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 Read Free Page B

played Bagatelle. *
    No surviving records explain why the cue sticks in Bagatelle were replaced with a device called a “plunger,” but for some reason the evolution took place and the game transformed into a new sport called “pinball” before the turn of the century.
    If one event paved the way for today’s computer and video game industry, it was David Gottlieb’s
Baffle Ball.
The founder of D. Gottlieb and Company, David Gottlieb was a short, stocky man with a full head of brown hair and an ever-present cigar in his mouth. A showman and an inventor, he once made a living by taking carnival games to oil workers in remote Midwestern oil fields. He understood the balance of chance and skill that made games fun and had a talent for refining ideas to make them more fun. In 1931, Gottlieb created a game called
Baffle Ball.
    Baffle Ball
used no electricity and bore little resemblance to modern pinball games. It was built in a countertop cabinet and had only one moving part—the plunger. Players used the plunger to launch balls onto a plane set at a 7-degree slope and studded with pins circling eight holes or “scoring pockets.” Each scoring pocket had a certain point value attached to it. For a penny, players could launch seven balls.
    Baffle Ball
did not have flippers, bumpers, or a scoring device. Players kept track of scores in their heads. Once they launched the ball, they could control its course only by nudging the entire
Baffle Ball
cabinet, a technique later known as “tilting.” Sometimes they tilted so forcibly that the entire
Baffle Ball
cabinet could slide several inches during a single game.
    At first
Baffle Ball
sales grew gradually, but within months, Gottlieb’s game became a major success. By the time the game reached peak popularity, Gottlieb shipped as many as 400 cabinets a day.
    Gottlieb, the first person to successfully mass produce pinball cabinets in a factory, became the “Henry Ford of pinball.” His competitors worked out of their garages and couldn’t compete.
    Imitators popped up immediately, more or less. I mean everybody got involved in the business, and, like I said, there were a lot of people building them in their garages.
    Gottlieb machines were a little more expensive. I think it was $16.50 for the machine, and that was $1.00 or $1.50 more than the competitors. But my grandfather used a better quality of walnut; I think the pins were a higher quality metal. He wanted it to be the Cadillac of pinball machines.
    —Michael Gottlieb, grandson of David Gottlieb
     
    Once Gottlieb proved money was to be made, imitators followed. David Rockola created several successful pin games * before establishing his company as one of the most famous names in jukeboxes. Ray Moloney’s first pinball machine,
Ballyhoo
, sold so well that he changed the name of his company from Lion Manufacturing to Bally.
    Gottlieb’s chief competitor was Stanford-educated Harry Williams. Having studied engineering, Williams brought a deeper understanding of mechanical workings to the industry. He entered the business as a West Coast distributor selling other companies’ amusement machines but discovered he could purchase used pinball games and refurbish them with playfields of his own design for much less than it cost to buy new ones.
    In 1932, Williams decided to make pinball more challenging by limiting the amount of “body English” players could use. He designed a table with a device that contained a metal ball on a pedestal in its base. If players nudged the machine enough to knock the ball off the pedestal, the game ended. He originally called his device “Stool Pigeon,” but when a customer complained that the machine had “tilted,” Williams decided to call it a “tilt” mechanism. He tested this innovation in a game called
Advance.
    Williams later refined the “tilt” mechanism by replacing the ball and platform design with a pendulum device, which has been present in nearly every pinball