Northwest Coin Machine Company
Overview
Northwest Coin Machine Company was a Chicago manufacturer active chiefly in 1931 and 1932, when pinball was still finding its commercial form. Its seven known titles are all Pure Mechanical and include compact novelty pieces such as Stop and Sock, Fan-Tan, Skippy, and Spoofus, alongside the paired Hi-Lo (Junior) and Hi-Lo (Senior), which show the company working in both countertop and larger pin-table formats.
The surviving record suggests a firm very much embedded in the rough-and-ready competitive culture of early Depression-era pinball. Northwest’s games borrowed freely from popular ideas of the day, and the company’s Goofus was reportedly retitled Spoofus after legal pressure connected to Bally. Its history therefore illustrates an essential fact about the 1932 market: small Chicago makers were moving quickly, imitating one another freely, and improvising around legal as well as commercial pressures as the new industry took shape.