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Collecting Pinball Machines from the Birth of Pinball to the 1930s - Pinball Expo 2024 - Panel

Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2024)·video·1h 3m·analyzed·Oct 18, 2024
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Panel traces pinball ancestry and documents 1930s industry origins through games and marketing materials.

Summary

A Pinball Expo 2024 panel discussion featuring Caitlin Pascal, Mike Minshew, and others exploring pinball history from pre-1930s origins through early industrial development. Pascal traces pinball ancestry through aristocratic gaming tables, bagatelle variants, and international game evolution, emphasizing rigorous source documentation. Minshew presents a 30-year flyer collection covering 1930s-1940s pinball manufacturing, highlighting Baffle Ball as the industry's true launch point and the Gottlieb-Keeney manufacturing partnership.

Key Claims

  • Wiffle is generally considered the first coin-op pinball machine, combining bagatelle playfield, payment acceptor, sealed glass playfield, and automatic ball recycling.

    high confidence · Caitlin Pascal, presenting established pinball history consensus at Pinball Expo 2024

  • The Chateau de Bagatelle narrative in Dick Buchel's Encyclopedia of Pinball lacks conclusive evidence; the Comte d'Artois's 'gaming table' was for cards/dice gambling, not pin bagatelle.

    high confidence · Caitlin Pascal, primary research debunking widely-cited pinball origin myth through archival investigation

  • A pin bagatelle table in the Deutsch Museum in Munich, likely from the late 1700s, is currently the oldest known pin bagatelle artifact in the world.

    high confidence · Caitlin Pascal, citing museum curator claims and James Masters' verification through hands-on inspection

  • Japanese rolling ball (tamakura gashi), introduced to the USA in 1901 via Buffalo World Exposition, evolved into Fascination and Pokerino, eventually spawning the modern redemption arcade industry.

    high confidence · Caitlin Pascal, citing collaboration with Japanese pachinko historian Kazuo Sugiyama on book research

  • Approximately 836 pinball manufacturing companies have existed historically, with the majority active during the 1930s, with roughly 400 companies in operation at peak.

    medium confidence · Mike Minshew, citing Internet Pinball Database (IPDB) data

  • Baffle Ball (Gottlieb) represents the true launch of the pinball industry, introducing mass production and manufacturing standardization, distinct from earlier ancestry games.

    high confidence · Mike Minshew, distinguishing 'games that launched the industry' from pre-industrial pinball ancestry

  • Gottlieb partnered with Keeney & Sons to manufacture Baffle Ball due to insufficient production capacity, with Keeney allowed to release their version weeks earlier.

    high confidence · Mike Minshew, documenting partnership through comparative flyer analysis (Gottlieb vs. Keeney versions claiming different 'consecutive years' leadership)

Notable Quotes

  • “If you wish to make a pinball machine from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

    Caitlin Pascal@ 5:44 — Frames the challenge of defining pinball ancestry by paraphrasing Carl Sagan; illustrates how gaming history traces back to ancient societies and arbitrary context-setting.

  • “There's not a lot of evidence to support that delightful theory of Bagatelle's inception. Perhaps the evidence is out there, and perhaps you'll be the one who can dig it up, but for the time being, we have to consider this a bit of a myth.”

    Caitlin Pascal@ 8:56 — Directly challenges the widely-cited Chateau de Bagatelle origin narrative; emphasizes rigor and source verification in pinball historiography.

  • “Without sources, it is essentially a folktale that we tell ourselves because it does make a good story.”

    Caitlin Pascal@ 10:38 — Critique of uncited Wikipedia pinball article; warns against propagating unverified narratives in the era of AI-generated content.

  • “I might die tomorrow and so I'm always eager to share the material I find in hopes that everyone else will be able to pick up the ball and run with it.”

    Caitlin Pascal@ 11:14 — States philosophy of open-source historical research and community knowledge-sharing; emphasizes accessibility of sources.

  • “The flyers of the 30s tell a story about the end... they're mostly four pages, one picture of a game, and a whole lot of words. I mean, it's like reading The Economist magazine.”

    Mike Minshew@ 24:04 — Characterizes 1930s pinball marketing materials as educational and instructional, teaching operators about best practices, maintenance, scheduling, and lighting.

Entities

Caitlin PascalpersonMike MinshewpersonRob BurkepersonJames MasterspersonKazuo SugiyamapersonDavid GottliebpersonDick BuchelpersonKeeney & Sonscompany

Signals

  • ?

    event_signal: Pinball Expo 2024 featured dedicated pre-war pinball booth and panel discussion showcasing ~30 playable pre-1930s machines alongside flyer exhibits and historical presentations.

    high · Tap 91 Game Room collaboration, Rob Burke contributions, trivia-based flyer giveaways, formal panel structure with multiple speakers.

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Pinball mechanics and game design philosophy evolved through centuries of international influence (French bagatelles, Japanese rolling ball, UK corinthian games, etc.), with ideas mutating and spreading globally.

    high · Caitlin Pascal emphasizes 'global thing to study,' tracing billiards/bagatelle transmission through Dutch-Japan trade, rolling ball arriving via 1901 Buffalo Exposition, UK games imported to Japan in 1930s.

  • $

    market_signal: Pinball ancestry research is gaining prominence as a specialized field within the pinball community, with focus on rigorous source documentation and international game evolution tracing.

    high · Caitlin Pascal's extensive research across Japanese, German, French sources; emphasis on primary documentation; Expo panel dedicated to pre-1930s history; collaboration with international historians like James Masters and Kazuo Sugiyama.

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.192

0:00
and the pre-war Facebook group. We came together here with Tap 91 Game Room to create a booth of pre-war pinballs, along with Caitlin Pascal and Mike Minshew and Burrs over here, who all have contributed games. We brought about 30 games up to be able to play. Please come play them. It's quite the show. Rob Burke has also contributed quite lovely to our booth and has some beautiful games that you don't see examples of very much. So what we're going to do is we're going to start out with Caitlin talking about pinball before 1930 as it comes into the age and some of the early inventions. You'll see some of those at our booth as well. And then Mike's going to talk about collecting pinball flyers from the 30s, which interests me very much, which may not interest my wallet very much. And then I'm going to go ahead and go over some of the history of pinball, I'll talk about the things that people think are brand new and spanky and flashy that I have on all the machines in the booth. And also, Birds is going to jump in and heckle me while I'm doing that. I'm just here to harass you. Right? So there we go. So, Caitlin, the stage is yours. All right. Hi. My name is Caitlin Pascal.
1:13
And on the screen or any ways you can find me, my primary blog is Pinball Novice, and my blog of Japanese arcade research is Early Arcades Japan. We are here to talk about Pinball Ancestry and let's see how much we can cover in a relatively brief period of time. So this is Wiffle, generally considered the first coin-op pinball machine. This is where pinball collecting begins for most people. There's no single element of this machine, though, that is entirely new. But a few things combine together here for the first time. One, a Bagatelle playfield with pins. Two, a payment acceptor, a coin slide. Three, the playfield is sealed from the player with a sheet of glass so the player can't tamper. And four, it's able to recycle the balls and reset the game all without operator intervention.
2:02

  • Mike Minshew has compiled the world's largest collection of pinball flyers over 30 years, with focus on 1930s-1940s era.

    high confidence · Mike Minshew, self-identifying at Pinball Expo 2024 panel

  • “The majority of that 836 number existed during the 30s. I think at one point, you know, there was just south of 400 companies in operation.”

