A countertop pinball game builds the coin-operated amusement trade

What happened

Baffle Ball asked very little of a shopkeeper. It sat on a counter, needed no electricity, and returned ten balls for a penny, which the player launched with a plunger toward a field of pins and scoring holes. Gravity did the rest. D. Gottlieb & Co. shipped the game out of Chicago into a country where a penny was a serious amount of money and cheap distraction sold well. Drugstores, taverns, cigar counters and bus stations took machines on a revenue split, and the format spread faster than the company could build.

That split is the part worth noticing. A manufacturer sold to a distributor, who supplied an operator, who placed machines in somebody else's shop and came back to collect coins and share the take. Nearly every element of the later arcade business already existed in that chain. Competition arrived immediately, including a rival Chicago game called Ballyhoo whose maker eventually took the name Bally, and within a few years the city held a dense cluster of cabinet shops, parts suppliers and route men.

Machines of this generation were entirely mechanical and gave a player no way to influence a ball once it was launched, which put them on the wrong side of gambling law as soon as operators began paying out on high scores. Cities responded with licensing rules and, in several cases, outright prohibition. The trade's answer, sixteen years later, was to build in a control the player could actually use, but the manufacturing base and distribution habits formed in the early 1930s outlasted every one of those fights.

The world at the time

The early 1930s were the worst years of the Depression in the United States, when a penny's entertainment had a real market and shopkeepers welcomed anything that brought people through the door. Amusement rides, jukeboxes and slot machines were already familiar in public spaces, and Chicago's light manufacturing base was well suited to turning out wooden cabinets in volume.

What it changed

Pinball manufacturing sustained Chicago firms for half a century, and when video games arrived those same companies, distributors and route operators carried them into bars and bowling alleys. Conventions that lasted for decades were set here, from the locked cash box to the shared revenue to the appeal of a machine that earns money without an attendant.