The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (4 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
Gottlieb’s fears proved accurate. Politicians saw pinball as inextricably associated with gambling. When states passed laws prohibiting pay-out games, they usually outlawed all forms of pinball.
The most celebrated attack on pinball came from Fiorello LaGuardia, New York City’s flamboyant mayor. As part of his ongoing crusade against organized crime, LaGuardia petitioned local courts for a ban against pinball. After six years of petitioning the courts, LaGuardia’s request was granted. A Bronx court ruled pinball an extension of gambling and made it illegal.
LaGuardia celebrated by having the police confiscate pin games from around the city. He held a press conference in which he demolished several machines with a sledgehammer. The event was even shown on newsreels in theaters around the country.
There was a gaming [gambling] connotation to the coin-operated amusement business. There was a photograph I remember very clearly—Fiorello LaGuardia, the mayor of New York City, by the waterside breaking up all these “games of chance” and throwing them into the sea to dispose of them.
Today he’d have had an even greater problem with environmentalists.
—Joel Hochberg, president, Rare and Coin It
Within three weeks of the Bronx court’s ruling, the New York Police Department confiscated and destroyed more than 3,000 pinball machines. Mayor LaGuardia donated the metal scraps to the government to support the U.S. war effort against Nazi Germany. In all, he donated more than 7,000 pounds of metal scraps, including 3,000 pounds of steel balls. New York’s ban on pinball remained in place for nearly 35 years.
Once New York City banned pinball, neighboring counties followed. The trend spread quickly.
Gottlieb believed that the only way to legitimize pinball was to prove that it involved more skill than luck. Years passed before he found proof.
In 1947, one of Gottlieb’s engineers, a man named Harry Mabs, added an innovation to the game—six spring-powered levers that players used to propel the ball back into the playfield before it rolled out of play.
Gottlieb called them “flipper bumpers” and said that they proved that
Humpty Dumpty
, his latest pinball cabinet, was not just a game of chance because players scored most of their points by knocking the ball back into play with flippers rather than relying on luck and gravity.
The flipper bat was quite a breakthrough because it gave the player a true means of exercising and developing skill. You could aim at targets now, rather than in the old days when you popped the ball up and just shook the shit out of the table and hoped that it went in the right hole or hit the right thing. The use of the flipper bat is probably the greatest breakthrough ever in pinball.
—Eddie Adlum
It [the introduction of the flipper] not only changed the basic landscape of the games themselves, but specific to the players, it really changed how they interacted with the games. It was a totally different entertainment form than it had been.
More important, it was a remarkable change for the game designers and developers. What had been the prescribed way of doing game development
for the previous decade had to be altered dramatically. No longer was it a situation of a person passively interacting with the game; now there was true influencing and greater control from the standpoint of the player.—Roger C. Sharpe
Gottlieb’s “flipper games” became the salvation of pinball. Pushed on by a desperate need for respectability, other pinball manufacturers and distributors imitated
Humpty
Dumpty’
s flipper bats and called their cabinets “flipper games.” In France, where pinball has a long and popular history, pinball machines are simply referred to as “le flipper.”
After years of complaining about competitors stealing his ideas, Harry Williams found himself imitating rather than innovating, as he joined the growing number of pinball manufacturers adopting the Gottlieb flipper. Williams’s first flipper game was called
Sunny.
By this time, Harry Williams owned his own Chicago amusement company, Williams Manufacturing Company, which he founded in 1942.
Though Harry Mabs created the first flippers, it was Steven Kordek, an engineer from a company called Genco, who discovered the best use for them. Kordek replaced
Humpty
Dumpty’
s six flippers—two at the top, two in the center, and two at the bottom—with two flippers along the bottom of the playing field. Kordek’s innovation was introduced in a game called
Triple
Action.
*
I worked for a small company and I was always told to save money—and there was no way in the world that I was going to use six flippers.
—Steve Kordek, former pinball designer, Genco
Most pinball machines created in 1947 had six flippers. When Kordek’s two-flipper design was demonstrated in a trade show in January 1948, it caused an immediate stir. The industry has followed his basic design ever since.
Even as Gottlieb sought to legitimize pinball with flippers, Bally introduced
Bingo
machines—flipperless pinball machines with rows of pockets.
Bingo
re-opened some of the wounds caused by pay-out games. Though pinball remained legal, most states outlawed
Bingo
machines permanently.
People tried to operate
Bingo
machines legally and treat them as regular pinball machines, but because they were gambling devices, my grandfather didn’t want to have anything to do with them.—Michael Gottlieb
Flippers were enough proof that pinball was a game of skill for some legislators. Satisfied by flippers and free-game rewards for high scores, some states relaxed their laws governing pinball. New York continued its ban into the 1970s.
There were five game manufacturers in the beginning. It was Gottlieb making pinballs. It was Williams making pinballs and novelties. It was Bally’s making pinballs, novelties, and slot machines, although the major industry didn’t use those. It was Chicago Coin making pinballs and novelties. It was Midway making novelty games—target rifles and so on.
There was a sixth, United Manufacturing. But just about the time I joined the industry in 1964, United was purchased by Williams, so that put it back down to five.
—Eddie Adlum
The coin-operated amusement industry has two tiers of companies. The first tier includes companies like Gottlieb and Williams, which manufacture amusement equipment. The second is made up of local distributors and operators who place equipment in stores, bus stations, bars, restaurants, and bowling alleys and set up routes to maintain it.
