From Bagatelle to Video Games: The History of Pinball

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To learn more, visit Bose.com. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show. And that includes your stories. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They're some of our favorites. Jeremy Saussure is the assistant vice president for interpretation and electronic games, and he's also the editor of the American Journal of 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. I would say pinball is an American icon. It traces its roots back to a French parlor table game called bagatelle. 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 a cue stick that 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 you were to say missing link between bagatelle and pinball happens in the late 19th century with an English immigrant to America, Montague Redgrave.

He patents in 1871 what he called improvements in bagatelle, and that introduced the spring loaded ball shooter, what today we would refer to as the plunger. The idea of also adding sound effects or sound to the game by putting bells on the play field. The first pinball machines made this type of game into a coin operated machine. It took that play field and it essentially monetized it, right?

It placed it in a wooden case. It put a piece of glass over the play field to separate the player from the game. As you think of ramps and flippers and all those things, that's starting in the 40s and 50s. The first game that introduces the idea of really like let's have flippers to actually control and to bat the balls around is 1947.

This game Humpty Dumpty had six flippers and they were on each side of the play field. This changes pinball, right? It makes it much more interactive and that becomes particularly important to the kind of public debates that are going to happen about pinball. The best example of this in the early 1940s is in New York City, Mayor LaGuardia bans pinball, actually does prohibition style raids to kind of root out pinball. They had been associated and in some case used in gambling and essentially money laundering.

I mean, you have these bans in Los Angeles, you have them in Ohio and 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 it being a gateway to organized crime. There's a pinball moral panic, but you start to see that kind of breakup in the 1970s. There's an important event that happens with the New York City Council in 1976 with a major pinball player at the time, Roger Sharp. In 76, Sharp and a number of folks who are really in support of overturning that ban go before the New York City Council and in this sort of dramatic, you know, Babe Ruth calling the shot moment, he plays a pinball game in a way that shows the counselors that pinball is 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 play field.

It was overturned with a vote of about 30 to six, 30 to five, 30 to six. It's probably also worth mentioning that in the 1970s, pinball was extremely popular. New York City also saw the fact that, hey, this is going to be a revenue generator because we can license and register all these machines and make money off of that. But what's also happening is the introduction of video games. Video games were making a tremendous amount of money, particularly in the late 70s and early 80s when there was an arcade craze.

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 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 Invaders pinball machine. What you also see is them trying to incorporate the form and some of the conventions of video games into pinball games.

There's a game called Hyperball. It took sort of mini pinballs. You had a trigger and you're just firing balls at these targets on the play field. 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. You had that level of influence where it was really directly affecting 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, of storytelling and play that really comes together and I think kind of immerses you in what today is pinball. And a great job by Chrissy, our 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. Folks, 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 and terrific online courses.

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