- gameplay_feature
- Kickers
- gameplay_feature
- Captive Ball ×2
- ipdb.corporate_entity_name
- Pacific Amusement Manufacturing Company
- ipdb_id
- 4236
- ipdb.image_urls
- ["https://www.ipdb.org/images/4236/image-1.jpg"]
- ipdb.manufacturer_trade_name
- PAMCO
- ipdb.notable_features
- 10 balls per play. Captive balls (2), Kicker (1). The captive balls are first shot into play to land in pockets to establish the "House" score as a player objective.
- ipdb.notes
- This is one of five different games that PAMCO advertised collectively as the "Quintuplets". According to an article in the Coin Machine Journal (May 1935, pages 73-75) in which PAMCO owner Fred McClellan introduced the games in an interview, each had a miniature cabinet measuring 14 by 25 inches (ads indicate 14 3/8 by 25 1/4 inches) intended for locations where a larger cabinet would not fit. The game could be operated as a pin table, or the legs could be easily detached to make it a counter game. There was nothing mounted inside the cabinet except an "entirely new" ball lift and plunger assembly not used on previous games. All other internal mechanisms were mounted to the underside of the slide-out playfield.
"Make or Break" was identified in PAMCO advertising as the second of the five games. Their pictures of it can be seen with a thin vertical marquee mounted at the rear of the cabinet showing the words "Quintuplet No. 2" on it, while the actual name of the game appears in the upper playfield. According to the above article, however, the second game originally was to be "Heads or Tails", a title and theme which ultimately was not used, as we have not found any information or advertising for it, nor have we seen any subsequent references to it by the manufacturer.
In that article, McClellan said the original idea was to make replacement playfields for their Contact games but instead they saw demand for a complete and miniature game. The name "Quintuplets" was to capitalize on the international popularity of the Dionne quintuplets born in Canada only the year before. Just as the prematurely-born Dionne babies were displayed in incubators to an admiring public, McClellan displayed his five new "baby games" in his showrooms in what he called "a strictly modern conception of the coin machine incubator".
The other four games are:
PAMCO's 1935 'Hit or Miss'
PAMCO's 1935 'Odd or Even'
PAMCO's 1935 'Double or Nothing'
PAMCO's 1935 'Left or Right'
In an interview with pinball historian Russ Jensen on March 24, 1982, Harry Williams thought Bon MacDougall was responsible for the design of the Quintuplet games, but we have been unable to pin this down definitively.
- month
- 5
- player_count
- 1
- technology_generation
- electromechanical
- year
- 1935