Friday, December 16, 2022

exploring the arcade in ワンパク番外地 / Wanpaku Bangaichi (1971)

TOO-san has given us another wonderful arcade thread! (archive)  This is from the TV show ワンパク番外地 第1話「ワンパク勢揃いの巻」(1971年4月8日放送) (Wanpaku Bangaichi Episode 1 "Wanpaku Lineup Volume" (broadcast on April 8, 1971))


First let's look at the two pinball machines.





The one on the left is Royal Guard

1968 Royal Guard by Gottlieb

exploring the arcade in La belle équipe (1936)

 La belle équipe is a movie from France circa 1936.


Not much to see here except for this one gorgeous crane game.  With the bartender distracted, 3 men tilt the machine to help them retrieve 2 choice prizes.  I am unsure if tilting the machine like that actually provides any advantage.


Monday, December 5, 2022

2022-09-24 bagatelle lecture by Ed Nickels

I was finally able to get this video edited and up online.  On September 24th, 2022 Ed Nickels gave a lecture about his bagatelle pinball collection that was on display at the Field House Museum.






You can see the prior lecture by James Masters from 2022-08-16 over here.

Friday, December 2, 2022

the teeny tiny table games

There's 10 of them now.  10!


How did this happen?  A Redgrave bagatelle had been on my wantlist for a while.  Then shortly after I discovered an auction in the UK for a scaled-down bar billiards table at a good price, and I had to go for it.  I do not think that the Singer bagatelle will be sticking around.


For the sake of discussing them, I will number them.  Tables number 1, 2, 5, 6, and 10 are all miniature / toy versions of tables that are regularly full-sized, usually 7-10 feet in length.  Tables 3, 4, 7, 8 and 9 are all made for the home parlor / toy market.


  1. Cockamaroo: Seems to have began early 1800s.  Left and right shooter lane, and uses a cue or mace for both.  Place a King Ball at the top dot, and then there are 6 cups to land in on the way down, plus scoring columns along the bottom.
  2. Pin bagatelle with plunger, first seen mid 1800s.  An example of how bells were introduced into the game.  Dual shooting lanes, with one for the plunger, one for shooting with a cue.  There is no King Ball spot here.
  3. 1876 Redgrave bagatelle.  First USA patented coiled spring plunger from the front of the table, the way we now know with contemporary pinball.
  4. Singer bagatelle: different style of plunger to avoid Redgrave's patent.  This has scoring slots along the bottom, a remnant from cockamaroo that would disappear by the 20th century.
  5. 9-hole English bagatelle:  the classic English Bagatelle layout, 1 center cup encircled by 8 others.  Still played within some parts of the UK and USA.
  6. Japanese rolling ball table: by 1870 there were variants of the English Bagetelle table sold that had cups in multiple lines.  In Japan, early meiji era, tables like this were used for ball rolling, and points exchanged for prizes.  This is the birth of modern redemption arcades.
  7. Japanese rolling ball toy:  After the success of Japanese Rolling Ball in the USA, toy versions were sold from the 1900s to 1950s, though only some models had references to the Japanese origin.
  8. Poolette: post-ww2 bagatelle toy from Japan, similar to Corinthian tables popular in the early 30s
  9. 20th century bagatelle toy from the UK.  Corinthian style board, but with springed plunger and bakelite (maybe) plastic surface.
  10. Bar Billiards: supposed "arriving from the Dutch" in the 1930s, bar billiards is still popular in parts of the UK today, as well as in a few other countries.  Sometimes referred to as "Russian Billiards", the game has under-table troughs to bring sunk balls to the labeled point slots at the front.

Wednesday, November 9, 2022

Winners Circle! A Bally prototype arrangeball derby game, probably from 1974

I am incredibly excited to share photographs of this seemingly unknown Bally prototype game, Winners Circle!


The owner has graciously allowed me to post these photographs and video.

This is an arrangeball game with derby rules.  The remarkable thing is that it seems to have been made for potential USA markets.  I would like to get into the rules of the game, then review what is going on inside, and then I'd like to share context of why this is significant and what else was going on in the industry at the time.

