The Southern Fried Gaming Expo and Pinball

After attending the 2024 Southern Fried Gaming Expo, TechStuff looks into the origins and evolution of pinball machines. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you? So? Just this past weekend, I was
invited to attend an event called the Southern Fried Gaming

(00:27):
Expo here in Atlanta, Georgia. I attended as media. So
big thanks to the Expo for allowing me to come
in and check it out. I really appreciate it. This conference,
this convention, this gaming Expo is founded in twenty fourteen
by a group of pinball and arcade enthusiasts, and it's

(00:48):
an annual event in which gaming fans from across multiple
platforms and genres all come together and they can trade
and buy and sell and play games. That includes all
sorts of games like you've got your pinball and your
arcade machines. Many of those arcade machines are quite obscure,
like you could call them classic titles because they date

(01:11):
back to like the seventies and eighties. But good gollie,
I ran into ones that I had never heard of before.
And I've played a lot of arcade games, but you
also have console games there, you've got tabletop games. It's
kind of a mecha of gaming and a great community too,
really interesting group of folks who are wandering around and

(01:33):
playing different games, and the expo includes many different activities.
You know, of course, you can do all the playing
and buying, selling and all that sort of stuff, but
they are also panel discussions ranging from history lessons to
advice on how to maintain a machine of your own
or even design one if you were so inclined and

(01:53):
like elements of game design, which is pretty cool. They
had musical performances and occasionally professional wrestling. There are vendors
selling game adjacent stuff like clothing or dice towers, or
source books or jams and jellies. It was a fun event.
I really did enjoy my time there, but it got
me thinking I should do an episode on the evolution

(02:15):
of the pinball machine. Now I have done an episode
about pinball. There was a classic episode of Tech Stuff
where I covered it, but I feel like the subject
actually needs a deeper dive and we'll need a couple
of episodes to cover because pinball has a history that's
really fascinating. You've got the evolution of mechanical, like purely

(02:36):
mechanical machines to electro mechanical pinball machines up to modern
day electronic and computer based pinball machines. When I say
computer based, I mean the micro controllers and stuff are
overseen by a fairly simple computer, but a computer nonetheless
in some modern pinball machines. But obviously you also have

(02:58):
pinball games that are computer games, right, like simulations of
pinball machines. That's kind of a different thing. I'm not
really going to talk about that. So let us dive
into the fascinating story of pinball, because it's also got
a lot of politics and crime and moral panic wrapped
up in it. Now. The story itself is tricky to

(03:20):
tell because pinball is one of those things that evolved
rather organically from other activities, and I maintain it's largely
a matter of opinion as to what constitutes the first
pinball machine, Like there are a lot of contenders that
could potentially claim that title, and I think it all
depends on what components need to be there for you

(03:42):
to call it a pinball machine, Like what does a
pinball machine actually need to have for it to be
considered an actual pinball machine. Would it need to have pins,
not all pinball machines do. Does it need to have flippers?
Does it need to have a ball presumably a coin
slot like a score keeping system? What is it? But

(04:03):
whether we can definitively proclaim a specific instance as the
first pinball machine or not, we can still talk about
its origins. So before there were pinball machines, there were
lawn games. Now, some of these games shared a resemblance
to golf, which required an awful lot of land to

(04:24):
play on. Most people did not have a lawn large
enough to have a golf course on. Golf dates back
as far as the fifteenth century, with King James the
Second of Scotland famously outlawing the sport in fourteen fifty
seven because he really needed to get the Scots, you know,
trained up for war, but they were too busy golfing.

(04:45):
So golf was seen as a distraction and something that
unseerious people would pursue, and Jimmy's ban on golf would
serve as one of the earliest, if not the actual
earliest record of the sp itself golf getting banned. So
it really is like pinball, But that's that's getting ahead

(05:06):
of myself. Anyway, lawn games became popular, and there were
lots of different variations, like you had bowls, you had croquete,
you had baci. But these games still required you to
actually have a lawn and they weren't great options if
the weather happened to be unpleasant, which it could be
in places like northern Europe. So what if you could

(05:27):
create games that evoked certain elements of lawn games, but
they were designed in such a way that they could
be played indoors, Then you'd have a Eureka moment. This
was what inspired the invention of parlor games like bagatel.
So in many ways, bagatel is similar to billiards or pool.
It'splayed on a table. Those original tables were quite large,

(05:50):
they were level, they were flat, right, they had no
mechanical elements at all. So the table had little divots
in it, and you would play bagatell with balls, and
you would use acoustic similar to billiards or pool, and
you would hit the ball toward these little divots, each
of which had an amount of points associated with them.

