Pins

The “pin” in pinball is the game’s oldest feature: a small metal post standing up out of the Playfields for the ball to strike and glance off. It does nothing on its own — no switch, no coil, no moving part — and scores nothing when hit. Its whole job is to change where the ball goes, and a field of them turns a straight roll down the slope into an unpredictable scatter.

Origins

On the French billiards tables that Bagatelle descends from, the pins began as skittles at the far end for the player to knock over, but “pins took too long to reset when knocked down, so they were eventually fixed to the table, and holes in the table’s bed became the targets”.^[1] Fixing them in place inverted the game: the pins stopped being what a player aimed at and became what stood in the way. The eighteenth-century variant Billard japonais “used thin metal pins and replaced the cue at the player’s end of the table with a coiled spring and a plunger”,^[2] which is a pin game in everything but name, and by the time Montague Redgrave was building bagatelles in Cincinnati in the 1870s “the balls became marbles and the wickets became small metal pins”.^[3]

The machines of the early 1930s ran on nothing else. After the plunger, the ball “simply proceeded down the playfield, directed by static nails (or ‘pins’) to one of several scoring areas. These pins gave the game its name.”^[4] Every Flipperless machine works this way still, and so does the Countertop trade of the same era, where a penny bought five balls and the pin field decided all five.

What became of them

Modern machines more often have Stationary Posts than pins. Strictly speaking, a pin is a bare nail or peg driven into the wood,^[4] whereas a post is a rubber-sleeved or plastic anchor used to bounce the ball around, guide balls into lanes, and hold up playfield plastics. However, many players use the words interchangeably.