Thursday, October 27, 2022

updates

exploring the arcade in 愛欲の罠 / Aiyoku no wana aka Trapped in Lust (1973): identified the missing pinball machine!!  (search for "Update 2022-10-27" in the post)  Also previously add Sun Trial!

bagatelle notes: Trou Madam, Mississippi, Pigeon Hole - significant update as I declare Trou Madam to be the true spiritual birthplace of pinball.

Japanese Rolling Ball: 2 photos added to the very bottom, from Salons Vénitiens.  Plus a new postcard added to 1908.

Niche Mechanisms 004: rotation - added Xenon, Automatic Obstacle Race, Steer Crazy II

Niche Mechanisms 001: the drop shelf - added Funky Circus, Dream Rail, Dream Rail Lovely, はっぴーぴえろ Dream Rail 2

Niche Mechanisms 002: catchers - added ダイナマイトキーパー, 電動ホーマー (Electric homer), Catch The Ball

Sunday, October 23, 2022

exploring the arcade in 女獣 / Mejû / Woman Beast (1960)

Like the previous posts, I found this movie through a tweet by TOO_yoshikawa.  I have also included this in my "exploring pachinko in Japanese cinema..." post, but since this has smartball in it, I wanted to post it separately as well.  I'm going to include a few extra photos in this post.


The movie starts with a great pan of a bustling downtown streetscape, and then we pan down to a pachinko parlor exterior shot.


"Shinjuku Tokyo"







exploring the arcade in 本日休診 / Honjitsu kyûshin / Doctor's Day Off (1952)

Another movie I discovered via a tweet by TOO_yoshikawa, this movie shows us a handful of older pachinko machines.  The famous "masamura gauge" came out in 1951, but these machines are older.

本日休診 (1952)

I am adding to my "exploring pachinko in Japanese cinema..." post as well, but I also wanted to share as a standalone post to highlight a few extra scenes.



exploring the arcade in this 1955 Japanese video on candy...

 This video is assumed to be from 1955:


I found it via this tweet from TOO_yoshikawa.  It is a great little video, but there are some pachinko-related rarities to be found.

First we see kids at this pachinko machine.  We can't tell much from the glimpse, but the coin slot at the right means it's a medal pachinko machine  Most machines with the slot there would pay out coins for a win.  But this isn't a video about pachinko, this is a video about CANDY, so I imagine this is a pachinko machine that dispenses sweets on a win.




The camera then cuts to a different machine, giving us wonderful footage of the machine in action!

a win causes a candy to dispense here


If this looks familiar, its because we've seen this machine before, in the Birth of Pachinko Museum by Kazuo Sugiyama:
~1940 子供パチンコ 自動菓子販賣機 (Children's pachinko confectionery vending machine) by セイコー社 (Seiko)

These machines are not gambling or tests of skill.  They are a novelty for the kids to play with.  The ball will fall out the bottom and back to the shooter lane, allowing someone to keep shooting until they hit a winning pocket and receive their confection.


exploring the arcade in ハイティーンやくざ / Hai tiin yakuza / Teenage Yakuza (1962)

via this tweet by TOO_yoshikawa I learned of the movie ハイティーンやくざ which has 2 scenes at a smart ball parlor in it.


ハイティーンやくざ (1962)



The tables being played:

1950s Lucky Ball - ラッキーボール by YMラッキー株式会社 (YM Lucky Co., Ltd.)

I hope I can find more information on the YM company.  Their tables seem quite prolific from the 50s and 60s.

Lucky Ball has come to denote the 4x4 grid configuration we see above, where you can win by completing a row, column, or one of the 2 diagonals.

Here is a better shot of what I think is the same model:



There are a few variations in this style of smart ball.  This one, as in the movie, there is no opening to the front players' trough.  The attendant uses a scoop to serve the balls to players:

Thursday, October 6, 2022

new project: a foreigners' guide to eremeka arcades - 外国人のためのエレメカアーケードゲームガイド

I'm sure you all read about it already over on nazox2016's blog, so it's probably a good time to announce it here as well.  

