Center Up-Posts

A center up-post is a post that rises out of the playfield between the flippers on command from the game, closing the gap a ball would otherwise fall through and dropping flush again afterwards.^[1] It is usually a round translucent column with a bulb inside, lit when raised so the player can see the save is live;^[2] a ball that meets it stops, rolls along its edge and comes to rest against one flipper or the other.^[3] The trade also calls it a magic post or a recovery post.^[1]

Origins

The idea is older than the post. Gottlieb and Chicago Coin fitted a V-shaped metal blade between the flippers on machines of 1950 and 1951 — Gottlieb called it a blocking gate, or a safety gate — which rose to close the flipper gap and steer the ball to one flipper or the other, and the round plastic up-post descended from it.^[4][5] Thing (1951, Chicago Coin) is one of the machines that carried the blade.^[6] The up-post proper first appeared on Playboy (1967, Rally),^[7] after which Williams, Bally and Chicago Coin all fitted one between the flippers across their late-1960s and early-1970s lines, with makers in Japan and Spain taking it up in the same years.

What raises it

Whether the game or the player commands the post varies from machine to machine. On Big Guns (1987, Williams) the game raises it for the duration of a jackpot mode, holding the Left Outlane Kickbacks live and diverting the right outlane back to the flipper at the same time.^[8] On Harley-Davidson (3rd Edition) (2002, Stern) both have a say — the machine and the player each command the post.^[9]

The UK All-Skill system

The post’s largest deliberate use was legal rather than sporting. British law long treated pinball as a game of chance rather than skill, which put it under the same licensing and tax regime as slot machines, since the free game a player could win carried the cash value of a play.^[10] The answer the trade devised was the UK All-Skill system: two extra up-posts at the top of the outlanes and a large centre up-post between the flippers, all three worked by a second pair of flipper buttons on the cabinet sides.^[11][12] The reasoning was that a player who always had a physical means of stopping the ball could only lose it by reacting too slowly, which made the game one of skill.^[13] The posts stayed up for about half a second and could be fired again as soon as they fell.^[14]

The system first appeared on The X Files (1997, Sega) and ran through Sega’s line and then Stern’s as far as The Sopranos (2005).^[15] It was never universally welcome: many operators simply switched the posts off on location.^[16] What ended it was hardware and then law — from Nascar (2005) Stern’s new siderail design left no room for the extra buttons,^[17] and the Gambling Act 2005, in force from September 2007, settled that a free game is not a prize and took pinball out of gaming-machine licensing altogether.^[18]