    Mike Minshew@ 28:03 — Quantifies manufacturing fragmentation during pinball's industrial inception; many garage-scale producers alongside major manufacturers.

  • “The games that launched the industry... To me and to a lot of the researchers and people who are into these games, Baffle Ball was the beginning of the actual industry.”

    Mike Minshew@ 28:32 — Distinguishes between pre-industrial pinball games and mass-market pinball manufacturing; marks Baffle Ball as the demarcation point.

    • D. Gottlieb & Company
    company
    Montague Redgraveperson
    Tap 91 Game Roomcompany
    Deutsche Museumorganization
    Internet Pinball Databaseorganization
    Wifflegame
    Baffle Ballgame
    Pin Bagatellegame
    Klondike Poolgame
    Fascinationgame
    Pokerinogame
    Rocks of Sillygame
    So I like to say that pinball ancestry is looking at everything that brought us to Wiffle. A well-known example of this would be the Montague Redgrave Bagatelle, pictured here for a U.S. patent in 1871. this was not the first table like this nor was this the first game like this with the spring plunger but it was the first one that was patented in the usa and over the next few decades red graves bagatelles and there's at least 40 variations that do exist became very popular while they were enjoyed by people of all ages they were still primarily a toy when you look at the timeline of pinball history we often see toy versions as cultural aftershocks of larger versions that were built for commercial use. And that is something we'll see with all arcade history.
    2:49
    This is Pin Bagatelle from France. And I say Pin Bagatelle specifically because there are many types of table games that get referred to as Bagatelle, and I'm trying to never use the term Bagatelle by itself. And the first thing you want to notice is its size. This is decidedly not a toy. This table here is 65 inches long and 33 inches wide. It's slightly larger than a Bally Dolly Parton pinball machine, which is 54 by 31. This table here is from the mid-19th century. It has gates along the top of the playfield for your ball to pass through to score points, and it has a very ornate gate at the top with a bell, which is typically the most valuable shot in any game. This model has a spring plunger in the right shooter lane, though most tables of this sort are played exclusively with a cue or a mace.
    3:39
    During my research, I came upon this wonderful 1905 photo of a billiards hall in New York State. One thing I quickly learned when looking at pinball ancestry was that you should always check anything related to billiards, and this image pays off handsomely. In the back corner of the room, we see a game that is sometimes called Klondike pool or American bagatelle. These tables were made late 19th century and similar to French bagatelles that inspired them. You have a shooter lane on either side of the playfield and a playfield full of pins for the balls to traverse as it descends. We can see a bell mounted at the top center of that playfield. At the very top, there is another ball placed resting in a tiny divot. We call this the king ball, a concept that came from the early game cockamaroo. You can shoot this ball, king ball, and knock it from its perch and score it with both balls. What makes Klondike pool distinctive are the trap holes in the playfield, and these holes are connected via channels to a trough at the front of the machine for the ball to come out. Some things that fall under pinball ancestry might not be so obvious to a pinball fan, So this is a 2P Holland days table. You use a spinning top to knock down wooden skittles for points. And these tables have a history traceable back to the 16th century, and we can readily find evidence of them in the 18th century. Purportedly, some tables would have a bell mounted beneath them, and if a player jostled the table too hard, the bell would ding, essentially a proto version of a tilt bob. If you were at the York Show last year, you might recognize this specific table. It is probably from the end of the 19th century. and this one is now on display at the Roanoke Pinball Museum.
    5:20
    It is composed of beautiful, heavy brass work and has mother-of-pearl scoring inlays under the arches. It's an absolutely stunning piece to behold. This game did not need to be built so lavishly. Modern versions are just called skittles, are readily available and cheap, made by just all wood, but these here were pieces of elegant furniture, and these, to me, define aristocratic table games. So to paraphrase astronomer Carl Sagan, if you wish to make a pinball machine from scratch, you must first invent the universe. In game research, this is the problem of arbitrarily choosing your context, since games can be traced back to the beginning of all society. For pinball ancestry, I choose to start at aristocratic gaming tables and all of the mysteries that currently swirl around them. So aristocratic table games were toys for the wealthy. They could be purchased for saloons and bars, but I probably do not need to convince many people here of the enticing idea of spending significant money to own a meticulously crafted high-end piece of gaming machinery for their own private game room. Some of these were crafted by the finest woodworkers and metalworkers of their day. All of the gameplay elements that went into a game like Wiffle have roots in these games of the 18th and 19th centuries, with origin stories that span the entire globe. Or at least, that is the picture that is emerging because pinball ancestry is full of mysteries just waiting to be solved. There has never been a more exciting time to research pinball ancestry because each year new troves of data are being digitized. Newspapers and texts from previously unread decades and centuries are coming online, plus books and ephemera from different countries, provinces, municipalities, trade groups. Previously work like this would require traveling to different countries and manually digging through archives. Contemporary OCR and translation tools help remove the barriers of access to these materials from 150 to 250 years ago. For example, modern tools have allowed me to conduct research in Japanese, German, and French games. So one of the most compelling mysteries, you might be familiar with this one, is that of the Chateau de Bagatelle in Paris, France. Dick Buchel's Encyclopedia of Pinball, Volume 1, presents a narrative of the Comte d'Artois unleashing this game of bagatelle upon the French aristocracy. I read this and I really wanted to know what kind of table was being spoken about here. I went through each of the references given in the book and unfortunately there was no conclusive evidence that a pin bagatelle ever actually existed there. so a quote about the the comte d'artois from a 1903 article that is referenced from the book he had a number of domains was a gambler a betting man and constantly in money difficulties and his brother louis 16 had several times to pay his heavy debts he kept a gaming table in his own house but in the parlance of the time gaming table was just a table where people would gamble with cards or dice. According to the floor plan, he did have a billiards room, but the phrase hold a gaming table was just inviting people to gamble. After presenting this narrative, Bouchel eventually concedes the remarkable coincidence of the appearances of this new betting game at precisely the time that a leading member of the inner court circle of France had a game room in a building called Bagatelle, beggars a connection between them. While much of the history of France in the Encyclopedia of Pinball is well footnoted, the assertions about the game itself are not. There's not a lot of evidence to support that delightful theory of Bagatelle's inception. Perhaps the evidence is out there, and perhaps you'll be the one who can dig it up, but for the time being, we have to consider this a bit of a myth.
    9:10
    So one confounding factor is that we only start seeing the word Bagatelle referring to a game table around 1810. And that was in regards to an English nine-hole bagatelle, which is very different from other tables we've seen, as it is a billiards variant played on a level surface. And I should say, we have one of these tables at the show. Thank you, Gabe. Next to the pre-war booth, come check it out. You can play it. That one at the show is from 1860. These nine-hole bagatelles were immensely popular in the UK. Many of these tables have the ability to fold and they travel well, and they came to North America on military ships.
    9:51