Though flipper machines and other games have long represented a steady source of income, the jukebox defined the industry in the early going. During the 1940s and 1950s, jukeboxes were an integral part of the fabric of American society and the main source of income for amusement companies.
Known as music operators, these distributors placed jukeboxes and games in bus stations, restaurants, and ice cream shops. In exchange for permission to place their equipment in businesses, operators paid location owners a portion of jukebox and game receipts. They established routes and hired teams of technicians to maintain their equipment, empty the coin boxes, and place new records in jukeboxes. Keeping current with the latest music trends was essential to earning a good income and keeping location owners satisfied.
It was a competitive business. The music operator’s entire livelihood depended on keeping customers happy. If a location owner thought he had received inferior equipment or old records, he could make arrangements with a new operator simply by picking up the telephone.
In the mid-1960s, Gottlieb was the recognized leader [in pinball]. Bally was the recognized loser. In fact, I knew a salesman named Irv Kempner in New York City who worked for Runyon Sales Co. They were distributors of both Rowe jukeboxes and Bally pinballs, and one of the guys said the reason “Kempy” was the best salesman was because he had the worst pinball and the worst jukebox to sell.
Today, Rowe is number one in jukeboxes, and Bally owned the pinball machine industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
—Eddie Adlum
If you go to an old penny arcade, some of the equipment we consider antique today was quite popular in the days that I started [in the industry]. It makes me feel old.
—Joel Hochberg
Historically, the oldest coin-operated amusement machines were known as novelty games. Before making
Baffle Ball
, David Gottlieb manufactured a novelty machine called the
Husky Grip
that tested a player’s strength. By the 1940s,
companies had already invented mechanical baseball games. Other games simulated horse racing, hunting, and Western gunfights. Over the years, the field has grown to include hockey, soccer (known by many as foosball), flying, and even building construction.
One of the most popular themes was the shooting arcade. Taverns began carrying mechanical pistol games in which players shot tiny ball bearings at targets on the other side of a small glass-enclosed cabinet. Larger shooting galleries with rifles became staples at arcades.
We had some wonderful ideas like the
Seeburg Bear Gun
, a classic that old timers still remember. You took an actual rifle that had a cable attached to a console about 6, 8, 10 feet away, and the bear moved from left to right. He had light-sensitive targets in his stomach and on each side. As you shot, he would rear up and growl and turn in the other direction, and you just kept shooting until you ran out of bullets. It [
Bear Gun
] was a huge, big hit; a lot of people had it.We also had the
Six Gun
game where you had a great big mannequin dressed like a cowboy. He stood at one side and challenged you to a gun fight, and you stood on the other side and had a pair of guns mounted in a little stand-up frame. He would challenge you to draw, like a 1-2-3, and you would pull your gun, and he would lift his arm. If you got him, he would say, “You got me,” and if he got you, he would say, “You lost. You’re dead,” that kind of thing.The
Six Gun
game was built like a Russian toilet so that it would last forever. And it did.By and large, you didn’t go into an arcade in those days to play a specific game. You went into the arcade to go into the arcade. You went in there, got change for your dollar (of course, some games in those days were still on nickel play), and you just looked around to see what there was to play. You put a couple of nickels in here and put a couple of nickels in there until your dollar was used up.
—Eddie Adlum
By the 1960s, novelty games had become quite sophisticated. Black lights were built into the cabinets to make objects glow against dark backgrounds. One game,
Chicago Coin
Speedway
, had a projection screen for a background. Players steered a race car in front of the screen, dodging the projected images of other cars. If the player came too close to a projected image, the machine made a banging sound to simulate a crash and the player went to the back of the pack.
These were the direct ancestors of modern video games.
If any one person has worked at every level of the amusement machine industry, it is Joel Hochberg. A jovial, quiet man with a self-effacing sense of humor, Hochberg entered the industry to remain near his ailing mother. He never imagined that years later he would help reestablish a multibillion dollar company and change the evolutionary path of the entire industry.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Hochberg earned an associate degree in electronics from the New York Institute of Technology. “I never wanted to find out how to make things tick; I wanted to know how to make them tick better.” He got his degree in 1956 and began the selective interviewing process at Burroughs Corporation.
One Saturday, a neighbor who worked for Master Automatic Music asked Hochberg to help him repair a jukebox.
He [Hochberg’s neighbor] worked for one of the larger companies in the five boroughs area. He asked me one Saturday morning if I could help him. There was a very prominent location that was without music and would have been without music until Monday because the distributor was closed. It [having the jukebox shut off] would cost the company a lot of money, but I think more than the money was the lack of the entertainment required for the weekend in that location.
—Joel Hochberg
It is nearly impossible to understand the impact that jukeboxes made on businesses in the 1950s. At that time, not having a jukebox meant that customers went elsewhere.
Though he had studied electronics, Hochberg knew nothing about jukeboxes. He opened the machine and found a problem with the amplifier. The
jukebox worked within a few hours. Hochberg later found out that his neighbor had never really expected him to be able to fix the problem.
Harry Siskind, then president of Master Automatic Music, was impressed that Hochberg had fixed the jukebox and asked to meet him. Siskind didn’t have a job to offer at the time but told Hochberg that he should consider working in the music operators business because he had the “ability to take things with a technical approach.”