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- description
- The bingo machine is pinball's gambling cousin: the player shoots five balls onto a field of holes, trying to light numbers into a line on a 5×5 card printed across the backglass.[1] It arrived in 1951 with [[manufacturer:bally]]'s *[[title:bright-lights]]*, the first "in-line" machine, whose playfield layout became the pattern every later bingo followed.[2] The play is elemental — a coin buys a card, five balls go up the shooter, and three or more numbers in a line wins.[3] In its classic form the machine carries no [[gameplay-feature:flippers]] at all: once a ball is loose, only careful nudging of the cabinet can influence it.[4]
Bingos exist because of a law. The federal Johnson Act of 1950 banned interstate shipment of gambling devices — the slot machines and single-shot "one-ball" games [[manufacturer:bally]] had dominated — and the in-line bingo was the trade's workaround, a new kind of pin game to take their place.[5] For all its amusement styling the result was frankly a gambling machine: a player fed extra coins before the shot to lengthen the payout odds, and a winning card was settled by the location in free games or cash.[6]
The format's on-and-off relationship with the flipper grows from that same legal tangle. Because courts in many places treated flipper games as machines of skill, exempt from the gambling bans, a common workaround was to fit flippers to a bingo to lend it a veneer of skill — something [[manufacturer:bally]] itself never did, but that operators and later makers took up.[7] Squeezed out of its home market, the genre also emigrated: long after the American firms had abandoned it, makers in [[location:italy]], [[location:spain]] and [[location:belgium]] kept the electronic bingo in production for export,[8] among them the Belgian houses [[manufacturer:sirmo-games-sa]] and [[manufacturer:splin-sa]], whose flippered cabinets carried the once-American genre into the solid-state era.
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- display_order
- 8
- name
- Bingo Pinball
- slug
- bingo-pinball
- status
- active