Flipperless

A flipperless machine is a pin game with no player-operated Flippers. The ball is launched with a plunger, and from there gravity, the pins and the Bumpers decide where it goes, so a play ends wherever the ball settles rather than in how long the player can keep it alive.

Origins

Pinball began flipperless. Historians date the game to Montague Redgrave’s bagatelle patent of 1871, which already had the spring plunger firing a ball into an inclined field of obstacles - and nothing the player could do once it was moving.^[1]

The earliest flippers were purely mechanical. Double-Shuffle (1932, Ad-Lee) carried eight of them, and baseball machines commonly gave the player a bat to swing by hand.^[2]

The electrically operated flipper reached production in 1947, on Gottlieb’s Humpty Dumpty.^[3] It carried three pairs of them climbing the playfield, a long way from the single pair at the bottom that later became ordinary.^[4]

Chance, skill and the law

The lack of flippers carries legal weight across the world. Almost everywhere, gaming law turns on whether a game is one of skill or chance. Flipperless machines have no obvious claim to skill, which places them alongside gambling equipment.^[5]

The German word for a pinball machine carries that distinction outright, naming it a machine of skill that offers no cash prize.^[6]

Most countries answered by licensing the payout machine into a category of its own rather than outlawing it. Spain separates purely recreational machines from those programmed to pay a cash prize.^[7] Japan arrived at a similar accommodation by a stranger route: cash gambling is illegal there, and pachinko, a flipperless vertical pin field, survives through an exchange of prizes for cash off the premises.^[8]

The United States of America took the harder course. For much of the twentieth century pinball there was not licensed into any category but simply illegal across much of the country.^[9]

The flipperless formats

Several formats are flipperless by definition rather than by omission. Bagatelle, the ancestor of the whole medium, gives the player the launch and nothing after it. Rolldown takes away even the plunger: the machine hands a ball to the player, who rolls it onto the playfield by hand.

The gambling formats are bare for a reason of their own, since a wager on where the ball lands is only spoiled by a player who can aim. One-Ball was legislated out of the trade by about 1951, and Bingo Pinball was built expressly to replace it; bingo playfields stayed flipperless for decades afterwards. Operators fitted flippers to them anyway, cutting into the playfield and often using impulse flippers that cannot be held up, so a machine could read as skill without handing the player much control.^[10] What an operator did afterwards does not change the machine, which keeps the description it left the factory with.^[11]

Not every machine lacking a pair of flippers belongs here. Pitch and Bat hands the player a bat to swing, which is player control under another name.