13 more issues of Canadian Coin Box!!
The Canadian Coin Box and Vending 1948-06 |
The Canadian Coin Box and Vending 1948-09, 10 |
13 more issues of Canadian Coin Box!!
The Canadian Coin Box and Vending 1948-06 |
The Canadian Coin Box and Vending 1948-09, 10 |
I was annoyed by the handful of sub-standard photos of the Mike Munves catalogues floating around the internet so I decided to do something about it.
Here are the Munves distributor catalogues from 1939, 1940, 1941, 1953, 1954 + insert, 1957.
Mike Munves 1939 |
Mike Munves 1940 |
Mike Munves 1941 |
Mike Munves 1953 |
Mike Munves 1954 |
Mike Munves 1954 Insert |
Mike Munves 1957 |
Of all the companies listed in IPDB about half of them are from the 1930s. (credit to Michael Minchew for pointing that out.) This was a time of rapid innovation that saw an incredible number of companies threw their hat into the ring. Many companies would release a game or two, maybe just a prototype, and then fold.
The rules, tropes, and expectations of pinball were all very new and the result was a period of wild creativity with relatively few success stories, at least compared to the volume of different machines built. Many of the machines from this time, especially the very quirky ones, probably only have less than 10 copies remaining. Lots of these probably only have a single copy remaining. But that's not altogether surprising when you consider the business zeitgeist of the thirties coinop world.
Here are three games that I noticed recently.
1932 Hot-Shot by The Ball Games inc, Chicago |
I begged Rob Berk to bring this game to pinball expo. I had caught a glimpse of this game during a YouTube video that toured his facility showed off some of the back storage area.
The only reference to hotshot that I've seen is in this 1932 issue of automatic age where the game and associated company were listed for an exhibition.
Automatic Age 1932-03 |
The game has a nearly flat play field almost like a billiards table except hardwood like a pin table. It has a slight tilt so balls will fall into the slots at the front if they do not enter a hole.
A large plane of glass would cover it though the machine in the picture does not have the glass on. It has a nickel slide at the front, which should move the baffle board and release the falling balls into a trough at the left side of the machine. A player would then manually pick up the balls and place them into one of two cannons at the front. Each of the cannons has a spring lever at the back allowing the player to fire the balls into the playfield where they hopefully come to rest in high scoring pockets.
ball tray |
bottom scoring pockets |
Rules for playing |
This game is certainly precedented. Here's another random cannon-plunge-style game from the same year:
Q-Ball by Dixie Music Co Automatic Age 1932-02 |
Automatic Age 1933-08 |
This game recently came up for auction (archive). The name was a mystery to the pre-war community, but I found the game in advertisement for "decalomania transfers"
The Meyercord Co advertisement in 1932-02 Automatic Age |
ENHANCE! Marbelous revealed |
I spent the last weekend in Chicago, USA, For the 40th anniversary of pinball expo.
Pinball Expo 8am Wednesday morning |
I was there to help my friends Cliff & Colleen of Tap91 Gameroom run the pre-war pinball booth. This was a lot of hard work, and 14-hour days, but it was all pinball and it made me very happy. We also teamed up with Jeff of HistoryOfPinball.org and Bryan.
booth layout plan |
The prewar booth received the award for first place booth at Expo.
<3 <3 |
Making friends
high-voltage! |
On Thursday I was on the panel "Collecting Pinball Machines from the Birth of Pinball to the 1930s". My talk is the first 20 minutes of this video:
Back at COAPF in June I was given a stack of tapes. I had mentioned the archiving projects to a vendor and he ended up donating them all. The videos were all digitized, and now the audio tapes are too.
12 tape set
digitized by Nateo87
Audio has been normalized, and the audio speeding up at the very end of the final lecture was like that on the tape.
Pinball Expo 2000 seminars - case cover art |
Download and/or listen to the Pinball Expo 2000 seminars at The Internet Archive.
These photographs were posted at kanaloco.jp and I wish I had archived the page back when it wasn't locked.
I did save a screenshot of the web page:
kanaloco.jp screenshot |
These are wonderful photographs, and I wish we had many more from this era. Let's see how many of these machines can be identified! Begin by looking at these two pictures and ask yourself how many games you can recognize.
We will proceed from the right (near us) to the left (further away), and utilizing details from both pictures.
To the right of the counter we can see a portion of one machine:
1959 Bingolett by Günter Wulff, Berlin (archive) |