exploring the arcade in The Women In His Life (1933)

Lots of people have seen this clip from The Women In His Life (1933) bounce around,  as it's heralded as the first movie appearance of a pinball machine, so check it here:

It's on screen for less than a minute, and it's just one machine, so maybe this isn't much of an "Arcade Exploration", but it's still an arcade that needs to be explored.

transitional electric pachinko machines

This page is a work-in-progress in hopes to document the late-70s transitional electric pachinko machines.

With the start of the 1970s, arcade machines took their first baby steps towards solid-state technology that would eventually lead to the videogame revolution.  Pong machines came from numerous manufacturers in the early 70s.  EM arcade machines started including sound board and limited circuits.   Pinball manufacturers slowly started including solid-state circuity:  first for sound effects, and eventually for scoring and game rules.

Pachinko felt the same pressure, and the 70s gave us a fascinating period of incorporating electricity in to machines.  Previously machines would only have electricity for lights:  one for jackpot payout, and one to indicate low balls in the upper tray.

There were a few super quirky innovations, like pachinko machines with tiny TV sets in the center so players could watch while playing, but those were not pervasive.

My favourite era of pachinko ended when electric ball shooters became the norm.  And once Sankyo released Fever in 1980, things changed forever for pachinko, a revolution that would lead to the digipachi (deijipachi / デジパチ) dominance of pachinko we have now.

This page will NOT be including arrangeballs, challengeballs, pachinko baseball, pachinko mahjong, and other early solid-state pachinko variants.  This is just machines that "play + pay" like normal pachinko machines.

I will put them in chronological order as we verify their year.  If we don't know the year, they go to the end.  When possible I will link videos.  Thank you to everyone who has helped with this, and/or has unwittingly had their posts/images used as a resource.

Pachinko Queen Implosion

I took the softcore hetero porn film Pachinko Queen Explosion and edited it down to just the parts that teach us something about modern pachinko or show off the parlor.  There is nothing remotely pornographic in this clip.

Pachinko Queen Implosion from Caitlyn Pascal on Vimeo.

I've noticed that embedded video doesn't show on this blog if you're on mobile, so if you're on a mobile device click the link to go right to Vimeo.

Here's the cover art from the original movie

Pachinko Queen Explosion (2007)

Smart Ball in Shenmue 3

Someone brought this to my attention over in this pachitalk thread, but I thought I should repost it all here.

The videogame Shenmue 3 apparently has areas where you can go to an arcade and play Smart Ball variants.

from the thread:

Shenmue III takes place in rural China in the mountains along the Lijiang river in the year 1987 and across your martial arts journey you find a few places where you can play Smart Ball, they are completely optional and have no bearing to the games plot but you can play Smart Ball and win prizes.

I am not sure if Smart Ball machines were ever imported into China, but certainly it could be that they are making references to the spa towns in Japan where you can still find retro smart ball parlors.  (though only a few retro parlors remain)

If you have any info on machines like this being in China, I would love to hear about it!   I've found so incredibly little about any 20th century coinop machines in China.   The only related thing I've posted was this bit about the Hong Kong Museum.

There are three general "periods" of smart balls that I can see:
the hand-operated ones (1930s to 1960s)
the automatic payout ones (1960s to 1970s)
the solid-state redemption ones (1980s-present)

Shenmue seems to combine a lot of these things together in varied ways.

The hand-operated ones had the balls cleared out manually with a latch accessed at the back.  Most allow balls to fall to a tray at the front, but in some cases the ball rack was handed to you by an attendant.
These did not have backboxes / backglasses.

1930s style smart ball at the Pachinko Museum

1950s style smart ball

The automatic payout ones used similar mechanical technology to the automatic dispensing pachinko machines, just scaled up the larger marbles.

These are my favourite as they winning are dispensed from the head.  The balls roll down the glass and can be fed into the shooter lane easily.

1960s/1970s style smart ball with automated payout

Then the solid-state machines offered scoring on discrete games, with the chance of winning a prize.  I am not sure if some of these ever had "ticket dispensers" like North American redemption machines.

if you can score 10 points, a prize ball will be dispensed out of the bottom slot

There is also a market of people making brand new 1930s-style smart ball tables.  Well they aren't quite like the 1930s machines, they have a very fundamental layout, but it's the same principle of operation.

they are sometimes found at fairs, where it seems the cost is now 300 yen. :)

Niche Mechanisms 001: the drop shelf

A horizontal bar, but you push a button and it recedes.  The ball or coin on it then falls.  That's it!  A delightful little gameplay mechanism that has been around for decades but is still barely known.  Machines here span almost 100 years.

Let's start with a basic machine, and the earliest.  There's a whole lot more under the cut.

1900 The Halfpenny by Price and Castell

when you push the button the shelf retracts, allowing the coin to enter the winning slot

Niche Mechanisms 000: an introduction

I'm starting a new series of blog entries where I just post up a bunch of media illustrating cool arcade gimmicks and mechanics that span decades and continents.

These are not going to be a definitive works, nor meticulously researched things.  But if you have more stuff to add to them please reply to the bottom and perhaps I'll update them with new entries as I go.

These are all cool little things I've noticed in my research of coin-op machines and that I've fallen in love with.  There are a bunch of topics in classic coin-op that I could include here, but won't because they are just too massive:  pitch-n-bats, physical horse-racing games, shooting gallery machines, bowling games, EM arcade games, etc.

But stay tuned for a handful of small Niche Mechanism posts in the future!

operator hacks: slot machine mod

I'm fascinated by all the way devious operators tried to make their machines more profitable.

With EM machines the mods can be smaller and less intrusive, but here is an example of a purely mechanical hack.  Taken from a facebook group about slot machines, this hack is much more intrusive.

Someone has taken one of the pay wheels for the slot machine and spot-welded one of the gaps, closing it off.

Each of the 3 reels on a mechanical slot is attached to one of these plates, and the holes line up to the symbols you see on the spinning reel.  If the holes line up, the pay fingers can enter them and that permits the related payout.

With the hole closed, that position on the reel no longer pays out.  The operator then modified the correlating symbol on the reel, changing it from a lemon to a "Bell-Fruit-Gum" icon.

If this symbol comes up, you've lost!

Any gambling machine with a microprocessor controls the odds that way, and is of no interest to me.  But it's always cool to see how nefarious operators might have tilter the odds further in their favour on these older gambling machines.

This hack would have required disassembling the full machine and remove the reel parts to do the weld.