(06:12):
In some ways, I think a bagatel is similar to darts.
You've got a playing field with specific areas representing specific
point values, and your goal is to accumulate points by
firing a projectile at that playing field. Now, toward the
end of the nineteenth century, a chap with the name
Montague Andrew Elijah Redgrave came up with an idea to

(06:35):
enhance the old bagatel design and to miniaturize it. You know,
not everyone had space in their parlor for a dedicated
gaming table that was close to the size of a
billiard's table that just wasn't within everyone's you know means.
So Redgrave thought it might be keen to make a
Bagatelle table that was small enough to fit on a

(06:58):
normal tabletop, kind of like one of those small pinball
kits you sometimes see that are like a fifth the
size of a normal pinball table. Like a toy pinball
game is kind of similar to that. So this begatel
board would be played on an incline, so the top
of the playing field is an inch or two higher

(07:18):
than the base of the playfield. So the player would
need to shoot a ball, which would now be a
little marble sized ball instead of like a pool ball
sized ball. Shoot a ball up the playfield and then
the ball would naturally roll down this incline, and this
time you would have little holes in the playfield that
would represent points, but you would have pins pi ns

(07:42):
pins surrounding these holes and only allowing the ball to
pass through in certain points. Otherwise the ball would just
bounce off the pins and go somewhere else. So the
pins are kind of guarding the holes, and only a
ball coming in at the right angle is going to
actually make it into the whole and thus score whatever
the points happened to be. Redgrave created a plunger in

(08:07):
order to propel the little marbles up the playfield, and
he used a metal spring for the actual plunger. So
if you pull back on the plunger, it would either
compress a spring or it would stretch out a spring,
depending upon how you designed the plunger. But this way
you store potential energy. Right once you release the plunger,

(08:31):
the spring quote unquote wants to get back to its
normal shape. It'll spring back to its normal shape and
thus pull the plunger forward, strike the ball, and knock
the ball up the playfield. These boards were very simple
and purely mechanical systems. The only mechanical element actually was

(08:53):
just the plunger. That you would use to fire the
ball up the incline to start the whole process. Everything
else was passive. There were no flippers, there were no bumpers,
there were no crazy gimmicks. There was no progressive score
a keeping system. There was no way to manipulate the
ball once you release the plunger, unless you were to
nudge or tilt the table. You could do that, but

(09:14):
you weren't supposed to, and so you could argue that
this game was largely a game of chance. Now you
could have a general feel for how far back you
should pull the plunger before releasing, so there was some
skill involved, but that was the best you could do,
and the wild wins of fortune would carry the game onward.
Monty Redgrave would file a patent for his tabletop bagtel

(09:36):
game in the eighteen seventies. It would be a bit
before we get to something really resembling what we think
of his pinball, but some basic components, like the pins,
the balls, the plunger, those were already present in this early, early,
early iteration. Again, keeping score was the responsibility of the players.
There was no progressive score keeping system, so you had
to like write it all down because the wooden board

(09:58):
could not do that for you. One thing that would
be a contributing factor to pinball eventually becoming a scandalous
activity is that some bars and pubs and things of
that nature, some shops would have bagatel boards where you
could play and you would pay a certain amount of
money and you would get a certain number of balls

(10:18):
for however much you paid. Typically we're talking like pennies
for like five balls or something, And if you were
to rack up a high enough score, you might win
yourself a free drink. So you'd pay the bartender, get
a bunch of balls, try and get your best score.
And this element of chance in the game made it
lean a little bit on the side of gambling. So, yes,

(10:40):
there was some skill to this too. It wasn't entirely
up to chance. Using just the right amount of finesse
to plunge a ball so that it's more likely to
go where you wanted it to go was part of it.
But a lot of that stuff really was up to chance, right, Like,
you could be really careful and still things might go
poor simply because of maybe there's a defect in the ball,

(11:03):
maybe there's a chip in the playfield. There could be
anything like that. So this means the games were tiptoeing
up to being classified as gambling, just as slot machines
would turn out to be. Okay, we're going to take
a quick break to thank our sponsors, but when we
come back, we'll talk more about the early days of
proto pinball. We're back now. I'm sure there were no