All throughout 2022 I have been working to build a list of all of the Japanese eremeka games.  What started with an obsession for electromechanical oddities and candystore skill games has spiraled out of control to document a good chunk of Japanese arcade history.

The history of videogames is meticulously documented by an overwhelming army of historians, but I was unable to find a list online of Japanese electromechanical arcade games, let alone a pictures of most of them.  I wanted a list that showed...

  • a game's name (English and Japanese)
  • the year it appeared
  • who made it
  • a decent photo
That's it.  So here it is:

a foreigners' guide to eremeka arcades - 外国人のためのエレメカアーケードゲームガイド


The bulk of information I used came from Onitama, kt2, nazox2016, and the good people of Gaming Alexandria.  There is a much longer list of sources on the page itself.

This is a work in progress and there is still so much to do, but I decided that once I hit 2000 machines documented I would do a "soft launch".  Scroll down to the heading Current Machine List and you will find a text-only version of every machine documented.  This is very useful for just hitting CTRL+F on to find something.  The photo pages are (currently) split into 6 8 different sections: 

  1. machines before 1970   //   1970年以前の機械
  2. machines from 1970-1974  //  1970〜1974年の機械
  3. machines from 1975-1979  //  1975〜1979年の機械
  4. machines from 1980-1989  //  1980〜1989年の機械
  5. machines from 1990-1999  //  1990〜1989年の機械
  6. machines from 2000 and after  //  2000年以降の機械
  7. machines without any year (please help us find any year references!)  //  年のないマシン(年の参照を見つけるのを手伝ってください!) 
  8. machines with no picture  //  写真のないマシン



I still have a lot of material to sift through.  It is an arduous process and I don't want to disclose just how many hours I've poured into this already, but trust me: it's a lot.  When I finish processing the bulk of the materials remaining, I will probably begin tagging all of the machines so that I can generate pages of specific styles of game.

I hope one day someone from Japan decides to make a site like IPDB.org or similar, but for the Japanese games.  I would be able to offer them my data and research for integration.   Until then, this project is the current best hope for documenting these kinds of machines.

There are currently over 2200 machines listed (2023-05-02 update: almost 3500 machines!).  My passion is for the 1970s and earlier, but the materials for machines before 1974 can be extremely sparse and difficult to come across.  Most of the work going forward will be for machines from the 1980s onward, as that is the bulk of the remaining research materials.


On a project like this I have had to set myself some limits, or else I would end up documenting every single Japanese arcade machines ever made.  Maybe someone else will do that, but the thrust of this project is to document all of the machines that I have some interest in, based on flexible criteria that I apply unevenly.

I am including all of the electromechanical medal games, but not all of the modern medal games.  Why?  Most modern medal games are a video slot machine.  I only care about games that have a physical component, and I don't want to consider "dispensing medals" as a physical component here.  There are many large games like horse racing simulators that I am not including, but I am including some modern horse race games that actually have physical horses moving around the track, even though the action itself is all electronically controlled.

I am not including carnival games where you pick up balls and throw them in buckets or baskets.  These came out of the redemption arcades of the 80s and don't interest me.  But I have included some air hockey tables, as they appeared in the electromechanical arcades of the early 70s.

I am not including horoscope and modern novelty machines like photo gimmicks, but I am including old electromechanical ones.  I'm not including most novelty prize games, like string cutters and UFO catchers, but I am including crane games from the 60s and 70s, and their evolutions into the modern age.  I am also including crane games that have novel physical adaptations that interest me, but that's mostly arbitrary.  Rotary merchandisers go back to the 1920s, and more modern versions certainly have a place on my list.  What I'm saying is: it's not a perfect system, but if I can't defend the inclusion or exclusion of something specific, just assume it's because I was exhausted.  :)

One way to think about it: once we hit the IC age (Integrated circuits) my interest diminishes.  If something is from before 1974? My interest piques.

