How Pinball Found Its Way Through Bans, Backrooms, and the Arcade Boom

On this episode of Our American Stories, pinball’s story winds back to a quiet corner of European parlor culture, where small tabletop games offered a brief challenge to anyone willing to try their luck. Those early ideas eventually migrated to America, where the game weathered citywide crackdowns and the tests of time.

As the tables grew more complex, the machines slipped into public rooms that gave them steady use and helped shape the early world of classic arcade games. Jeremy Saucier of The Strong Museum of Play lays out how that path unfolded and how pinball machines became the fixtures they are today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
and that includes your story. Send them to our American
Stories dot com. There are some of our favorites. Jeremy
Saucer is the assistant vice president for Interpretation and Electronic
Games at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York,

(00:38):
and he's also the editor of the American Journal of Play. Today,
he gives us the exciting history of an American icon,
an American original, the pinball machine.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
I would say pinball is an American icon, traces its
roots back to a French parlor table game called bagatel.
Sometimes it would be in a form that looks similar
to a pool table. The player would get to hit
a ball, often with something that resembled acu stick that

(01:15):
we would use today in pool. Initially the idea was
to avoid pins. There'd be these little wooden pins and
a lot of different versions of the game, and eventually
that evolved into where you actually had fixed pins and
scoring holes. The kind of link that you know, if

(01:36):
you were to say missing link between bagatel and pinball
happens in the late nineteenth century with an English immigrant
to America. Montague Redgrave. The he patents in eighteen seventy
one what he called improvements in Bagatelle, and that introduced
the spring loaded ball shooter what today we would refer

(02:01):
to as the plunger. The idea of also adding sound
effects or sound to the game by putting bells on
the playfield. The first pinball machines made this type of
game into a coin operated machine. It took that playfield
and it essentially monetized it right. It placed it in

(02:24):
a wooden case. It put a piece of glass over
the playfield to separate the player from the game. As
you think of ramps and flippers and all those things.
That's starting in the forties and fifties. The first game
that introduces the idea of really, like, let's have flippers

(02:44):
to actually control and to bat the balls around is
nineteen forty seven. This game, Humpty Dumpty, had six flippers
and they were on each side of the playfield. This
changes pinball right. It makes it much more interactive, and
that becomes particularly important to the kind of public debates

(03:05):
that are going to happen about pinball. The best example
of this in the early nineteen forties is in New
York City mayor La Guardia bands pinball actually does prohibition
style raids to kind of root out pinball. They had
been associated in some cases used in gambling, in essentially

(03:27):
money laundering. I mean, you have these bands in Los Angeles,
you have them in Ohio, They're all over the country.
There's all these associations and all these anxieties around what
are children doing with their time. The stories about kids
stealing lunch money or stealing money from their parents to
go to play pinball, and it being a gateway to

(03:49):
organized crime. There's a pinball moral panic. But you start
to see that kind of breakup in the nineteen seventies.
There's an important event that happens with the New York
City Council in nineteen seventy six with a major pinball
player at the time, Roger Sharp. In seventy six, Sharp

(04:09):
and a number of folks who are really in support
of overturning that band go before the New York City
Council and in this sort of dramatic you know, Babe
Ruth calling his shot moment, he plays a pinball game
in a way that shows the councilors that pinball is

(04:30):
actually a game of skill. He can tell them, Hey,
this is what I'm going to do, and I'm going
to show you this is how you can play pinball
and affect what's happening on the playfield. It was overturned
with a vote of about thirty to six, thirty to
five thirty to six. It's probably also worth mentioning that

(04:50):
in the nineteen seventies pinball was extremely popular. New York
City also saw the fact that, hey, this is going
to be a revenue generator, right because we ca license
and register all these machines and make money off of them.
But what's also happening is the introduction of video games.
Video games were making a tremendous amount of money, particularly

(05:14):
in the late seventies and early eighties when there was
an arcade praise, and so there was a tremendous amount
of effort being made by the burgeoning video game industry
to kind of inject respectability into the coin op industry
as a whole, and so they helped to legitimize pinball.

(05:36):
But they're also seeing that pinball is in some ways
pushed out of the arcade. A lot of what it becomes,
I think has to do with the influence of video games.
You see video game themed pinball games going into arcades.
There's a Defender pinball machine. There's a Space Invader's pinball machine.
What you also see is them trying to incorporate the

(05:59):
form and some of the conventions of video games into
pinball games. There's a game called Hyperball. It took sort
of many pinballs. You had a trigger and you're just
firing balls at these targets on the playfield. It was
difficult to understand. You were spelling out words, you were
also trying to stop these bolts of lightning from coming

(06:22):
down and hitting your base and it just didn't work.
You had that level of influence where it was really
directly effecting the games. And then the other piece I
think is that you now have these development teams that
are led by designers, but you've got engineers, animators. It's
a completely multisensory experience. It's really bringing people into these

(06:47):
immersive spaces in this really beautiful marriage of technology, of art,
of storytelling and play that really comes together and I
think kind of immerses you what today is pinball.

Speaker 1 (07:04):
And a special thanks to Jeremy Saucier, who's the assistant
vice president for interpretation in the Electronic Games and editor
of the American Journal of Play at the Strong Museum
of Play in Rochester, New York. Again the story of
the pinball here on our American Story Leah Abib here,

(07:30):
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