The origin of pinball machine can be traced back to Europe and America in the 19th century. At that time, the pinball game was called bagatelle, which was mainly composed of tables and billiards. In 1871, the British inventor Montague Redgrave began to improve it, including adding springs and columns, increasing the tilt of the desktop, and shrinking the whole game. This also enabled Montague to obtain relevant patents.
Though the pinball was well-known, it did not spread as widely as expected until an American named David Gottlieb released the first mechanical desktop game “Cricket” In 1931 and the machine can also be said to be the origin of the arcade coin charging mode. Because this is the first game machine that can be played only with coins. Players who have played arcade games know that coins are so addictive. The pinball costs only $17.50 to sell to the store, while players only need 1 cent to play seven balls. It only takes two days to get their money back when they did not meet a pinball master player. This has also made the machine become necessary one in major bars and clubs.The enterprises had made a great deal of money.
After found this scene, Americans with capital in their minds could not await their doom. They started the transformation and sale of pinball machines one after another to make their own pinball machine look very different. When a game is popular, there will be no lack of plug-ins. In order to prevent players from improving scores by shaking the table and prevent the crash caused by shaking, an inventor harry williams in 1933 added a “tilting” mechanism to the pinball machine, which simply put a metal ring under the table and the metal block connected to the table in the middle of the ring. Once the table shakes seriously, the two metals will collide and be powered on. So that the arcade machine will stop working.
Many people are dissatisfied with the popularity of pinball machines. The main reason is the birth of slot machines, a derivative of pinball games. For poor families, such games that only invest but do not return are bottomless holes, so a campaign is inevitable. In 1940, the first thing the new mayor of New York, fiorento LaGuardia, did when he came to power was to crack down on slot machines. Both slot machines and pinball machines were born of a mother, and pinball machines were implicated at the first time. In the 41 year attack on Pearl Harbor, the federal government also called on the people to donate old metal support, so the marble machine became the object of recycling.
But because of this, pinball machines have get famous all over the world. Then a derivative species “pachinko” has born in Japan. In the post-war economic recovering period, the pinball machine also returned as a prince. In 1947, Gottlieb company launched the first pinball machine with controllable baffles called “Humpty Dumpty” which can be operated six baffles on the board to form multi-stage ejection. However a lot of players were deterred by multiple operation points. So the company updated the game for their second time. They simplified the pinball baffles to two and named it “spot bowler” which has also become the basic operated strike plate of marbles at present.
As in the 1940s, once the game became popular, there would be various variants. In 1962, the manufacturer Steve Kodak made the “falling target” and introduced the multi ball playing method in 1963; In 1966, Americans made the first digital scoring pinball machine “rally girl”; In 1975, micro released the first solid-state electronic pinball machine and so on. A large number of new technologies and new playing methods were integrated into this small board.
Not to mention the style of the machine itself, the pinball playing has progressed with the times. In the United States, many manufacturers and organizations have jointly held many pinball machine Championships in order to promote pinball machine business. At present, the international Pinball Machine Association (IFPA) and professional and amateur Pinball Association (Papa) are more famous. These two organizations are still actively cooperating with manufacturers. They have held hundreds of competitions every year. Although the traditional pinball game has become a minority, it has never died out.