    You've probably encountered this weird racist political cartoon showing Abraham Lincoln at a similar bagatelle table. And if you count the holes, you'll see there's actually 21 holes of that bagatelle, not nine. There are variants that do go past nine holes, but they are extremely rare. I've seen an 18-hole once. If you do find some documentation of a 21-hole bagatelle board out there, please let me know. I'm sure there's some out there somewhere, just waiting for a collector to discover. but they were never popular.
    10:18
    Maybe at some point you found yourself on the Wikipedia page for pinball, and you have probably seen this remarkable table in the image here.
    10:26
    One thing to note about this section of pinball prehistory is that there are no citations. There are many specific assertions given with confidence, and this might as well have been written by ChatGPT. Without sources, it is essentially a folktale that we tell ourselves because it does make a good story. The section even ends by tossing out a wildly incorrect assertion that this game was directly ancestral to Japan's pachinko.
    10:50
    It was not. I do not want to digress into a rant about how AI has wildly undermined humanity's store of knowledge, and a lot of these details were here on the wiki being wrong for years before AI slop became pervasive. On my blogs, I share all of my pinball ancestry research notes and sources. especially in this day and age I think we probably shouldn't rely on anything we cannot properly cite I approach my research with the philosophy that I might die tomorrow and so I'm always eager to share the material I find in hopes that everyone else will be able to pick up the ball and run with it so but uh onto that bag onto that table says this is that pin bagatelle table that is in the collection of the Deutsch Museum in Munich Germany it is a work of remarkable craftsmanship by an expert, expert woodworker. I would like to first introduce my friend James Masters. He's a games researcher from the UK. You can find out his website, mastersofgame.com, and he sells many traditional wooden games and supplies. James has published a number of academic papers, most recently on the ancient Egyptian game of mehen, as well as the English game logits, which is a bit more recent, only 500 years ago. James was able to make arrangements with the curators of the Deutsche Museum to spend hours inspecting this table. The curators of the museum claim this game is from the late 1700s, and we have found no reasons to doubt that, though the provenance is unknown. The top level of this table opens to reveal a basic billiards game with a cup in the center. Raise the top of the table and a pin bagatelle, like we see in this photo, can be propped up. Beneath the pin bagatelle, there's a catapult game hidden inside. This is actually one of two tables in the museum has in their collection. The other table is very similar except it has three entirely different games built inside of it. In this one a ball is propelled into the playfield using a flat piece of spring metal in the plunger. A bell hangs at the top gate. There are gates of various points on their way down and half of the shots half of the slots along the bottom also score points. So while evidence for the Chateau de Bagatelle might be a bit sketchy, here we have this incredible game possibly from the late 1700s and so many of the common trappings of early 1930s pinball are already visible. Currently this is the oldest pin bagatelle artifact known to exist in the whole world. There's a lot more to say about these tables and if you're interested please feel free to ask me later or send me an email.
    13:21
    I want to close on a mystery that I was, one of the mysteries I was able to solve based on my pinball research I was contacted by Japanese printmaker and pachinko historian Kazuo Sugiyama to assist with the English language research for a book about Japanese rolling ball aka tamakura gashi a game which dates back to the 1870 Japan rolling ball arrived in the USA in 1901 via the world exposition in Buffalo and was soon fit after found at major vacation hotspots like Coney Island and enjoyed decades of popularity patrons would roll balls up that long playfield into those scoring pockets of different denominations. Their accumulated scores could be traded for prizes of wares imported from Japan. This was a time when very few Americans had ever encountered a Japanese person or had a chance to purchase any Japanese products. The shopkeeper would keep a tally of your points across multiple visits and ask people to eventually redeem them before the end of the season. As electricity became more prevalent, rolling ball evolved into games like Fascination in Pokerino. And as rolling ball faded in the 20s, skee-ball parlors, which had begun adopting the popular redemption model. Tamakura Gashi, this rolling ball game from Japan, had invented redemption arcades, one of the largest sectors of today's arcade industry.
    14:45
    So this does not have to deal with pinball per se. I'm talking about this under an umbrella of arcade ancestry, an expansion to the idea of pinball ancestry, where we look at all the developments that led to arcade machines as we know them. Japan has some incredible arcade history just waiting for researchers to dive into. I am currently compiling a history of Japanese electromechanical machines and mechanical arcade games at my site, Early Arcades Japan, and if you're interested in that topic, it's a whole other thing, please come talk to me later. Some quick examples though. The image on the right is from a scroll from the 1890s showing a ball game where you gamble on which ball would arrive first. The coin-op equivalent would be the steeplechase and similar trade stimulators that were popular in the 1930s. At the pre-war booth we have a game called Flying Colors which is a pinball version of this exact same idea. Please come play it there. These are depictions of early cork gun and BB gun shooting galleries from around 1908 and 1891, respectively.
    15:50
    Very early arcades. Before the rifle became popular there were blowgun shooting galleries The one on the left is from the 1870s The one on the right is a depiction from a much larger scroll work from 1813 where targets are shown as elaborate demon figures, spring-loaded to startle players when struck.
    16:15
    Lastly, here's the oldest piece of arcade ancestry I've discovered from Japan so far, an archery shooting gallery where spring-loaded mechanical dragons and demons surprise and delight players.
    16:26
    Now, this one is from a 1797 document that recorded life of that era. Now, I promise we will stay firmly in the 20th century, specifically the 1930s, so let's talk about Wiffle and all the pinball goodness that followed. Thanks for your time.
    16:49
    Does anyone have any quick questions before we... Yeah, the toys actually precede Red Graves. Like, Red Graves was certainly responsible for a lot of the popularity within the USA, but on a global scale, games like that were really popular and had different waves of popularity at various times in the 1800s, the 1800s depending on the country like we know there's like there was a mid mid mid 1800s in france there was a wave of them um fortuna is a game from finland that had massive a bunch of waves of popularity that was uh um so it's very difficult to say um specifically because you'd have to you'd have to narrow it down to region uh but each one each uh each country had their own waves of popularity uh you know yeah the the toys were in japan in 1930s corinthian they call them the corinthian game and the 1920s in finland was it was fortuna um redgrave the the redgrave in the usa and then uh but a whole bunch of different names like they would call it billiard chinois in france um in the middle mid 19th century uh but so not not just there's not just one wave there was many waves of popular of popularity but i i it's hard to say when the first one was of mass mass production. Thank you so much. This kind of rigorous work is incredible.
    18:23
    Do you have any idea about the road versus the anthem? I mean, is it sort of colonial? Oh, yeah. I mean, first of all, I want to preface that I am not like a trained historian. and like I saw like I there's a huge amount of gaps like I talk about countries a lot and like a whole bunch of stuff could be happening in those countries and right over my head um but um I know that in like in Japan was had a period where it was closed off to uh foreign trade uh and then I think then there was an exception in the 1600s for Dutch traders and that would that introduced billiards um into Japan and there's lots of there's actually some wonderful antique scrolls that depict some early billiards in Japan. And so that influence was paramount for the Japanese front.
