One-Ball

A one-ball was a type of pinball game common in the 1930s and 1940s that gave players only a single ball per coin to win credits, payouts, or replays, often styled around horse or dog racing themes.

Origins

The type descends from pinball’s first split. Rocket (1933, Bally) was the first automatic payout machine,^[1] and pin game design promptly divided into gambling “payouts” and “novelty” amusement games, the payout games that offered a single ball per game becoming known in the trade as “one-balls”.^[2] The games were often named for famous racehorses, racetracks and other racing terms — Blue Grass and Turf King among them — and their massive cabinets typically reached the floor rather than standing on legs.^[3]

Built to draw coins

Everything in the design worked to draw another coin. A later one-ball lit its selections at random with each coin inserted — the next coin might light one more number or all of them^[4] — and on the machines the trade called “one-ball multiples” the payoff was multiplied by up to four as the coins went in.^[5] With the pair Lexington and Citation (1948), Bally introduced “Guaranteed Advancing Odds”: an additional coin could raise the odds or leave them unchanged but never lower them, and players responded by inserting more.^[6] Machines shipped as near-identical twins — Bally marked the war’s end with Victory Derby, which paid out directly in coins, and Victory Special, which registered its awards as replays^[7][8] — and “Special” in a name ordinarily signified the free-play model.^[9] The replay versions were gambling machines all the same: the location owner paid winners cash for their accumulated free games and cleared them with a concealed knock-off button.^[10]

The trade

The Second World War halted pinball production, the factories turning to war work,^[11] and the payout field never refilled. Bally returned to it nearly alone^[12] — the Victory pair were its first new games after the war^[7] — while Gottlieb made its last payout game, New Daily-Races, in 1947.^[13][14] Keeney built a few more, and late in the era Universal Industries, Inc. (Chicago) A subsidiary of United Manufacturing Co., a firm set up under United to build console slots and one-balls, made some notably sophisticated horse-race machines.^[15]

Outlawed and replaced

The end came by name. Anti-gambling ordinances took to naming “one-ball games” as an outlawed type,^[16] and Bally watched a market it practically owned dry up under legislation aimed at its product.^[17] Its hedge was the “Skill Lane”, a factory option that nominally turned a one-ball into a five-ball game for jurisdictions that had banned the type.^[18][19] The federal Johnson Act of 1950 then banned interstate shipment of gambling devices except into states where they were legal,^[20] and the one-ball was virtually outlawed by 1951.^[21] The industry’s replacement arrived that same year: a pin game playing five balls and scoring by lighting numbers in a pattern, sold by Bally first as Bright Lights — the beginning of the Bingo Pinball line, created expressly to take the one-ball’s place.^[22][23][24] Amusement Pinball went the other way: the Flippers introduced at the end of 1947^[25] gave it a claim of skill to argue in court — a defense the one-ball never had.^[26]