-
- description
- A flipperless machine is a pin game with no player-operated [[gameplay-feature:flippers]]. The ball is launched with a plunger, and from there gravity, the pins and the [[gameplay-feature: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 [[person: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. *[[title:double-shuffle-3]]* (1932, [[manufacturer: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 [[manufacturer:gottlieb]]'s *[[title: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. [[location:spain]] separates purely recreational machines from those programmed to pay a cash prize.[7] [[location: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 [[location:usa]] 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. [[game-format:bagatelle]], the ancestor of the whole medium, gives the player the launch and nothing after it. [[game-format: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. [[game-format:one-ball]] was legislated out of the trade by about 1951, and [[game-format: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. [[game-format:pitch-and-bat]] hands the player a bat to swing, which is player control under another name.
1. Pacific Pinball Museum — https://www.pacificpinball.org/pinball-gambling Most pinball historians tie the birth of pinball with the 1871 patent for "Improvement in Bagatelle" secured by Montague Redgrave. [...] the spring-loaded plunger that launches a ball into an inclined field of obstacles
2. Internet Pinball Database (IPDB) — https://www.ipdb.org/glossary.php Archive flippers were already used on many games prior to 1947, but they were non-electrical, entirely mechanical. Some games had eight mechanical flippers, such as Ad-Lee Company's 1932 'Double-Shuffle'.
8. Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachinko Gambling for cash is illegal de jure in Japan, but the widespread popularity of low-stakes pachinko in Japanese society has enabled a specific legal loophole allowing it to exist.
-
- name
- Flipperless
- slug
- flipperless
- status
- active