    19:17
    It was the UK's version of, say, of Corinthian that Japan imported that became the sensation there in the early 1930s, as an example.
    19:29
    And then, you know, one great thing we see with the – I always want to stress that this is a global thing to study because the ideas traveled the globe so readily and then mutated and changed on their way. And there were so many ideas that came into Japan, and then Japan made them their own thing. And then those ideas were taken by Germany, by the UK, by the USA, and spread there and had their own lives there. There's one more question there?
    20:03
    So my first question is, so what, when, and where was the first Baglitelle game? You mean like a toy one or like the aristocratic gaming table version? Either or. I mean, we don't know. The real answer is we don't know. There's a lot more work to be done. As more documents come on, as more documents from the 18th century become digitized and available and people searched them, we'll find more clues. Right now our best clue is there's a game of – we have records of a game called Rocks of Silly. And that's S-C-I-L-L-Y, which is a rocky shore. You have to imagine the boat smashing through a rocky shore. Well, they turned that into the balls falling through pins as the boat's smashing. And we have records of that from the 1700s. But it could be mid-1700s. It could be earlier. We don't actually know because we don't have any actual firm documentation, but definitely pre-Chateau de Bagatelle.
    21:10
    And then I also – so I noticed that you mentioned in Bagatelle that there would either be nine or usually 18 holes. Is that a reference to golf? No, no connection there. I don't think – and I think when that was being made, I think golf was in a much more prototypical stage that was not – and had not been spread far outside of Scotland at that time. All right. We'll pass it over to you. All right. Everybody good? Yeah. Then we're going to go ahead and let Mike speak next. All I know is I need some more pre-1930s games now after that conversation. So Mike's going to talk to us about collecting pre-war flyers. We're going to definitely shift gears a little bit. That was probably the most information I've taken in in 15 minutes since college, so that was dense.
    22:05
    I'm not going to do the same thing. So can we full screen that? Absolutely. here and then we'll hit this symbol to go into slideshow mode and it'll kill all this this up here and then yeah let's go to this one to the right to the right this one here you want to run it yeah let me drive you're at it i am not a powerpoint oh okay i can write powerpoint it works okay see we're there perfect wonderful yeah help me with mine we'll do classes later Hello, everybody. Thank you very much. My reason to be included on this is a little bit different.
    22:40
    I know I see a lot of familiar faces in the audience. Some of us in the hobby are really into documenting the history and learning from collecting the games and the flyers. And I have spent the last 30 years putting together the world's largest collection of pinball flyers. And so Rob reached out and thought this was another piece of the history that we ought to expose people to. So I just wanted to get started and say it's going to be a little different tone of presentation.
    23:09
    I actually have a little bit of agenda that the only thing that's important on this slide is that word in red. There are prizes for trivia questions today. I put together packs of flyers going back to the 50s. Oh, you want to pick yours out now?
    23:22
    Thank you, Vanna. And I've done this before. I did this for Dave Marston at Pentastic, and it was a lot of fun. And so there are questions embedded in the presentation. I will simply kind of, you know, you raise your hand, I'll call on you if you're right. We'll pass you the flyer. Let's don't have any fussing or, you know, nobody. They're just flyers. I've got 11,000 spares if somebody's upset and doesn't get a pack. We'll make you up one. No fighting today. But anyway, this is my focus, especially the last two or three years in the hobby, has been in the 30s and the 40s. And just to preface where we're going, the flyers of the 30s tell a story about the end. I mean, I don't have the struggles that you've had, Caitlin, in terms of trying to get documentation. Anyone who picks up a 30s flyer, they're mostly four pages, one picture of a game, and a whole lot of words. I mean, it's like reading The Economist magazine. They were teaching people how to build an industry, teaching people how to operate, how to keep games clean, and what time of day were they the most popular, how to have the right proper lighting. It's fascinating if you get into them. We're not going to have time in 20 minutes to go really deep, but I wanted to give you a bit of an overview. And I'm going to jump through some of this. I love the Aladdin's Castle t-shirt down here on the right. Do you get Guy on the Pink Phone? Anyway, he's not listening.
    24:43
    I wanted to say one of the reasons I'm here is because when I was about nine years old, my dad started taking me every Saturday to Bally's Aladdin's Castle. and playing pinball for a few hours until we ran out of X amount of money, which meant you got good fast and then go out to lunch. And so my fascination with this started very early. I was this generation. I then progressed that, and for a number of years, I worked for Ross Perot's company down in Dallas, EDS. And during that time, we sponsored the EDS Byron Nelson Championship, a stop on the PGA Tour. I got lucky enough to be selected to go we need to figure out a way to spice this up hopefully a number of you remember a tv show called American Choppers it was the father and the two sons up in New York that built the amazing motorcycles so what we did was we reached out and we built 11 over two years we did the first run of machines the really the one in the blue the ultimate golf ball frenzy was really the fun and that's where we did 11 machines three choppers two episodes of the show all for the children's charity so i have had some amazing opportunities to design games build games you know and take these and i mean we had we had the games up on the big screen in time square in new york city i mean i i felt so good about that at the time because this was a kind of a period when pinball was struggling and i took it as a personal opportunity to help drive the hobby now um what happens when you're into it at this level and you're a collector and you're not rob burke and you're never going to have a place to put 1200 games you really pretty quickly realize that the only way to have for me i realized to have all the games is to have all the flyers which has led me on this 30-year quest across almost every country on the globe and people have just run down you have that flyer oh anything on here i have yeah i've got hundreds of 30s because i have hollywood at home oh okay well it's the only one i've ever seen i'd love if someone could show me another one that's um anyway so this has become this is the way i have approached my passion for the hobby is to track these down and this gave me a way to have you know to keep collecting and to stay involved really in the hobby and meet people long after i have completed what i'll call my collect my personal collection of games so there's the where i came from why i'm here my approach maybe gives you a little bit of you a reason to listen a little bit. And now I think if I did this right, we're going to do our first trivia question.
    27:11
    Can I answer? No, you're, no, no, no. It's multiple choice, so somebody should be raising their hand. I got one. The first one is this guy. It's this guy. Yeah, you. The guy in the, you.
    27:29
    This guy. Oh, D. I'm sorry. I thought you said C. You're right. My bad. Okay. I was too quick with the buzzer. You're right. So here's the next screen with the answer. Yes. IPD has it down to yes. And let them pick one or just throw them one or whatever. They're random.
    27:50
    Thank you, Vanna. Yes. I'm handing out our presents. But I thought this would make it fun. But yes. So 836 companies have existed. And this really ties into what we're going to talk about in terms of the 30s games a little bit. The majority of that 836 number existed during the 30s. I think at one point, you know, there was just south of 400 companies in operation. Now, some of them may have produced 10 games out of a garage, but they did count. And so as we move forward in this, and again, we're talking in different terms. I'm very carefully using the language here, the games that launched the industry, which is a little different than Caitlin was talking about. So I want to make that distinction. To me and to a lot of the researchers and people who are into these games, Baffle Ball was the beginning of the actual industry.
