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) by 柿崎計器 (Kakizaki Keiki)
~1978 Space Trip by 豊栄産業 (Hoei Sangyo) [presumed]
1978 Super Cars - スーパーカー by 柿崎計器 (Kakizaki Keiki)
Japan - any Japanese machines from before World War 2. as an example...
omikuji machines (fortune dispensers)
plus, pachinko machines from the 20s to 40s:
pachinko machines with odd nail distribution
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
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.
Join the Field House Museum on Wednesday, August 10, at 1:00 pm for a Speaker Series that takes Bagatelle from the parlor to the arcade. Gaming expert and creator of the Online Guide to Traditional Games website, James Masters, will join us via Zoom, all the way from the UK! Masters will share his passion and interest in the evolution of the table game through to pinball. For those joining us in person for the watch party, explore our main gallery exhibit, "Bagatelle," after the presentation.
This presentation will primarily take place on Zoom, but the Field House Museum will host a small watch party during the event. Reservations must be made in advance through Eventbrite, by calling the Museum at 314-421-4689, or by emailing info@fieldhousemuseum.org.
About the Speaker:
James Masters has been into the history, mathematics, strategy, camaraderie, rules, and even the playing of games since early childhood. His interests tend to whirl around pub games, table games, ancient board games, and how games of all sorts evolve over time. Author of the Online Guide to Traditional Games website and maintainer of the Games Research Database, most recently, he has completed a paper on the medieval sport of Loggats and an article on the ancient Egyptian game of Mehen for the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
The Field House Museum in St. Louis, MO is currently hosting a marvelous exhibition of bagatelles from Ed Nickel's collection. Here are a few pictures that were sent to me by Ed:
And from the Field House Museum staff:
Between the knowledge of Ed Nickels in the USA, James Masters in the UK, Wayne Morgan in Canada, and Kazuo Sugiyama in Japan, we are piecing together a robust history of bagatelle and related table games.
We do need someone from Finland to discuss the history of Fortunaa, perhaps...
I realized my arcade room had been askew for about 2 months since I had been neglecting it. The games were all shoved aside to give me access to Kick Off's backbox.... and then I just got distracted by life and other projects. One goal of the weekend was to get things back in to a state of order!
The first issue with Kick Off was that on player 1 the 10,000 reel wasn't resetting. I've dealt with this many times on Gottlieb machines, but Kick Off is my first Bally. The principles aren't widely different, just things shuffled around and renamed a bit.
Here is the part of the schematic dealing with the scoring reels:
In this post I am going to be dumping references to bagatelle from some newspapers. Many of these clips I'll later sift into the more overarching posts on this topic. (will this post disappear if I integrate stuff into older posts on these topics? Unsure...)
Below the cut you'll find information on bagatelle, russian billiards, bar billiards, etc
Doing a search through New York Historic Newspapers, the earliest mention of bagatelle to mean a game (on that site) seems to be 1819.
1819-08-17 Lansingburgh Gazette
(if I go to your house and you have bagatelles and aeolian harps, I'll be very impressed)
The book is published by Hosei University Press [ISBN978-4-588-21881-1] and is 370 pages of pre-arcade history for all of the Meiji-era fans in your life. :)
My central thesis around Japanese Rolling Ball was that it was the central ancestor of modern day redemption arcades. It directly evolved into Fascination and Pokerino as electricity became available, seems to have inspired the invention of skee-ball, and was used as inspiration for a new type of carnival barker game.
Documenting the birth of the earliest redemption arcade models is, for me, the most important achievement of this research.
Hey it's me! This is now the 2nd book from Japan with my name in it :) But this time my name appears a few more times, and the research I did is spread out through the entire book.
I spotted this image in the Japanese trade magazine Game Machine:
Game Machine - 1977-02-15
It's obviously a composite photo, given the two perspectives. Some editor with a blade lovingly cut out the guy playing Atarians and put that Sea Avenger shot behind him.
What was this game Sea Avenger? There's not much out there on it.
A few months prior, this advertisement from Meadows Games appears in Play Meter magazine:
Play Meter 1976-11
cropped:
Company info from the flyer:
Meadows Games, Inc
181 Commercial St, Sunnyvale, CA
94086
(800) 538-1515
Sea Avenger was mentioned twice in Cash Box magazine:
Cash Box 1976-11-13
The only quote on the game here was recycled into the Play Meter advertisement we saw above.
This next quote mentions how Lila Zinter went to the ATE show (London tradeshow) with Atari's pinball machine Atarians. It is ambiguous as to if Sea Avenger was with her, but we have other confirmation that Sea Avenger was indeed at the ATE show.
Lila Zinter would soon after go to work for Exidy. She unfortunately passed away in 2016.
Back to the Japanese magazine Game Machine, which included a writeup on the ATE show and not only confirms that Sea Avengers was present, it also gives us a description! You will not be ready for the surprise:
The following is a machine translation, prepped by my friend tweakbod of Gaming Alexandria fame, who also provided some of the research for this article!
Game Machine No. 68 – Feb. 15, 1977 (page 2)
Japanese and U.S. Industries Making Great Strides
New Flippers in the Spotlight
ATARIANS & SEA AVENGER
Atari's Atarians and Meadows' Sea Avenger attracted particular attention in this ATE, as neither of them had attempted a flipper until now. The first machine is an IC flipper from the U.S. TV game machine manufacturer, and this machine attracted attention for its ambitious entry into the flipper market, which was gaining momentum on the back of its strength in TV games.
The main features of Atarians are first, that there is no score display etc. on the backglass, rather all scores are displayed digitally in front of the field, and second, the area of the play field is now much larger than in the past, both vertically and horizontally. The content of the game incorporates many aspects of the flippers, but the feedback we received was that the level of perfection is not good enough.
Sea Avenger, on the other hand, is significantly different from the conventional flipper, with the playfield tilting to the left and right. In addition to the flipper buttons, this feature is activated by pressing a button on the front, which allows a ball on the right to be brought to the left by tilting.
It was unveiled at this ATE as the first machine with its own ingenuity, and it will be interesting to see how it develops in the future.
Game Machine 1978-11-01 says Lila Zinter went from Meadows to Exidy "last month", so perhaps in September or October 1978.
It's a bit hard to believe it, but that's what it says: TILTING PLAYFIELD.
This isn't entirely unprecedented, as the 1970s saw a handful of other pinball machines with playfield novelties like this. Challenger was a long 2-player table and the playfield would tilt between two players.
Allied Leisure had two "shaker pins" where you had more freedom to jostle the playfields. This isn't quite the same as tilting, but I'd be remiss to not note their impact here.
The trail on Sea Avenger goes dry after this. I hope to discover some photos are or videos from the ATE show as I don't think the game made it to other trade shows, nor ever made it to production. A button to tilt the playfield left and right was never attempted again by a manufacturer, and perhaps that's a reasonable decision.
The PR quote was that solid state was more reliable? Who knows, but a tilting playfield sounds like an engineering nightmare.
Someone did make a playfield that tilts left and right: TILTY FLASH! In this video, starting at the 18 second mark, you can see a 1978 Flash by Williams that has been modified to tilt back and forth.
Here is a few seconds of gameplay:
It was also pointed out to me that the 1987 game Wolf Man by Peyper has the "El Movimiento" feature, with handles to move the playfield.
