The image is vivid in my mind: A room lined with bright back-lit pinball machines with boys and young men attached to the end of them, their eyes transfixed, their hands trying to out-maneuver and out-smart these mechanical wizards.
I never got into pinball machines and always considered them a form of male entertainment. I remember hanging out with a friend once, though, and hopping into one of those mechanical race cars and speeding down a raceway in the image on the display, but always ending up on the sidelines running over people and anything else that got in my way.
I came face to face with pinball machines earlier this week, and these were the first that I recalled seeing at auction. Three vintage machines were pushed against a wall slightly behind some other furniture at the auction house. And the February issue of the Antique Week newspaper carried a front-page article about pinball machines, which the writer said had only recently become a collector’s item.
The true collector, the article said, was the person who put down hundreds or thousands of dollars for two or more. Collectors buy them both for display and for play.
The three at auction had some awesome graphics on the backglass that were as colorful as a box of Crayola crayons. “Dragon” had a half-naked woman atop a fire-breathing dragon. “Gottlieb’s Two Player Gladiator” had two gladiators a-fighting. “Bally Variety” had a line of showgirls a-dancing.
Pinball machines made in the 1980s and 1990s were worth more than the older ones, according to Brett Weiss, who wrote the article. Newer pins or pinball – as they are apparently called by collectors and aficionados – can sell well up into the thousands of dollars while those from the 1930s and 1940s can be had for less than $1,000.
The machines on several most popular lists on the web were from the 1980s to the 2000s, likely because they were more complicated and challenging. Here are some tips if you’re interested in collecting them.
Those at auction looked to be among the classics – in age, at least – but I found that they were not as old as they looked.
Dragon was made by D. Gottlieb & Co., a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, around 1978 and is a four-player machine. The company was started in 1927 by David Gottlieb as a maker of mechanical and then electric-powered pinball machines. In 1947, flippers – which flipped the ball back up the field – were developed and changed the industry for Gottlieb and other makers (most of which were located in Chicago). The company’s Humpty Dumpty pinball is said to be the first to use them.
The machines became recognized for their artwork around this time. The artist for Humpty Dumpty was Roy Parker, an artist at Gottlieb who created art for the company for years.
Gottlieb’s most popular machine was Baffle Ball, made in the mid-1930s, among the first coin-operated machines.
Gladiator, also a product of Gottlieb, was made in 1956 (I found another version called Gladiators with more fancy artwork from 1993). It was a two-player pinball with art by Parker and design by Wayne Neyens, who together propelled Gottlieb as an industry leader with some of its most classic games.
Bally Variety was made by Bally Manufacturing Corp. in 1954, and designed by Don Hooker. The company now known for its casinos started out making pinball and slot machines in the 1930s. In the 1960s, Bally was the dominant player in the slot-machine industry, and inevitably got into casinos when New Jersey legalized gambling and Atlantic City opened its arms to developers in the 1970s.
A non-working Bally Variety like the one at auction sold for $450 last year at auction. The auction house dated it as circa 1939, but I found other versions of the 1939 Bally Variety that looked different.
Interestingly, some states – including New York in 1942 – banned the machines, considering them illegal because they offered games of chance. A 1956 Billboard article noted that the state Supreme Court in Vermont ruled that the machines violated the state’s anti-gambling law. Around the same time, the city of Memphis prohibited those 18 or under from even playing pinball.
Obviously, that’s not an issue now, especially when you can gamble freely in most states by picking numbers in Mega Millions and Power Ball at your local corner store or dropping by your local casino to play the slots.
