The Story of Pinball

On this episode of Our American Stories, pinball is an iconic game. Jeremy Saucier of the Strong Museum of Play shares the surprising story--from pinball's origins in French parlor games, to its prohibition, to its emergence as the popular game that it is today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:12):
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's some of our favorites. Jeremy Saucer
is the Assistant vice president for Interpretation and Electronic Games
and he's also the editor of the American Journal of

(00:33):
Play at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Today,
he gives us the exciting history of an American icon,
an American original, the pinball machine.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
I would say pinball is an American icon. It 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

(01:12):
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, if you were

(01:34):
to say, missing link between Bagatel and pinball happens in
the late nineteenth century with an English immigrant to America
Montague Redgrave. He patents in eighteen seventy one what he
called improvements in Bagatelle, and that introduced the spring loaded

(01:56):
ball shooter what today we would refer to as the plunger.
The idea 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.

(02:20):
It placed it in 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,

(02:40):
let's have flippers 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 particular really important to the

(03:01):
kind of public debates 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,

(03:24):
in essentially 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, you know, lunch money or stealing
money from their parents to go to play pinball, and

(03:45):
it being a gateway to 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 nineteen seventy six
with a major pinball player at the time, Roger Sharp
in seventy six, Sharp and a number of folks who

(04:09):
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
counselors that pinball is actually a game of skill. He

(04:29):
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.
That was overturned with a vote of about thirty to six,
thirty to five thirty to six. It's probably also worth
mentioning that in the nineteen seventies pinball was extremely popular.

(04:52):
New York City also saw the fact that, hey, this
is going to be a revenue generator, right because we
can license and register all these machines 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 in the late seventies and early eighties when there

(05:14):
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.
But they're also seeing that pinball is in some ways

(05:36):
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
form and some of the conventions of video games into

(06:01):
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
down and hitting your base and it just didn't work.

(06:24):
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
immersive spaces in this really beautiful marriage of technology, of art,

(06:50):
of storytelling and play that really comes together and I
think kind of immerses you in what today is pinball.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
And a great job by Chrissy are Intrepid intern and
a special thanks to Jeremy Saucier, who's the assistant vice
president for Interpretation and 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 stories.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
Folks.

Speaker 1 (07:31):
If you love the stories we tell about this great country,
and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that
all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture,
and faith, are brought to us by the great folks
at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the
things that are beautiful in life and all the things
that are good in life. And if you can't get
to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free

(07:54):
and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to
learn more.