    28:41
    This is where mass production came into place. This is where Dave Gottlieb stepped back and looked at how games were designed and assembled and how he could simplify that process, how he could ensure quality, ensure profitability. So there's a lot of detail in this era, but one of the things I found most interesting when I was putting this together in the last couple of weeks was the fact that I had not only found this particular flyer. This is the Gottlieb flyer. And pay attention at the very top where it says, many consecutive years of recognized leadership. And let me flip to another version of this flyer. This is why I find this part so interesting.
    29:23
    This is a Keeney and Sons, not J.H. Keeney, but Keeney and Sons flyer that says at the top, it's an identical flyer with the exception it says 31 consecutive years of blah, blah, blah. Okay.
    29:35
    Maybe a bunch of you know this, but I'll quickly try to share the story here. So when Baffle Ball came out and it took off, there was not enough production capability at Gottlieb to do this. He partnered with Keeney, and they were actually, as part of the agreement, allowed to release their game a few weeks earlier. The 31 years comes from the fact that Keeney had been involved in the more gambling and other types of sides of the business for a long time. They wanted that on their flyer. Gottlieb obviously couldn't use it. The Gottlieb flyer came out later, and I'm going to flip back for a second. This is actually one from one of the distributors. The CS is a Moseley vending. As a collector, with the way I do it, I actually always try to find the various versions because there is always what I'll call a factory flyer, like Keeney & Sons. They produced the game. They did the flyer. A lot of Gottlieb flyers are the same way. You'll see D. Gottlieb & Company at the bottom, but then the ones for the distributors would have a place where the distributor is printed. Those are different flyers, and in some cases, the text, the imagery is different. And we could get into a whole discussion over that, but we don't have that kind of time. I just want to point out that this is the game that's generally considered to have launched the industry. There's a lot of history here. I think in what you find if you look into this, this was not the only arrangement where one company came out with a game that was so popular they couldn't afford it. They could not make enough to supply demand, and so they partnered with one of their competitors, and this was the way the industry started. I mean there was a lot of partnering, but yet at the same time there were some very bad things that came out of that, and some people reneged on their deals. Were those games stamped with the Gottlieb stamp when they made them, or were they stamped with the Keeney stamp? They don't have either. Most of them – I mean some of them don't have either. I mean the way – what happened here was that the pre-story I was trying to avoid – thank you, Jeff – was bingo. That's what I did. And if you know the story of bingo and all the fussing and fighting and stealing that went on there. Yeah, so you get into, and so this was the first redesign. If you notice the very distinctive plunger, the very distinctive coin slide plate, that is Gottlieb Gottlieb. This is a higher quality game. And so now, but I'll keep going and maybe give a little bit more. Whoa okay when I change the sorry about the lack of rotation there on the baffle ball senior PowerPoint decided to do that on its own I guess But this was the PowerPoint Senior game and this was actually if you can tilt your mind you see this was a factory flyer with the D. Gottlieb at the bottom. And then to make this story even more interesting,
    32:07
    this game was so popular that they came out with the idea, which was brilliant, to sell these very inexpensive, here on the right, the Baffle Ball home game. One came up, an NOS one came up for sale on eBay, about three months ago. I wanted to buy it, but I think it went north of $500 for a little tin toy.
    32:27
    But this was brilliant, right? I mean, so here's a prize to give away to people when they play the game and achieve a high score. They were very, very inexpensive. They actually ended up making it in two sizes, a junior and a senior of the home game. So there is the baffle ball countertop, and then they call the junior, then the senior you see pictured improperly here on the legs, and then two versions of the home game. And we're going to take a break and go to our next trivia question. so we don't get bored.
    32:54
    Boy, if you get this one right, you're a genius. I'm sorry? Did I read the question? Oh, okay, I was making them do some work. Trivia question. What 1933, thank you again, what southern state did Bally Manufacturing list as a primary operations and distribution facility? What state?
    33:12
    Martin, I mean, Jonathan, you're probably cheating. Okay, we'll make this work. I don't know who got their hand up first. Jeff, you have to say. I think Jonathan did. I think it was. Oh, okay. There's a disagreement.
    33:23
    Okay. Back here. I'm sorry. The glasses. Oh, no. I just felt that you knew it. John. Correct. How did you know that?
    33:39
    Years ago we had this debate. So I found two flyers, one for Pennant and off the top of my head right now, I can't remember. I found these several years back that clearly are printed and listed with Memphis, Tennessee as a ballet location. I actually went and tried to research this address, and unfortunately it was bulldozed many, many decades ago, and the records are really incomplete. So I can't – I wasn't able to completely validate it, but the fact there were two different games, both of them with this address on the flyer, gives us another thing to look into. So this is part of the history and the interest where I kind of get into this is like what really went on. Do you have the same kind of discrepancies or the same similarities with the billboard magazine ads and the automatic age as you do in the flyers? So that – Because I look at those a lot, right? Yeah. And so this is really just personal preference and other things, but I only collect a flyer. I don't collect magazine pulls. I don't collect magazine ads. I don't collect any of that. They tend to line up very, very well. It's just that by the time you get ready to produce and print and distribute the flyer, I find that things are more refined. Although, since you've introduced the aside, I've mentioned this concept of a factory flyer and a distributor flyer. What we do see is, and I'm most familiar with the Gottlieb era because they did this for the longest period of time of any of the major manufacturers, the factory flyer was produced first. It was often produced from a prototype game. it was done to get ready for an immediacy need, a trade show, or somewhere they were going to do that. And they would take those to the trade show, and then they would mail them to a specific mailing list. I have so many that you can actually track all this from who it went to. The distributor flyers were then done second. And in some cases, they corrected errors. So the most fun is to find one where they changed something in the game, or they changed the way they had to talk about the game from a legal perspective or something else. And so again, a lot of stuff comes out now also focusing a bit on the you know i've collected and restored games for a long time as well and i just wanted to put up actually i can't find the photos of these two games because they've been sold when we moved houses i didn't have these were both i had the countertop version of five star final and the countertop version of whiz bang and i um i had to get rid of anywhere to put them i had to move to games that had legs and and kind of fit in the new house better but i The point here was really early on I found these. I mean, I was more of a solid state kind of guy. And what I will say is that these games are amazingly fun to play when they're restored. When they play properly and operate properly, the level of skill. And to me, the idea that in 1932 or 1933 you could get someone to put a penny or a nickel in a game during the Depression or right after the Depression to maybe have some amusement or entertainment.
    36:41
    It was just amazing to put your hands on those machines and think about it. Or win some money at the bar. Because it's all gambling. If only there was a way that people could prove their talents on these wonderful machines.