(11:35):
shortage of folks who created variations on Bagatel, like there
were probably lots of knockoffs and copies and iterations of Bagatel.
But the next bit that I feel is really important
for our exploration of pinball is the inclusion of coinslots.
So Bagtel for the longest time meant that you would

(11:55):
have to go and pay somebody who would keep the
balls like locked away, and they would give you the
balls for a game of Bagatel, and then you would
bring the balls back afterward, like you would write down
your score, maybe bring the bartender over to see your score,
and then try and get some beer out of it
or whatever. But this was an activity that would benefit

(12:16):
from automation. We talk a lot about automation on this
show and how it can be bad, but sometimes it's good,
you know, if you don't want to have to keep
track of a bunch of marbles while your clientele are
playing Bagatel. Then this is a good development, which is
that the introduction of the coin operated slot game. I

(12:37):
did an episode about the history of vending machines which
stretches back surprisingly far. There are records of an ancient
design by Hero of Alexandria back in the first century
of the Common era. For example, a hero proposed a
device that, in exchange for a deposited coin, would dispense
holy water. Some pretty clever system of a pan and levers,

(12:59):
and so when you inserted a coin, that coin would
fall onto a pan and weigh it down, and this
would put pressure on a lever. The lever would open
a valve and let the holy water out, but then
the pan would eventually tip over far enough for the
coin to slide off of it into a repository, and
when freed of the coin's weight, the pan would come

(13:20):
back up again and the lever would close the valve
and the water would stop flowing, which is pretty neat.
We don't know if anyone ever built one of those things,
but the design seems like it would work. But the
real era of the coin operated vending machines would be
the nineteenth century. The eighteen hundreds, folks began to build
machines that would dispense stuff ranging from books to stamps

(13:43):
to later on stuff like postcards and food. Finding a
way to connect the insertion of a coin with the
operation of the device was the real trick, but by
the late nineteenth century it was really becoming a thing.
One company in the United States that was in the
coin operated machine business was a Detroit Bay Least operation
called Kale Brothers Manufacturing Company. That cillle So Kale became

(14:07):
known as an amusements manufacturing company, building coin operated devices
like test your Strength games, gum vending machines, slot machines,
and yes, coin operated Bagatel tables. So again, early on
we see an association of proto pinball machines and less
respectable means of amusing oneself. So the Kale brothers themselves,

(14:31):
August and Adolph, they formed the company in the early
nineteen hundreds, though August had previously operated his own company,
and some of his work kind of bleeds over between
these two organizations, including this Bagatel game. I'm sure they
made many more models than just one. The one I
could find was called log Cabin, which itself went through

(14:55):
several iterations. The first version of log Cabin was kind
of boxy. It looks sort of like a picture frame,
like it was a rectangle. Later versions, however, would have
an arched upper border, so you'd have a curve at
the top instead of you know, hard angles, and that
curve was a nice curve that a ball could follow
if you were to plunge it up the playfield. Now,

(15:15):
the game was kind of like plinko. You know, you
would launch a ball to the top of the table
and again the ball. The table was an incline so
that the ball would roll toward the bottom of the playfield,
and there were pins all along the way, which would
you know, change the way the ball would fall. Eventually,
a ball would nestle into a slot at the base

(15:37):
of the board, and there was also a hole at
the very top of the board. If you got a
ball in the hole, you would win yourself a dollar.
The bottom pockets had values ranging from absolutely nothing up
to fifty cents, and it cost five cents to play
the game. You would get one shot per play. But
we still don't have any flippers. We don't have any
electro mechanical components to talk about. Heck, with log Cabin,

(16:00):
it was a lot about luck, so we're definitely close
to gambling here. What's more, this is how things would
stay for around three decades. It wouldn't be until the
nineteen thirties when we'd actually get the word pinball at all. Like,
you could argue that log Cabin was a pinball machine
even though there was no like flippers or other mechanical elements. Besides,

(16:21):
you know, the plunger and flippers would take like half
a century to get there. So in the nineteen thirties
we're skipping way ahead. Because while there were lots of
other tables made over the following decades, they weren't different
enough to really merit inclusion. So by the nineteen thirties
you get to a company called the Bingo Novelty Company,

