Sources
Contributors to this record: Flipcommons AI Descriptions (DisplayType), Flipcommons Catalog.
- description
- Flipcommons AI Descriptions (DisplayType)Score reels are mechanical rotating drums, each one displaying a single digit — zero through nine — painted on its face and driven by a solenoid one click at a time. To show a score of 47,300, five separate reels would spin to their correct positions, each advancing with a satisfying mechanical clunk. When a player rolled the score past 99,990 points, the reels would quietly cycle back to zero and start again. [[manufacturer:gottlieb]] introduced the first practical score reel displays in the late 1940s, and they became the universal standard for the [[technology-generation:electromechanical]] era. [[manufacturer:bally]], [[manufacturer:williams]], and [[manufacturer:gottlieb]] each developed their own reel assemblies, usually six digits arranged across the backglass and visible through the painted artwork. The arrangement of those reels — and the artwork designed around them — became part of each machine's visual identity. The reel's sound is inseparable from the character of EM pinball: the rapid-fire clicking of bumper hits accumulating, the slow deliberate turn of a bonus reel advancing one hundred points at a time, the satisfying final clunk when a thousand-point shot lands. When [[technology-generation:solid-state]] electronics arrived in the late 1970s and [[display-type:alphanumeric]] LED displays made reels obsolete, many players mourned the loss of that sound as much as anything else.
- display_order
- 1Flipcommons Catalog
- name
- Score ReelsFlipcommons Catalog
- slug
- score-reelsFlipcommons Catalog