    36:53
    There's a tournament tomorrow where they can, Caitlin. Thank you. So these were early parts of my personal collection that got me more interested in the 30s games and led to the flyer and everything else that's happened. And in the interseeing years, well, I'm sorry, again, when I converted the PowerPoint, we moved to computers, it looks like it rotated the images. But come play them in person at the booth. We have those two games. We have both of these.
    37:18
    I have a Rockola Jigsaw and a Rockola World Series that are absolutely my pride and joy of my 30s collection, meticulously tracked down and purchased the best condition ones and then went through the full restoration process. And these games are incredibly fun to play. I know that the World Series is one that everybody gravitates to because of the movement and everything else, but I actually find the jigsaw more satisfying to play. I enjoy playing that one, and the skill involved in that one is incredible. I mean, you know, I'm one of those people, you may have picked up on this kind of already, but anyone who's spent 30 years collecting the flyers and the different versions and all this, I actually went so far. I thought these two games were so beautifully colored, especially the jigsaw. I actually went to the point of having Joey at Pinball Decals have those guys in Germany make me sheets of that non-reflective glass, specially sized just for these games. Oh, and I have four sheets left over at My Wants Any. I had to buy ten to get an order in, but they were expensive. All right, all right. But they make the colors just pop with no reflection anyway.
    38:23
    Again, we've rotated the images. I apologize. We didn't catch this when we loaded it up real quickly, But I just wanted to show here that I have a serial number matching on the World Series. So the play field and the cabinet serial number match. That retaining, I had it blown up so you could see it, but that serial number sticker inside of the World Series on the casting, having that date hand signed off with the serial number. I mean, to me, that's just part of my joy in owning this machine.
    38:52
    Let's do another question. because the – what pinball manufacturing company made the largest number of titles? I think – we'll go over here.
    39:04
    No. There's only one other guess. There's only one other person. Yes. 702 machines to 696. And that's 702 machines up to what day? I went to Internet Pinball Database, and I pulled how you can do Bally all years, all company names, Gottlieb, I did that and then sorted it. That's a lot of machines.
    39:31
    Now, kind of moving forward, and I think that having been involved with owning and restoring the Jigsaw and the World Series, oh, and I have to also mention that on that World Series, the biggest single source of help really on both games was Nathan and Buckworks. Being able to lay your hands on really good new plunger tips, new springs, everything that you need to make a game, that's the place to go. But I've really put a big focus on trying to track down a lot of the old Roccola flyers. And these things are incredibly hard to find to the point where I will please say is even after 30 years of collecting, I have half of a World Series flyer and no jigsaw flyer. if anybody can lay their hands on one um we need to talk you've got a small car there as far as i'm concerned um juggle ball story here you know it's a it's it's a really you've got one we got one in the booth you got one at the booth it's in my opinion before before you start okay is that and brian and i have talked about this is this game was too easy to win oh because because it's completely skill-based and we've had people at the different shows hit this hit juggle on that multiple times. Wow, okay. Right? And so what we find is their next game, which was Wings, right, has no skill involved. It's just cool. And that is much easier to take money from. They're both beautiful games, lots of color. I mean, you see the, to me, as someone who's been involved in the Flyers for so long, you can follow the ups and downs of the industries by the Flyers. You look at the KISS foldout. You look at the Space Center. You look at, and then you compare those to the times when times were tough. Like I think if I have a ballet skill role that I love playing, but the flyer is the most horrible black and white boring thing you've ever seen. You follow the, you know, in Gottlieb, you follow this through and you can see when times are good, flyers are beautiful and well executed. When times are tough, they cut back. You know, it's just part of the process. We see it today in the industry and have seen it over, you know, the last 15 years, the ups and downs. But juggle ball to me was interesting because the flyer is just beautifully done. The color, the writing, the care. I mean, this is not a game and how much it weighs and 10 features on each side of the play field. This is real information. And then the interesting part about this one was this is a game that came as close to bankrupting Rockola as anything ever. It was a complete and utter failure in the market.
    41:57
    Had to go get loans from his investors, and then, of course, they popped out as the next was Jigsaw and completely turned the industry back around. I mean, it's, you know, the ups and downs, and these guys were no different than us sitting in this room right now, right? I mean, they're making their best judgment. They're trying to design games, do what they thought was right, and you win some, you lose some. But this was a beautiful flyer and an interesting piece of the story. And then I want to pop up just a couple of other ones that I laid out just because they, you know, a lot of people have seen some of these. But when I talked earlier about the number of words on the page versus picture, I thought this was one of the flyer that illustrates that about as well as you can. That's a lot of words. I mean, for a game with no electricity, that's a lot of words.
    42:40
    Same thing when you move forward and you look at some of the Mills flyers. This is really actually one of the most simplistic of the Mills flyers. Most of these were, as the company grew quickly, they became very, very elaborate. In fact, those are some of the most beautiful and elaborate flyers in the industry. I've got some with like silver leaf on them. I mean, they're just amazing. But again, lots and lots of words, lots of instructions about how to be an operator, how to operate your games, how to make money, really getting this going. And then you get to the late 30s, and I found this one I thought was just a fantastic find. This is like a 1939, and they were using, I think, a Ballet Royale. But the idea was this game light. And if you take a look at the language, it talks about people spend more money on pinball like after 6 p.m. or whatever, and that's when it's dark. and you need to buy one of these lights so that people can see the pretty play field and enjoy the game. So, again, it's a piece of the history. To me, this kind of fleshes out the things that we don't always see when we just come to the booth, play the game. This is how they help build this industry. Is that like Penn Stadium? I'm sorry? That's like Penn Stadium. You just went way over my head. Is that like Penn Stadium, the lighting? Oh, okay. I got you. I'm sorry. I wasn't making the connection there. Got a couple of questions, I think. Are there – Oh, no, I went – I pushed the button. Well, listen, Caitlin, I'm pushing buttons. Okay. Back there in the teal shirt, I think it was the first hand up.
    44:08
    Yeah, you got it. Do you know what game? Do you know the name of the game? You're right. Right. This was the gimme question. I was trying to get to the – I was trying to think of something late last night because I was still short on trivia questions.
    44:24
    And there it is. Yes, William's Expo. I thought that was a good one. All right, so we have one flyer pack left, and that's available to the person with the best question in the Q&A. But let me get to the Q&A slide.
    44:40
    So the first question is, do I collect flyers? That would have been an easy one if someone had yelled out yes, you'd have gotten the last flyer pack. I have those cheeks on fire. There we go.
    44:54