What are you still doing reading this?  Go look at some cool eremeka machines instead.

Thursday, September 22, 2022

2nd bagatelle lecture at the Field House Museum

 This weekend there will be another lecture on bagatelle!  

Ed Nickels will be giving a lecture about his bagatelle collection, 2022-09-24, 1pm CST (2pm EST)


It is Ed Nickels who is showing his collection at the Field House Museum, and I'm very excited to hear the lecture about his collection.  To join via Zoom, you must register in advance here.

The first lecture, by James Masters, is available to watch online!


About this event

Join the Field House Museum on Saturday, September 24, 2022, at 1:00 pm as we welcome avid collector Ed Nickels for a special Speaker Series on Bagatelle. Before the ring of pinball machines echoed through arcades, Bagatelle was filling parlors and pockets across the world. Learn all about this unique collection of intricately decorated and brightly colored tabletop games from the 1800s to early 1900s as Nickels takes an in-depth look at the games on display.

This program is free with limited availability in person and on Zoom. Reservations must be made in advance through Eventbrite, by calling the Museum at 314-421-4689, or by emailing info@fieldhousemuseum.org.


Wednesday, August 24, 2022

Bagatelle - An Evolution lecture at the Field House Museum 2022-08-16

I am delighted to share with you this lecture by James Masters, as given for the Field House Museum (St. Louis, MO, USA) on the history of bagatelle.  

The lecture can be viewed and downloaded on archive.org!

also on youtube:



The lecture was given over Zoom, which ended up being quite ideal since it was attended by people from Canada, USA, UK, Spain, and other countries, as well as a handful of people in person at the museum exhibition itself.

James and I have been writing back and forth for a while know, and he raises a number of key details about the history of bagatelle that have vexed us both:


1) we have no proof about there being any sort of pinball precursor at the legendary Chateau de Bagatelle.  There are many references to the Chateau, but none describe a billiards table of any sort, and only a single source makes claim of a "gaming table".    Comte d'Artois was a known gambling addict, but a gaming table can be any table a game is played, and most often cards.  Until we can verify any specific references, it might be best to let this legend fade into history.


Let's returns to the relevant Bueschel quote, sent to me:
"The remarkable coincidence of the appearance of the new betting game of bagatelle at precisely the time that a leading member of the inner court circle and prince of France known as a sportsman and gambler who also"... kept a gaming table in his own house" in a game room of a building called Bagatelle beggars a connection between the man, the party and the game.""

The quote included by Bueschel there is from a 1903 article in The Nation.  I'll include that here!

1903 The Nation: Chateaux Bagatelle

1903 The Nation: Chateaux Bagatelle



2) I appreciate the disentangling of Fossette from the pinball pre-history...


3) Fancy pin tables in France?  Absolutely.  Just not as early as we might have thought.  Or at least, many of the examples that get passed around as "18th century pinball" are known to be 19th century, especially 2nd-half 19th century.


4) There is a table of mystery in the Deutsche Museum that they claim is from 1770-1790, based purely on the materials and build type.  But there is no provenance.



bagatelle notes: 19th century publications

Let's get some definitions and rules!  We're going to sift through 19th century game books here to trace the language around bagatelle and related games.

It's important to note that some of the dates for these books need to be eyed with skepticism as they might not be accurate to the edition.


1801 / 1810 / 1903 The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England from the Earliest Period: Including the Rural and Domestic Recreations, May Games, Mummeries, Pageants, Processions and Pompous Spectacles by Joseph Strutt

this was first published in 1801, but this edition is from 1903 and has had SUBSTANTIAL editing.  If you know where to locate a proper FIRST edition, please do let me know.


