Vertical Playfields

A vertical playfield is a playing surface that stands upright behind the glass instead of sloping away from the player. The ball is fired to the top and falls back down through pins, gates and pockets under gravity, so where it finishes owes more to the arrangement of the pin field than to anything the player does after the shot.

Turning a Playfields on its end changes what skill can reach. On an inclined surface the ball rolls its length and a flipper at the bottom gets a moment to meet it; on a vertical one it drops the face and arrives fast. Many of these machines are Flipperless for that reason, and those that answer the problem often answer it with something other than a flipper — Melchers Automatenbau KG’s Flik Flak has “no flippers in the traditional sense, but each of the two springs that form the bottom edge of the playfield has a kicker post below it”,^[1] so the player times a kick at a resting ball rather than swinging a bat at a rolling one.

On machines of every size

Standing the surface up says nothing about how big the machine is or where it sits. Gottlieb’s Chuck-O-Luck (1932) is fourteen inches tall and lives on a bar, small enough that some references leave it out because “it’s small and vertical, resembling a pachinko game more than a traditional pinball machine”.^[2] Williams put the same idea on a full-sized floor machine with Still Crazy half a century later. American Amusement Company sold both at once: Bat-A-Ball was “a floor-standing upright game” whose “counter game version is American Amusement’s 1946 ‘Junior League Bat-A-Ball’”,^[3] the surface vertical in each.

Nor does a tall machine imply one. Aisch & Melchers KG’s Euromat hangs on a wall in an Upright body, and “the playfield is sloped towards the player”^[4] exactly as it would be on legs.

Pachinko is the format at scale

The vertical pin field found its mass audience in Japan rather than in the West. A pachinko machine “resembles a vertical pinball machine, but is different from Western pinball in several ways”,^[5] and plays much the way these games do: “the balls fall vertically through an array of pins, levers, cups, traps and obstacles until they enter a payoff target or reach the bottom of the playfield”.^[6] Western makers reached the same layout repeatedly and independently, from the coin-operated Bagatelle of Pickwick onwards, without ever building an industry on it.