(16:43):
which produced a purely mechanical proto pinball machine called, fittingly enough, Bingo.
The game had a coin slot, it had a plunger,
It had no other mechanical components, at least none that
I could see, And if you put a coin in
the slot, it would give you the chance to shoot
five balls up the playfield. And these balls could settle
into one of five holes surrounded by pins, so you

(17:06):
had to have the ball land just right to go
into these holes. Otherwise they'd bounce off and rolled down
to drain at the base of the playfield and you
would lose them. The promotional material for Bingo proclaimed it
to be a game of skill. I suppose if you
were very, very good with the plunger, you could make
the argument that it was a game of skill, and
maybe you could shoot the ball so it landed in
the appropriate holes. I assume those holes were associated with

(17:28):
the letters of Bingo, and that the main goal was
to get one in each hole. That's just a guess.
The pictures I've seen have all been at an angle
where I really couldn't see the playfield very clearly, so
it's hard to say exactly what the goal was. But
it was a game that was rather popular that One

(17:48):
interesting thing about Bingo is that the Bingo novelty Company
would partner with a young manufacturer to produce the machine
because demand was higher than what the novelty company could supply.
Was a company called Gottlieb, which would become famously connected
to pinball machines moving forward. It would become one of
the big names in pinball production. Another early game was

(18:12):
called bally Who. This one also involved using a plunger
to shoot a ball up a playfield, where it could
roll down and hopefully land in one of the holes
guarded by pins to earn a high score. Again, some
proprietors would award prizes to those who achieved a high
score you know that was above a certain given level
in the game. One neat component in bally Who is

(18:34):
that upon receiving a coin, the floor of the playfield
would kind of drop out, and that would allow the
balls that were already nestled into these little holes to
drop through and thus roll down and be ready for
your next round of play. So I thought that was cool,
Like it was a way of clearing the playfield without

(18:56):
having it be open access. Right, the earliest Bagatel games
were into the air. You could reach in and move
the balls around if you only wanted to, and then
obviously that would lead to the potential for lots of
hanky panky, Like you could just say you got a
high score and all you did was put the balls there,
kind of like in Young Frankenstein with the dart playing scene.

(19:16):
So that was something that had to be addressed. So
you would typically have like a sheet of glass, a
pane of glass separating the player from the playfield, and
maybe in one little section you would be able to
retrieve the balls, but otherwise you were not able to
physically manipulate where the balls were got to make the
cheating a little difficult at least. So there's a short

(19:37):
video of bally Who in action. It's on YouTube if
you want to watch it. It's on a channel called
Balin von Stahl b A L E n v A
N S t a L. And the game again is
called bally Who, so you can actually see it played
and it's pretty simple, but it certainly is protopinball anyway.

(20:00):
A ton of other similar games would come out in
the nineteen thirties, providing entertainment to cash strapped folks who
were navigating the Great Depression. You might say, like, wow,
these things seem really simple, but you have to remember
at the time the number of outlets accessible to most
folks was pretty limited as far as entertainment goes, and

(20:21):
money was in tight supply for a lot of families.
So finding something that was relatively inexpensive and diverting was
a big deal. Around nineteen thirty three, some designers began
to incorporate electric batteries into these machines, and these would
usually power pretty simple elements, a lot of noisemaker elements

(20:42):
like buzzers and bells, that kind of thing which would
signal scoring and draw attention to the table, but other
than that, they weren't really powering any components that would
materially affect the play. This was also around the time
that the term pinball began to pop up and be
used to describe these machines. Gottlieb produced a table in

(21:05):
nineteen thirty four called Register, which featured a progressive score counter. Finally,
players would not have to keep track of their own
scores and just add everything up in their heads. So
the score was displayed as a kind of dial, and
there was a needle that would keep track of the score.
The needle will just physically point to whatever score value

(21:28):
the player had achieved at that point. Now, one problem
that proprietors were running into was that some people were
willing to break the rules in order to try and
get a high score. They would bump or nudge a table,
or they would outright pick the table up and tilt
it to try and guide balls into the higher scoring sections.

(21:48):
And considering some places were paying out for high scores,
I guess you could understand why this was happening, but
it was a problem. So how do you make sure
people aren't cheating in order to win a prize or
even just to set a high score. Enter the tilt sensor. Now,
some sources cite Harry Williams as the inventor of the tilt.