I am including this section on Nine-Holes as it seems potentially relevant.  There is an 1896 article in this prior bagatelle post that that also goes in to bumblepuppy.

excerpt from the 1903 edition, but this also is included in the 1810 edition

I am unsure if Troul In Madame is a corruption of Trou Madam or a variant name given specifically due to the play being done with cues/maces, and so a new name needed.
It says it is "not unlike our modern bagatelle, only played without a cue or mace", but while it's exciting that bagatelle is called "modern", note this from the preface:



this passage does not exist in the 1810 version, so we can't use that to date 'bagatelle'

I had forgotten about The Benefit of the Ancient Bathes of Buckstones, but yes that 1572 work did reference Troule in Madame.
Oh hey look it's that 1572 quote:

A friend offered this modern take on the above text,
The Ladies, Gentle Women, Wives and Maids may in one of the Galleries walk: and if the weather be not agreeable to their expectation, they may have in the end of the Bench eleven holes made, into which to "trowle pummetes" or Bowls of lead, big, little or mean [average], or also of Copper, Tin, Wood, either violent or soft, after their own discretion, the pastime Troule in Madame is termed.
Likewise, men feeble, the same may also practice in another Gallery of the new buildings, and this does not only strengthen the stomach and the upper parts above the midriff or waist: but also the middle parts beneath the sharp "Gristle" and the extreme parts, the the hands and legs, according to the weight of the thing "trouled", fast, soft or mean.



This next text might be the earliest description of what we refer to as "pin bagatelle".  All of the critical components are described: curved top, elevated, a channel to drive the ball up, and it falls down "interrupted in its descent by wires inserted at different distances upon the table, which alter its direction and often throw it entirely out of the proper track."  The 'wires' spoken of here probably refers to gates and/or pins.  It also describes the gates used in games like Mississippi for receiving the balls at the bottom.  While we know Trou Madam can be traced to the 16th century, I am unsure as to the origins of the name 'Mississippi'.


This would lend obvious weight to the idea that pin bagatelle arrived by tilting a trou madam / mississippi table so that balls fell down towards the numbered gates to score.


2 other Rocks of Scilly references passed to me, which don't offer any real extra details but do give proof of existence.
1804-04-05 The Morning Chronicle (London)

1811-05-06 The Leeds Intelligencer and Yorkshire General Advertiser

Here is the entry on Mississippi from the 1810 edition, where it describes it as a billiard-like game where the balls are 'cast' (rolled) towards a set of arches for points.

I had previously thought Mississippi to be exclusively a cue/mace game, but I suppose it started out with just rolling the balls?  It's hard to tell for sure with just this description to go on.
The only real difference I can tell between Trou Madam and Mississippi is that Trou Madam lets you shoot straight into the scoring holes, while in Mississippi you have to bounce of the side bumper.
(James tells me in a chat, "Earlier tables were not smooth, uniform or level so knocking it straight into a hole was more of a challenge.  As table technology improved and maces changed to cues so accuracy also improved, it became too easy.  So then they added the rule that you had to bounce it off a cushion to make it suitably challenging.")


1847: Castles In The Air vol III by Catherine Grace Francis Gore

This is the earliest mention of the game cockamaroo that we've found so far.
p 246 of Castles In The Air vol III



1854: The Handbook of Games...

1854 Hand-Book of Games, edited by Henry G. Bohn


Pinball Machine Maintenance - Manual For The Repair And Maintenance Of Electro Mechanical Pinball Machine (1960-1977) by Henk De Jager

If you've ever been interested in iterations of EM technology this book is for you.  It's an EM pinball maintenance guide, but it outlines all of the various systems that Bally, Williams, and Gottlieb used over the years, and explains what each improvement in design is doing.  There are very few places to get an understanding of how the technology changed and evolved over the years.

Pinball Machine Maintenance - Manual For The Repair And Maintenance Of Electro Mechanical Pinball Machine (1960-1977) at archive.org

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

bar billiards

I am moving all of my bar billiards notes into a single post.  (It previously had bounced around as a sub-category in other posts.)

