California Games

California Games was a short-lived Los Angeles pinball maker active from 1934 to 1936, one of several West Coast firms — alongside California Exhibit Company, Allied Amusement Company, and Automatic Amusements Company — that proved pinball innovation in the 1930s was not exclusively a Chicago story. Its six known titles span the transition from Pure Mechanical pin tables to early Electromechanical designs.

The catalog opens with Radio Station (1934) and Rebound (1934), followed by Numbers (1935) and Olympic Pins (1935). Numbers featured sixteen trap holes and four horseshoe lanes; Marble Parade (1936) went further with thirty-two trap holes and a ball-advance unit in the upper playfield. Figure 8 (1936), recorded as an electromechanical game, stands out in a lineup otherwise rooted in the earlier mechanical era and hints at the direction the industry was heading.

California Games appeared and disappeared within three years — a common trajectory for small manufacturers during the mid-1930s boom. Its surviving catalog is modest, but it captures a West Coast pinball scene that was livelier and more inventive than its size might suggest.