Upright

An upright cabinet is tall rather than long. It stands on the floor or hangs on a wall. It often but not always has a Vertical Playfields.

The floor upright

Genco built a short run in the early 1950s — 400, Jumpin’ Jacks, Golden Nugget, Silver Chest — each “an upright game with a vertical playfield”,^[1] played with a single flipper worked by a button on the backglass frame rather than by buttons on the cabinet sides. These were full-height machines: Amusematic Corporation’s Boomerang measured 84 inches tall,^[2] and Zingo, the first game Williams ever built, reached 86.^[3] Later consoles kept the proportions and changed everything else — Midway’s Red Ball (1959) filled an “upright cabinet advertised as 26 inches wide, 66 inches high, and 30 inches deep”^[4] with a bouncing-ball scoring array.

The wall box

The shallow body needs no floor at all. Melchers Automatenbau KG’s Flik Flak “is a wall-mounted game with a vertical playfield”,^[5] and Chicago Coin’s Mini-Baseball “Can mount on wall or be placed on an optional console base”^[6] — one machine, hung or stood as the location allowed. A wall box costs an operator no floor space at all, which is why the shape kept turning up in bars and cafés long after it had left the arcade.

Why it stayed a minority

While the economics of an upright cabinet makes sense, the gameplay doesn’t. On a vertical playfield the ball drops fast and straight, so the outcome is mostly decided by where the pins are, not by the player controlling the flippers. A flipper mounted on a vertical surface gets a fast-falling ball and very little time or angle to do anything with it, whereas the usual two flippers at the bottom of a sloped playfield meet a ball that has rolled the length of the surface and slowed down.

Williams tried an upright cabinet once in the solid-state era with Still Crazy (1984), which put four flippers on a large vertical playfield. Twelve test units were built and the sample run was pulled before it shipped: “it was just too difficult to control the balls via the four flippers over the large vertical playfield”.^[7]