Bar Billiards
 


I had moved Bar Billiards with the Pigeon Hole tables at first, since the template for it arrived around the same time as Pigeon Hole tables were popular.  Now it's here on its own.  You can see a prior post with a good video on bar billiards.
It apparently came to the UK via Belgium (as Russian Billiards?) circa 1930s, but that's a highly suspect history considering the precursor tables with the same layout and features existed in 1880, and then the trough that returns balls to the front appeared with Klondike Pool.
The game had playfield holes and troughs let the balls roll to the front, making it perfect for a bar where surrounding space was limited.  The player always shoots from the front.
It is a 20th century game so I won't be spending much time on it, but I would like to see if there is evidence to better trace the 19th century tables to the present-day bar billiards machines.

It is also lays forth the inspiration for the "totalizer", a key innovation in the development of pinball in 1933.

Are we going to just rest on the story that "bar billiards came from Belgium around 1930" when this existed in the USA in 1872?
Jenny Lind table in the 1872 J. M. Brunswick catalog


Monday, August 15, 2022

some great EM videos

A number of really great EM videos have been posted recently.  Here are some treats:

Restoration (pics) and gameplay of a 1968 Moto-Polo by Sega:


A very special find: footage from the 1976 full motion video game Sky Hawk by Nintendo.  Note the game's data encoded on the bottom half of the screen.


A visual tour through a flasher slot machine:

Randy Senna showing off the first linked driving game, which was built for Disney.

An in-depth tour inside Kasco's 1978 game The Driver



my want list

This has come up a few times recently so I've decided to publicly share my "want list".  I am going to specify the geographic region for each, since most people tend to know machines from one geographic area above all others.


Most Wanted:  These are machines that are my top priority.  I am willing to pay for international shipping to make any of these happen.

Japan - 1977 Vanishing Point - バニシングポイント by 豊栄産業 (Hoei Sangyo) or 1978 世界一周ゲーム (Round The World game) by 柿崎計器 有限会社 (Kakizaki Keiki) or Space Trip by unknown or 1978 Super Cars - スーパーカー by 柿崎計器 (Kakizaki Keiki) 

These are essentially the same game except with different graphics.  Round The  World has at least 2 variant graphics.  There is also a game from 1984 called Mr. ジャンプくん (Mr. Jump-kun) by ケーアンドユー商会 (K&U Company) but it is a full upright, and I'd only want to ship the top half.

1977 Vanishing Point - バニシングポイント by 豊栄産業 (Hoei Sangyo)

1978 世界一周ゲーム (Round The World game)

Space Trip by unknown

1978 Super Cars - スーパーカー by 柿崎計器 (Kakizaki Keiki)



North America - 1932 English by Mills  (a failed prototype, there are at least 2 known surviving copies and I know where 1 is.  It was a bit of a dud but I want it because it shows a Rolling Ball influence.


North America - 1932 The Maple Leaf by Automatic Industries (I want to document more on one of the few Canadian manufacturers!)


Japan - 1950s Smart Ball or Lucky Ball table (I have one of these, but I want one in Very Good condition)


Japan - any Japanese machines from before World War 2.  as an example... 

plus, pachinko machines from the 30s to 40s:
I am interested in any old pachinko machines that look like just a grid of nails:

any pachinko machine that outputs a coin or token instead of balls


Miscellaneous:

  • Research materials on Japanese games - this is all on a separate page.  Catalogs, flyers, and other ephemera from Japan circa 1975 and before are desperately needed.
  • Mills Novelty circular 125 G circa 1906, or any Mills documentation of their "Japanese Booth" or "Japanese Rolling Ball" setup.
  • arcade marquees wanted:
    • Strider (Capcom)
    • Dark Planet (Stern)
    • Ninja (Sega, 1985)
    • Roller Aces (Williams)
    • Super Spacefortress Macross (Fabtek)
    • Time Gal (Taito, 1985)
    • Electronic Fantasy (Taito)
    • Quiz Dragon (Capcom)
    • plus a few more, message me for a full list
  • pinball backglasses wanted:
    • Women's-Lib (Sega)
    • Fairy (Playmatic)
    • Star-Jet (1963, Bally)
    • Flip A Card / Card Trix (1970, Gottlieb)
    • Star Trek (1971, Gottlieb)