(22:10):
His name is also associated with pinball because the Williams
manufacturing company would end up making a lot of pinball machines,
and in fact you hear things like Bally and Williams
and Bally Williams and that sort of stuff. But at
least some pinball historians say that a game that came
out of a company called Rockola may have been the

(22:31):
first to have a tilt sensor. Others say it was
Gottlieb's Broker's Tip game that had it, But all of
them had very similar approaches to being able to detect
a tilt, So the way the sensor worked was really genius.
It was a very simple mechanical approach. Typically, you would
have a cup and inside the cup, you would mount

(22:55):
a little pedestal, and this would be level to the floor.
The pedestal would have maybe a little kind of shallow
bowl at the very top of it, a very very
shallow bowl into which you would place a ball, and
if someone were to rock the machine, the ball would
get knocked off of this pedestal, and that would indicate

(23:18):
that there was a tilt. Some of the games, the
Rocola game in particular, had very very clever ways of
doing this. With a Rocola game, the ball was actually
being held against a little tab that connected to a
sign that indicated the game was legit, and underneath the
ball was a plunger, a spring mounted plunger that was

(23:41):
keeping pressure on the ball, keeping it in place against
this little plate that held the legit sign in place.
And if the ball were to fall off of that
plunger because someone was shaking the machine too hard, then
the ball would no longer be holding that play in place,
and the little sign would switch to say tilt, which

(24:05):
would indicate to the proprietor, oh, whatever score this person
achieved is not legitimate because they tilted the machine in
order to do it. That was the whole purpose of
these tilt sensors in the first place was just to indicate, hey,
this is not a valid score, so do not award
this yahoo a beer or a dollar or whatever it

(24:26):
might be, because they cheated in order to get it. Now,
as time would go on, this very simple mechanical approach
would get replaced by electro mechanical devices, so often they
would use things like leaf switches. These are very lightweight
metal contacts and if they come in contact with each other,
if they touch each other, they complete a circuit and

(24:47):
then you get a tilt or a tilt warning. That's
usually for side to side or up and down. There's
also another type, a pendulum type, where you have a
pendulum rod and it's mounted in such a way that
it's inside the circumference of a metal ring. And typically
the rod doesn't touch the ring, but if you were

(25:07):
to shake the machine, the rod could start swaying, and
if it comes in contact with the metal ring again,
it completes a circuit and you get a tilt or
tilt warning. Now, before I go on tilt, we need
to take another quick break to thank our sponsors, and
then we'll talk more about the evolution of pinball. Okay,

(25:36):
we're back. And at this point in our history, we've
got plungers, we've got balls, we've got a tilt sensor,
and then we would get bumpers. Still no flippers, but
bumpers would come next. Now I cannot swear that it
was the first machine to do so, but Bolo, a
game from the Patient Novelty Manufacturing Company in nineteen thirty six,

(25:59):
included bumpers. Now, these were passive bumpers, meaning they didn't
bump back like with modern pinball machines. These are the
things that, when the ball comes in contact with them,
will knock the ball in some other direction, typically with
great force, assuming that the bumpers are tuned properly. But
these bumpers, Bolo's bumpers, they were passive. They were spring mounted,

(26:22):
so they would you give when't being hit by a pinball,
but they would spring back too. These bumpers look like
bowling pins for Bolo. They are mounted on little rods
that in turn were attached to the springs, so yeah,
they'd move around if you hit them. A company that
would be called Bally, this is also another big name
in pinball, would essentially copy this idea for a game

(26:46):
that they called Bumper, and like Register, Bumper would also
have a progressive score component, but use light projection to
show it to the player. The score would remain on
the back box of the machine after play, and it
would only clear once a new game was ready to begin,
so that way you could have a score stay up

(27:06):
and show someone like if you hit a high score
or whatever. This also says that we're at a point
where we're getting backboxes on these machines, which was a
new development as well. Still no flippers though in fact,
the first pinball machine record I could find that featured
a pinball machine with player controlled flippers would be Humpty Dumpty,
which was produced by Gottlieb and released in nineteen forty seven.

