Gambling and Pinball: A Brief History

When we think of pinball today, most people think of fun, complicated games where the goal is to compete for a high score and have a good time. Many people are often surprised to hear that pinball actually has a bit of a dark history when it comes to the law. For decades, the devices were used primarily for gambling, and the state and federal governments were none too amused about it.

To understand how we got to today’s “for amusement only” pinballs, we need to take a brief step back in time to the early 1900’s. Electro-mechanical amusement devices were popping up all over, and followed a variety of themes. Horse racing, bowling, and bingo were all rather popular themes. And, of course, there were the simple bagatelle styles devices. With the addition of coin-op pin tables in the 1930’s, it was only natural that someone would think up a way to make things profitable, and gambling has long been a profitable enterprise.

So how did gambling some into play? Well, you put a coin in one of these devices, you shoot a ball, and where it lands determines the degree of payout. It was actually pretty simple back then, as pinball tables didn’t even have flippers. The only real change for “skill” was how far back you pulled the plunger that launches the ball.  

Naturally, Johnny-Law wasn’t too keen on these devices, and regulations started popping up everywhere to prevent the scourge of pinball driven gambling. Unfortunately, things weren’t very centralized back then, and there wasn’t really a single definition of what constituted a gambling device. This led to a crazy series of patchwork laws all over the United States, with different states and municipalities offering their own interpretations of what made a pinball illegal. Was it the ability to win credits? Or is it the element of chance? Maybe it’s about the number of balls? It all depended on where you were and who your were asking.

With such a crazy patchwork of anti-gambling laws in effect, pinball manufacturers constantly tried to innovate to stay ahead of the law and to ship their tables to as many places as possible. This led to sneaky “knock off” switches under the table to surreptitiously pay out the credits. In places that were a bit more rigid about credits, it led to other odd gimmicks like earnings a free game or a free ball that couldn’t so easily be cashed out. These features are still alive and well on modern tables, even with the gambling component long gone.

One particularly odd restriction was the limitation on balls. For awhile, there were some municipalities that outlawed devices containing one ball. In hindsight, it seems like a rather arbitrary limitation, but at the time no one had thought up the notion of using multiple balls. But soon they did, and this was a big driver of the multi-ball bingo tables gaining traction in the 1950’s.

Perhaps oddest of all is the story of the flipper. Flippers weren’t introduced into pinball until 1947. Before the flipper, it really was a game of chance based on how the ball bounced against the pins. With the introduction of the flipper, though, manufacturers started claiming that pinball was a game of skill, and therefore it had nothing to do with gambling. There were even retrograde modifications made to older tables to add flippers and suddenly make them “legal” under a particular jurisdiction.

All this cleverness aside, pinball as a form of genuine amusement eventually did take off. And, frankly, that’s the piece of pinball that is still alive and well today, and it’s probably what you think of when you hear the term pinball. Aside from pachinko, gambling has largely left the pinball industry. But, you can definitely still see hints of pinball’s original gambling culture if you peek around. You see it every time you walk up to a table and see the “For Amusement Only” placard clearly visible.

And, who knows….. without pinball’s history of gambling, maybe it never would have taken off in the first place?