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Topic starts at 10:03

 

Episode Summary:

A Brief History of Pinball is a great place to begin! Let’s wind the clock back WAYYY back. We’re going to visit the beginning of many ‘games’ in the early days of fancy pants Europe, the importation of table games to America, New Jersey’s part in all this, Harry Williams, Wayne Neyens, and all those innovations that make pinball, pinball!

  Games:

Baffle Ball, Ballyhoo, Contact, Skyscraper, World’s Series, Rockelite, Humpty Dumpty, Triple Action, Saratoga, Army Navy, SuperJumbo, Balls-a-Poppin’, Vegabond, Swing-Along, The Spirit of ’76, Flash, Gorgar, Checkpoint, Revenge from Mars, and Wizard of Oz.  

Sources:

Bagatelle. Here

Pinball. Here

ThoughtCo. The History of Pinball. Here

Baldridge, Nick. This Week In Pinball. A Beginner’s Guide to Bingo Pinball. Here

Pinball News. Illuminating. Here

Remembering Harry Williams. Here

Shalhoub, Michael (2004). The Pinball compendium: 1982 to Present. Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.

Kocurek, Carly A. “Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video

Game Arcade.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 

Sharpe, Roger. “Pinball!” New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977. 

Sullivan, Barbara. “Ballyhoo Over Goldberg Hardly Whole Bally Saga.” Chicago Tribune, June 17, 1996. 

Sweeney, Melodie. “The bagatelle wizard instead of the pinball wizard.” National Museum of American History, October 31, 2012. 

Terry, Clifford. “How the Pinball Machine Got Those Flippers.” Chicago Tribune, August 8, 1993. 

Wolf, Mark J. P. “The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to Playstation and Beyond.” Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2008.