(27:30):
So that's nearly half a century of these various amusement
machines before we would even get to flippers. And for
those of y'all who have never played pinball, the flippers
are little controllers that let you propel a ball back
up the playfield, and good players can get a feel
for where the ball needs to be on the flipper
in order to direct the pinball to a specific target

(27:51):
on the playfield. Great players can manipulate the ball and
pass it from one flipper to another, assuming that it
has multiple flippers in the first place, all in order
to get specific shots. Humpty Dumpty slippers, there are six
of them, range from the top third of the playfield
to the middle to the bottom third of the playfield,
but they are not at the very base, which is

(28:12):
where you would find them in modern pinball machines. Right.
Most modern pinball machines have a pair of flippers at
the base of the playfield, just above the ball drain,
and they're spaced far enough apart so that the ball
can pass between the flippers if the angle is right.
Humpty Dumpty has flippers facing toward the outer walls of
the playfield, so kind of like in the opposite orientation

(28:33):
of where you would expect them based on where flippers
appear today. And like I said, there's six of them,
and if the ball gets below your bottom two set
of flippers, you're pretty much stuck. An engineer named Harry
mAbs gets the credit for thinking up the flippers, and
these devices helped reinvigorate interest in pinball, but only in
certain places, because by this time authorities in some cities

(28:56):
were cracking down on pinball machines, saying that they promoted
gambling and delinquency, that kids were spending too much time
and money on pinball games instead of doing wholesome things
like studying, or running errands for their parents, or getting
drafted and sent off to war. In fact, the trouble
began pretty early on here in Atlanta, Mayor William B.

(29:20):
Hartsfield waged a war on pinball. Now, if you've heard
the name Hartsfield before, chances are you either live in
Atlanta or you had a layover at the Atlanta Airport,
which is partly named after him. It's also partly named
after Maynard Jackson, a different Atlanta mayor. So anyway, on
June twentieth, nineteen thirty nine, the newspaper here in Atlanta,

(29:45):
the Atlanta Constitution, reported that Hartsfield had outlawed pinball within
the city. Parent and teacher organizations had been pressuring council
members for this outcome for quite some time, proclaiming pinball
to be the source of all wickednesses children, which is
only a slight exaggeration, y'all, Like I'm I'm poking fun here,

(30:05):
But there was a lot of moral panic about pinball.
One councilman named Ea Minor said, quote, these machines, which
you can find on every corner in the city, are
tending to encourage a moral degeneration among our children. End
quote starts to sound like the music man right where
you're talking about how the kids are hanging out in

(30:26):
the pool hall and becoming total degenerates. So yeah, pinball
was viewed as a CD sordid distraction. Ea Minor would
even get more heated about pinball in that article I
was talking about. I swear I did not make up
this next quote. It's actually in the Atlanta Constitution newspaper.
It goes, quote, these machines lead to gambling and stealing

(30:51):
and killing and eventually to a rope around the neck
for someone. End quote. Good golly, Ea, you thought pinball
was the first step on a path that ultimately would
lead to capital punishment. All right, So what would happen
if you happened to be the proprietor of an establishment

(31:11):
within the city limits of Atlanta and you allowed one
of these sin machines in your place of business, Well,
you would face a fine of two hundred dollars, which
was a heck of a lot of money back in
nineteen thirty nine and also quote thirty days in the
stockade for either owning or possessing a pinball or similar

(31:33):
machine end quote. So this band didn't just cover pinball machines,
it also covered stuff like slot machines. Seventy five years
later to the day the Southern Fried Gaming Expo would
go live. So the Southern Fried Gaming Expo's first day
of operation was seventy five years after pinball had been
officially outlawed in the city of Atlanta. Clearly it has

(31:56):
since been rescinded, but that's just at least now. Arguably
the most famous war on pinball was what happened in
New York City, and another famous mayor was behind that.
LaGuardia also a guy whose name is used for an
airport in the city where he was mayor. So in

(32:18):
January nineteen forty two, this is after Atlanta has already
outlawed pinball. So don't say we're not progressive. We could
be restrictive far before the Yankees get to it. But
in January nineteen forty two, LaGuardia passed a ban on
pinball machines in New York City and even directed police
departments to raid various businesses that were known to have

(32:42):
pinball machines inside them. Now, whether you believe LaGuardia and
other leaders around the United States genuinely felt pinball was
an immoral invention that needed to be wiped out, or
you happen to be a little more cynical and you
think this was just a way for a politics to
score points with their base without you know, actually doing

(33:04):
anything really challenging, like facing down organized crime. Well, the
end result was that pinball machines in many major cities
across the United States were made illegal. Now, this and
the impact of World War Two, which required a lot
of manufacturing companies to convert their operations to support war efforts,

