Dave. Back in the 50s, were they too heavy and large for collectors? What happened to them? And why don't they get the love they deserve?
    56:52
    Well, I think one of the issues, the technology, was the balls disappeared from roll-down games, right? They were often down in the front of the game, and it was easy for people to pick up the ball and walk away with it and basically disable the game because you can't play a roll-down game without something to roll down. so so actually that's that's correct regional differences yeah that's kind of been through the history of of pinball and arcades it's whatever the locality allowed right if they allowed gambling pinballs we're putting them in and that's all we're doing which became a problem for pinball but rolled on was the same thing it was a way in the communities that were banning pinballs to get a different type of game in there that the operator could still make money on. Another part of it is that there was a separate network of distributors. So I went to distributors that were representing pinball, they were representing Chicago coin, Midway, et cetera. But the companies like Seidel, Philadelphia, Toboggan, Fascination, completely different representation. I think you could buy direct from the factory on those so you would only find out about them at uh iapa or the predecessor naapb not at amoa so a different world yeah there was no mob in philadelphia apparently for philip to buy a company i know nothing uh thanks so much everybody thank you very much appreciate it