    Back it up. I feel like I'm at the White House. This is going to be one of those multi-part questions from Fox News. Okay. Do you just collect English language? No, no, no, no. Okay. It's a great question, and it's really amazing because I collect 1932 to current all countries and all languages. and doing that has it really opens up because especially in europe um you got to the point where the distributors were doing you know we've kind of come full circle right the distributors kind of creating their own flyers or in a lot of cases of got leave and valley they would produce flyers where they eliminated the english text and they actually ran them back through and reprinted what they wanted to say about it and it's not dissimilar now to what you're seeing where you know stern's not really producing and they're just sitting here by the pdf and saying slap your logo or whatever, just reprint your own. So yeah, I do all languages because I feel like it's another piece of the story. Some interesting pieces of that, there were times when there were a number of games being exported to places like Brazil, Argentina. I think Gottlieb was in the business where they shipped them unassembled for tax reasons and they were locally assembled. You get into, I have a whole mini collection of flyers from Gottlieb from a distributor in Lebanon. And given what's going on in the world today, I found it fascinating that at some point in the past, they were at a place where they were buying amusement machines from America for Lebanon. And again, we've come full circle.
    46:35
    So I just wanted to make sure I wasn't wasting my question here. So has there been any foreign either distributors or even, I mean, manufacturers that do something so different with their flyers? Yeah, like naked women on them, yes. Spanish ones and stuff like that? Oh, yeah. I mean you get into – I mean the reality is they follow the cultural norms in the area. I got a bunch of flyers from the European region with like topless girls. They would – just like the ballet games when you think of the Dave Christensen era, they were designed to appeal to 15-year-old men. Well, the Europeans did the same thing but within their social norms. So you really get to see a lot of differences.
    47:21
    The flyer pack should – wait. You didn't get one already, right? Okay, he gets that one as the first of the Q&A. Mike, I think you were next up in the back.
    47:33
    Well, this is a – can you hear me? No. I cannot hear you. How about now? Yeah, that's good. I know the answer to this question, but I think it's something that everyone should know too. But I'm asking you, do you know the most mass-produced pre-war pinball machine of all time? And those guys were just pre pinball machine of all time You know I not going to say I the historian but I would assume based on what I know that it was Rockola World Series at around north of 75 units But I could be wrong. Absolutely. You're absolutely correct. And what's amazing – okay, but here's the question that I have for anybody. How many are left, right? Yeah. It's so rare to even come across them still. 3,000 of them left, maybe more than that? I don't know, but I just thought I'd want to share with everybody that for something that has been so mass produced, they're still so hard to find. They are. You just can't find them. I mean, I think that number includes Pleasure Island. No. No, no. That's three. So 3,003. But to the point, I mean, 30 years of being the person looking all over the planet, I've yet to land a single jigsaw, and I got my – I acquired a bunch of Mike Pasek stuff about five years ago from my collection when he decided to pass the torch, and he only had half of a World Series flyer. That's the one that's on IPD, and I can't find the flyer. I mean, no one can produce one.
    49:06
    I have the Army-Navy flyer. Yes, a full, complete, beautiful one. It was on the screen earlier. I just need the game to go with it. I just don't want to drop 20,000. He has one for sale. I'm sorry? He has one for sale. Oh, who?
    49:21
    We'll have that discussion. He's right here. All right, sorry. Well, thank – I was curious. You mentioned the – and you just repeated the sort of white whales that you're out for, like the jigsaw, but what's the crown jewel in your collection? Do you – like if you could save just one and you had like – I resist answering the question because it's really hard when you're – I think the last time I looked, I'm at about 6,600 unique pieces. I have tens of thousands of flyers. That doesn't matter, but 6,600 unique pieces in the collection. and they are a kind of a family i mean you know i've you know they're housed they're organized it's like a library of congress you lay your fingers on anyone within less than 30 seconds but probably the humpty dumpty only because it's the only one i've ever laid my hands on it's the only one anyone has ever produced you know people talk about having one i think most of them are really nice color copies from this one that were cleaned up in Photoshop. And that's a whole other piece of the hobby is as some of these pieces have become pretty expensive.
    50:40
    I mean flyer collecting in general, don't get me wrong, there are less of us than there were. In fact, I'm probably the youngest person left in the hobby.
    50:49
    But things like the Kiss, for example, on my pin side ad for buying, I always say I want to buy flyers, do you have any? I put up a copy of how to spot the fake Kiss flyer. Because of the market with the KISS collectors, those routinely sell for $70 to $150, and they have been reproduced. But the ones that were reproduced had a small tear on the back page in that double yellow border, and it's in the image. So it's not – that's the fake, and there's hundreds of those out there. So it's kind of like – it's a big discussion in the collector hobby right now around – kind of like today with Stern sending their PDFs to all the distributors. They print your own. What are those real flyers? It's one of the reasons I've pivoted to the older. At least I know I can identify. I've been asked to identify the fakes in a number of issues, and so I can count on those. But on the newer stuff, it's like when Jonathan comes over and he brings me stuff from the Dutch Pinball Society or RS Pinball or whatever, they're produced by the distributors. Are they real flyers? It's a debate in the collector community right now around kind of what have we done to ourselves with this approach. Sometimes it's the only printed flyer. Yes.
    52:03
    Yes, sir. You said – I forget what it was. I didn't say it. I deny it. Well, fair enough. You implied it, that one of the games was signed off by someone. There's a signature underneath the game.
    52:16
    Inspection certificate. The inspection certificate on the Rockola World Series on that sticker. It was signed off, so the inspector signed it. Oh, yeah. It's a multi-part. It's that traditional 30s where people cared about their work. Somebody finished the game, inspected it, signed off. They stamped the serial number. They put a date, a handwritten date. You can see that on multiple games. We can bust one open down. You can see those in the 70s. Sometimes in the 70s, Gottlieb, you can find inspection stickers with a person's name signing off on it. We have an airway down there that has – it has all the signatures on it. Wow. All that thing. There's a lot – I like – personally, I like finding paper in my machine. Yes. Whether that be inspector numbers or inspector signatures or sometimes you find the old point scoring cards. I opened a Rockola 2100 the other day and found seven different scoring modules for it. But I like the paper very much. While I was here at the show, I bought – from Larry, I bought a pack of paper on the skill roll. And he would show me that in there, it was the only one he'd ever seen. It's like get this many points on Valley Skill Roll. Absolutely, right. Free beer. Yep, 100%. That didn't last long. Did it say free beer on it? It said free beer. The word is free beer. That's good.
    53:24
    Any other questions? I'm out of flyers though. Combining the two talks, your talk was primarily U.S.-centric while the previous was European with a hint maybe of Asia. Any idea why pinball took off manufacturing-wise and otherwise in the U.S.? And in the 30s, were there machines being made in Europe as well?
    53:45
    I mean, so this is a group question. I mean, sure there were. There were machines being made all over. Chicago had that industry, though, I think. And while it started in Youngstown, Ohio, Chicago really took hold, I think, with Bally and Gottlieb and Rockola.
    54:04
    it's a good question right Larry I have a number of images of German Flyers that I could share with you guys later if you want that would be excellent yeah Belgium was pretty big in production of arcade and pinball France so they all contributed to some of the product
    54:34