(33:24):
not to mention shortages on raw materials, would mean that
very few pinball machines were actually getting made in the
late thirties to mid forties. But even that didn't stop
pinball manufacturers from making and innovating machines entirely. They still did.
The flippers being introduced in the late forties were a
really big part of innovation in pinball machines because with

(33:47):
more control, pinball could be positioned as a game of
skill rather than as a game of chance. However, it
would take nearly three decades for a definitive case to
settle that matter, and we'll get to that one in
the next episode. In the meantime, you had engineers like
Steve Kordak, who would design pinball machines for multiple companies

(34:08):
throughout his life. He also introduced some new innovations in pinball.
One of those was the drop target. So these are
little physical targets. They usually look like things like white
squares with a target painted on them, or like a
decal on them or whatever. They're not always white, but
that's a very common coloration for these drop targets. And

(34:29):
when they're struck, they drop down into the playfield and
there's an electronic switch that causes them to pop up again,
presumably when the player has achieved some task or when
the game resets. Kardak also introduced multi ball play. This
would be in the early sixties when he introduced this.
So multi ball is exactly what sounds like. It's when

(34:51):
a player suddenly has to contend with more than one
pinball in play at the same time, typically because they
have done some sequence of targets that have unlocked. This
multi ball. Cordeck may also be the first person to
relocate the flippers to the bottom of the pinball playfield,
just above the ball drain, which is again sort of

(35:13):
the standard location for most pinball machines today. At this stage,
we're in the true electro mechanical era of pinball machines.
More innovation would follow, so in our next episode, I'll
talk more about the inner workings of these electro mechanical
pinball machines, and we'll also transition toward solid state electronics
thanks to a little invention called the transistor. We'll also

(35:35):
talk about how the actual game elements of pinball would evolve.
Like early on, pinball games were all about just kind
of random bouncing around with a ball, hitting various obstacles
as it inevitably made its way toward a ball drain.
But over time you would see introduction of all sorts

(35:56):
of stuff like ramps and other elements that would would
allow you to strategically go about playing a game. And
then in turn, the games became more sophisticated, where it's
not just they had more features, it's that game designers
would say, what if we made a mode where someone
had to complete features in a specific order, and if

(36:18):
they do so, they unlock a new element of play
with this game. And then we eventually get to the
introduction of things like wizard modes. We'll talk all about
that stuff in our next episode and kind of chat
about how that evolved over time, and just like the
pinball machines themselves, this evolution was very organic and gradual.

(36:40):
I don't think you can point to a single pinball
machine and say this is where it all changed. There
are certain machines that are iconic and known for their modes,
like Adam's Family is a great example, and I'll definitely
talk about that in the next episod. But I'm not

(37:01):
sure that you can just easily point at any one
machine and say this is it, because there's always going
to be an earlier machine that had at least some
of those elements present. And it becomes kind of a
judgment called to say, all, right, at what point are
we saying this is where mode play became a thing.
But it's led us up to modern day, where there's
some pinball machines out there that on a mechanical level

(37:23):
are not maybe that complicated, but if you're looking at
gameplay level, if you wanted to maximize your score. They
get incredibly complex, sometimes to their own detriment. But we're
going to talk about that, and we'll also talk about
the case that convinced New York City officials to reverse
their decades long ban on pinball machines. Other places would

(37:48):
follow suit, although I think at least in a few
regions laws about pinball are still technically on the books,
they're just not enforced. But yeah, we'll talk about how
pinball emerged from its reputation as being, you know, the
dark side of the force, as EA Minor would have
had us think. So that's it for this first episode

(38:10):
about pinball. Like I said, Wednesday's episode will go further
into the pinball story. Thanks again to the Southern Fried
Gaming Expo for having me out. I was there kind
of low key. I wasn't like chatting with people. I
was really in observation mode. But I was really impressed
with what I saw. I got to play a lot
of really fun games. Maybe I'll talk about some of

(38:31):
those in the next one too. Also, if anyone from
STERN is listening, how do I get one of those
jaws pinball machines? Because good Gravy. That's like my favorite
film of all time, and that machine was incredible. All right,
enough of that, Enough of that, That's not what this
show is about. This show is about celebrating tech in
all its forms, at least all the forms that are

(38:52):
are worthy of celebration. I hope all of y'all are
doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen

(39:14):
to your favorite shows.