Flasher-Type Gambling Console

A flasher-type gambling console, also called an “electronic upright” or simply an “upright”, is not a pinball machine; it is a gambling device styled to look or operate similarly to mechanical arcade games.^[1][2]

Why they exist

These machines were built to bypass anti-slot-machine gambling laws. Manufacturers replaced the slot machine’s traditional physical spinning reels — a feature by which laws often identified a slot machine — with electronic flashers that lit up symbols behind a silk-screened glass, and dressed that difference in the language of skill.^[3][4][5] Pace sold King Pin (1938) as a “pin table”, “an attempt to get their slot machine console games into pinball-only territory”,^[6] and Bally offered Lincoln Fields (1937) with an optional captive-ball “Skill Feature”, “something to add an element of skill to the game usually done to circumvent gambling ordinances”.^[7] After the war the line moved again: coin payout were made illegal in the US so American manufacturers exported them to the UK.^[8]

Connection to pinball

These machines came off the same factory floors as pinball, and share its relays, wiring and backglass art.^[9] “Bally had a foot in both sides of the coin operated industry”,^[10] and so did Keeney, Games Inc and Mills Novelty Company.

How a flasher-type machine works

• The credit counter. Coins increment a credit meter, and on the post-war uprights that meter is also the prize. Of Games Inc’s Wild Cat (1958): “It does not payout cash. The credit meter increments instead, allowing for continued play without insertion of additional coins.”^[11]
• The spin. A handle or button starts a motor-driven wiper. On a flasher “the wipers for the flashers not only control the lights but the timer wiper as well”,^[12] so the same mechanism that runs the light show decides the result.
• The flashers. Symbols printed on the glass light in sequence.^[5] Mills’ Flasher (Bell Fruit) (1937) “has a glass playfield with no moving parts but has slot machine symbols that are lit from behind after the player pulls the side handle”.^[13]
• The outcome. When the cycle stops, the symbols left lit are read against the award schedule on the glass. A pre-war console paid in coin, the Mills machine “into a spring-loaded metal cup located on the front underside of the machine”;^[14] a post-war upright paid in credits, and only the export models paid cash.^[11][8][15]

Two generations

The pre-war consoles of 1937 to 1947, such as Bally’s Bally’s Club House, “an upright 7-coin console slot machine”,^[16] Mills’ Flasher and Keeney’s Gold Nugget, paid out in coin.^[17] The electronic uprights of 1955 to 1964 from Games Inc, Keeney, Bally and Auto-Bell Novelty Company, such as Keeney’s Big Tent and Games Inc’s Wild Cat, paid in credits, with cash-payout versions such as Barracuda built for the UK.^[18][2][8]