    some of the earlier machines. And I talked to a man from the Polish Pinball Museum in Warsaw, and they have a number of the – they have at least two of the German-made pinball machines from the 1930s. It's a – they're really cool. The German ones are really cool, yeah. So there were those industries in many other countries. But I just want to say, like, the reason pinball took off and the confluence of factors at the global level would make it an excellent two-hour documentary because it's so multifaceted and there's so many moving parts. And I highly recommend just pulling at that thread and you'll discover so much in that regard.
    55:25
    Yeah, there's two. We have two in the pre-workbook. Yeah, the third is both. We got two. They play great. So if you look for the booth with the 1930s bar and the brick walls, we have that there. Near the Stern booth. Yeah, it says pre-war tournament. We have a tournament this weekend.
    55:45
    So if I'm allowed to add to your question, I have a soccer game. It's a pre-war soccer game. Oh, that's a cool game. Have you gotten that working yet? No, not yet. It's a good game. I have a shooter for you. It's a clone of Valley Airway. It's called Soccer. And my playfield has, instead of airports, it has soccer teams from the UK. But there's also a version with French soccer teams. So I don't know who the manufacturer is because it's not listed on there. But to answer your question, there were manufacturers copying American game designs and buying – building them in Europe.
    56:29
    All right, so I've got five minutes. I'm going to blow through some slides. Thank you. Thank you both for – We'll shut up. No, no, no. So from incredibly interesting history. You don't get to hear a lot about that. It's very good. The flyers you don't see a lot because people have hoarded them from us, and we don't get them anymore. and as someone that's heard with Jay as fast as I can to get the four or five hundred that Internet Pinball Database does not have so that's awesome I mean to have that resource available to us as pinball hobbyists and collectors is amazing and thank you and that's what it's for and someone that's seen Jeff's presentation here three times now you guys are just amazing so I want to mention a couple of things I want to mention the history of pinball.org that's my website we just have we say what we're doing what shows we're going to There's a pre-war pinball group that's on – if you're on the Facebook. And there's a lot of good people out there, a lot of people trading parts, a lot of people trading games, a lot of people asking for information. That's really good. Let's see what I have here.
    57:30
    Okay, so I'm going to go through just a couple. We talked about the history already. We have some automatic industries, 1931. Ballyhoo and Baffle Ball we talked about. We get into a little more automation in Bally Airway. Pamco Contact, first machine with electricity. Harry Williams so Harry Williams also did the automatic and movements advanced so there's a great piece of story out on IPDB it's hard to find but it's a whole article and interview with Harry Williams right super neat talks about some of his first innovations right Valley bumper first machine with bumpers and then as far as I'm concerned nothing good happens till 1947 so a machine It is what it is. So early machines, you notice in the 1931 and 1932, we have a very wood-looking machine. We have the whiffle. There's a million whiffle variants, right? So a lot of times you'll see these wood machines with just the pins in it, a whiffle variant, right? And they're made all over the place. They're beautiful. I've seen ones made from furniture companies where they made one machine. The sides are all walnut with burl and this beautiful legs and all this curled wood. They're just absolutely gorgeous. They're a beautiful piece of furniture, right? And then starting in 31 and 32, Baffle Ball and Ballyhoo, big names. You start to see these big, bright colors, these big art deco kind of themes come into the machines in terms of the colors and the shapes. And even the shapes, if you look at the Baffle Ball and the Ballyhoo, they're similar the way they are. And they still have the kind of same circular collectors for the balls and the scoring that you see in the automatic industries. Some features. Flippers. We didn't have flippers until 1947. Wrong. 1932 double shuffle. Here we have flippers, right? Wire forms. Oh, yeah, we have wire forms. We have habit trails. This machine is actually at the booth for you to play. It's very cool, right? We have a couple of machines. We have a Chicago Express. I don't know if I have that on this slide deck. We have a Spitfire over there. Kickers, wire frames, playfield lights. all of those things that are on the new Metallica are also on our 1930s machines, right? I have all of that. What's once was old is new again, right? Okay, let's talk about gambling because I like gambling. Ticket payouts. So the gambling machines of the 30s used to have a number of ways to get paid out. You could either get paid out by these tickets by Stoner, which I think are absolutely gorgeous artistic. There was actually a ticket machine in the machines that would spit the tickets out just like if you're at Chuck E. Cheese, right? Or you would get payouts. So I have machines like Bally Rocket is a good example. One of the first payout machines, a 1933 electric machine, and it would spit out based on how many different toilet bowl seats that you would close on the machine. If you would close one through 500, you might get 20 cents. If you closed all of them, you might get 25 cents. Excellent machines. Love them, right? If you do come by the pre-war booth we are not paying out but we will cover your nickels going in i mean maybe right i might so tilts tilts there were a million kinds of tilts that came out you see tilts like uh uh this little red area on the world series rock all the world series right where it goes from red to black if you tilt uh you see this kind of tilt that looks very much like a current modern tilt um i know you can't see the mask can you i'm just yelling um so the you have this tilt that is basically the lift tilt like you have in the modern machine, right? And it causes the tilted up at the top. This is from an airway, right? You have a pigeon tilt, right? And I know it looks like the little table that holds the ball is sitting to the side of it and not in the game. So you have a little ball on the tilt, and if you push the machine too much, the ball falls off the tilt, and they would not pay you out for that. We have a number of machines with those in your play this weekend as well, right? gambling. I love gambling. So here's payouts. So you had any number of different kind of payouts, right? And they would normally be on the back glass in some of the later's games or backsplash, whatever you want to call it, right? Free games for no lost balls. You have an entire payout mechanism. All 10 balls must be played. I mean, so if you went over the score, you would not get paid out. If you went under the score, you wouldn't get paid out, right? Here's some from Rocket and Airway, you could score and pay out based on any number of features or factors based on what the operator felt that they would be good for them. So you could get paid out based on color, based on total score, based on, in the case of Airway, based on city, if you got the right city combination. So a number of different ways to pay out from the operator that weren't physically slot machine type mechanism payouts.
    62:34
    Here's some more payouts. And you can see where some are manufacturer payouts, like the Rockola's on here. The, great, I might make it.
    62:45
    The Rockola, Army, Navy, Jigsaw, World Series Playball, there's that. But then here's this one over here that looks like it's just by some dude in a bar, which I think is cool, right? I like those things. if the payouts interest you and we're good, I'm two minutes over so that's good if the payouts interest you, Cliff has a couple of bounties on some of his games that he's got medals he will award I also have had the $100 for all 10 balls payout on the airway for the past 8 years and no one's ever gotten it if you're looking for a challenge, come try to put up a high score on some of those see if you can snag a medal or as we mentioned, we're doing a tournament in the pre-war area tomorrow and another one on Saturday so it's qualifying from 10am till 4pm top eight at 4 p.m we'll put into finals head to head and see who gets first so thank you for coming if you have questions please come talk to us at the booth we're happy to yes sir booth 540 we're in the back right in front of the stage as someone said there's a banner for 1930s tournament we're right under that that was excellent