Game Formats

A game format is the broad category of play a machine belongs to — the physical vocabulary of how a ball (or puck) moves and how the player interacts with it. Pinball is the dominant format and the reason this catalog exists: a tilted playfield, a plunger, and — since Gottlieb's Humpty Dumpty in 1947 — flippers. It descends directly from bagatelle, the flipperless plunger-and-gravity ancestor that established the basic form. Shuffle alleys (pucks slid down a long lane toward pins or scoring zones) and pitch-and-bat baseball games shared manufacturers, operators, and distribution with pinball — Williams and Chicago Coin built all of them — but occupied different niches on the coin-op route.