Rolldown

A rolldown is a pinball game with the plunger deleted: the machine dispenses each ball to a cup and the player rolls it onto the playfield by hand, over rollover buttons and into scoring pockets.^[1][2] The form sat close enough to standard pinball that makers built some designs both ways at once — a standard cabinet with a ball shooter alongside a rolldown console of the same game^[3] — and operators converted machines from one to the other, blocking the shooter lane and setting a ball cup where the spring-loaded shooter had been.^[4]

Genco and the postwar rush

The form belonged to Genco before anyone else. Genco was well known for its rolldowns, a line running back to wartime baseball games like Play Ball (1942),^[5] which distributors of the day advertised as roll down games.^[6][7] When production resumed after the war, Genco led with the format again: Total Roll entered production in October 1945 and ran to 4,518 units,^[8] ahead of the firm’s first conventional postwar pinball.^[9] Within two years the trade had piled in — Bally’s Hy-Roll banked a carry-over “Super-Score” from game to game,^[10] Chicago Coin named its entry simply Roll Down^[11] — and the fad reached past Chicago entirely: Firestone Enterprises, Inc. of Brooklyn was advertising its Tally Roll by the summer of 1946.^[12][13]

Collision with the flipper

Then pinball changed underneath it. Electrically operated Flippers arrived with Gottlieb’s Humpty Dumpty at the end of 1947,^[14] and by the close of that year every maker had a flipper game built or underway.^[15] The two forms crossed inside the same cabinets: Bally’s first flipper game, Melody, arrived with a rolldown twin, Melody Roll;^[16] Keeney’s first, Cover Girl, was offered in rolldown and standard versions simultaneously;^[3] United’s first, Wisconsin, survives in examples operators converted between the two forms.^[17] The collapse is plain in the production numbers: Chicago Coin’s Roll Down of November 1947 ran to 350 units,^[11] and Genco’s Bubbles (Rolldown) of early 1948 to 245, built in three weeks.^[18]

Into the arcade

The format outlived the fad in the arcade. Williams’s Jolly Joker carried it into 1955, and Genco returned in 1957 with a pair of rolldowns built on gambling arithmetic — Number Roll playing at blackjack,^[19] and Lucky 7 at dice, its nudge buttons letting a practiced player steer the ball into the chosen hole.^[20][21]