The game bagatelle is invented when people adapt tabletop versions of bowling and billiards into a game with fixed pins where holes in the board are fixed targets.
c. 1750: Japanese billiards, or "billard japonais", is invented in France, with the first known instance of a spring loaded plunger, which is still frequently used today.
1869: The spring launcher is patented in the USA by Montague Redgrave. His other innovations that moved bagatelle toward modern pinball include the use of bells in the game.
1931: D. Gottlieb & Co., founded by David Gottlieb in 1927, releases Baffle Ball, the first coin operated pin ball game. It gave players 5 or 7 balls for 1 cent, and became a smash hit as cheap Great Depression entertainment, selling over 50,000 copies. It is considered the first true American pinball game.
1932: Raymond Moloney, a distributor for Gottlieb, founded his own company out of frustration that he couldn't get more supply of Baffle Ball to sell. His company was Lion Manufacturing, and the game he designed and released was Ballyhoo, named after a popular magazine at the time. It sold just as well as Baffle Ball, and Lion Manufacturing was soon renamed Bally.
1933: Pacific Amusements releases Contact, the first game to use a solenoid to kick the ball out of a bonus hole or ring a ball. This was the first use of electricity in a coin operated pin game. Contact was designed by Harry Williams, who would design games for various companies and eventually his own company over the next half century.
1935: After a boom following the success of Baffle Ball and Ballyhoo, only about a dozen pinball manufacturers are left, out of the 100+ that were in existence in 1932. Even fewer of those dozen will survive the Great Depression.
1941: The USA enters World War II. Most pinball manufacturers cease production of pinball and donate the materials to the war effort; remaining games are generally re-themed in patriotic ways.
Early 1940s: Fiorello LaGuardia bans pinball in New York City as part of a movement against organized crime. He declared that pinball games were gambling machines and raided establishments around the city, smashing the games with hammers and throwing the pieces in the Hudson River.
1944: Harry Williams founds Williams Manufacturing as a new pinball company. They begin a rise to prominence after World War II ends.
1947: Gottlieb releases Humpty Dumpty, the first game with flippers. There are three sets of the "player operated flipper bumpers", which point toward the sides of the table, and they are weak enough that it requires using all three sets to get to the top of the table again.
1948: Genco releases Triple Action, the first game to include just two flippers at the bottom of the playfield, though they still face outward.
1950: Gottlieb releases Just 21 and Spot Bowler, and Williams releases Lucky Inning. These three tables together are among the first to include two inward facing flippers at the bottom of the playfield, a now familiar design.
1953: Williams releases Army Navy, the first game ever to track a player's score with an individual odometer-style score reel for each digit, rather than a single reel for the entire score or a series of lights that would illuminate behind numbers to show the score.
1954: Gottlieb releases Super Jumbo, which is their first game with score reels in the style of Army Navy as well as the first game with flippers to support multiple players.
1956: Bally releases Balls-a-Poppin', the first game to give multiball as a reward. Previous games only had "multiball" if a player intentionally loaded multiple balls to the plunger at a time.
1960: Gottlieb releases Flipper, the first of their "wedge head" games, so named because of the trapezoidal shapes of their backboxes. This line of single player EM games helps push Gottlieb to the front of the pack in the 1960s and well into the 1970s.
1965: Gottlieb releases Kings and Queens, a game which would go on to receive international attention in 1975 thanks to its feature in the movie Tommy. Tommy was a movie about a psychosomatically blind, deaf, and mute boy who became a master pinball player that could play by smell and feel; the movie itself was based on an album of the same name by British rock band The Who, and helped coin the phrase "pinball wizard".
1965: Gottlieb releases the replay Bank-a-Ball and its add-a-ball cousin Flipper Pool, the first games to feature "flipper return lanes" now known as in lanes. The Italian bottom was born, and the out lane/in lane/slingshot setup with one flipper on each side would eventually become the norm in the 1970s and 1980s.
1966: Bally releases Bazaar, the first game with zipper flippers, which are a special type of flippers that can be rotated and moved inward to "zip" together and block off a center drain.
1969: Bally releases Bally Hoo, the first game to exclusively feature 3-inch "jumbo" flippers, which have since become standard in pinball.
1969: Bally acquires Midway Manufacturing, an amusement and carnival game manufacturer. Midway would enter the arcade video game scene with Space Invaders in 1978 and would be formally merged with Bally's pinball division later on.
1970: Gottlieb releases Snow Derby, the first game to include an end-of-ball bonus awarded to players after their turn ends.
1971: INDER of Madrid, Spain releases Hearts Gain, their first game. INDER would go on to become one of the largest and longest running pinball manufacturers outside of the United States.
1974: Bally designs a solid state prototype of their game Flicker. While a solid state version of this game was never released to the public, it is still widely believed to be the first working pinball game ever made that uses microprocessors.
1974: Zaccaria is founded in Bologna, Italy, releasing their first game, Strike. They will go on to become the premier pinball company in Europe for much of the 1970s and 80s.
1975: Allied Games releases Rock On and Mirco Games releases The Spirit of 76, believed to be the first two solid state games to reach production. Neither sold particularly well, but the solid state era was officially underway. These early solid state games had electronic scoring and processing, but still used electromechanical chimes.
May 1976: A young pinball enthusiast and writer for Gentleman's Quarterly magazine named Roger Sharpe testified in front of city council in Manhattan that pinball was a game of skill, not chance. Two machines were brought to the courtroom, a main and a backup, but the council demanded that Sharpe use the backup in case the first machine had been tampered with. The backup, and the one he did his demonstration on, was Gottlieb's Sure Shot. He predicted to the council that his plunge would end up in the middle lane out of the top set of 5, and then executed exactly as he predicted. The council unanimously overturned the ban on pinball for New York City, and many other cities followed suit. The events of this day were adapted into the 2021 documentary "Pinball: The Man Who Saved The Game".
October 1976: Bally becomes the first major pinball manufacturer to enter the solid state era with the non-commercial home game Fireball. Their first commercial solid state game would be Freedom, released in December.
November 1976: Atari joins the pinball industry and releases their first game, The Atarians. In addition to being known as a very early solid state game that put all player scores and info on the apron, The Atarians was also the first widebody solid state machine, the first game with solid state sounds instead of bells or chimes, and the first game to use under-playfield magnetic induction sensors to track the ball instead of standard rollover switches or buttons.
Late 1976: Gottlieb is bought out by Columbia Pictures, retaining the Gottlieb name. This sharing of rights will eventually allow Gottlieb to make pinball games based on popular contemporary media, such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Charlie's Angels, and The Incredible Hulk.
1977: Sam Stern, a previous part owner of Williams, and his son Gary purchase the assets of failing pinball veteran Chicago Coin, forming Stern Electronics. Their first game is a 2-player EM called Disco in June, followed by a game simply called Pinball that saw both electromechanical and solid state releases.
September 1977: Williams enters the solid state era with their game Hot Tip.
September 1977: Bally releases Eight Ball, the first game from a major manufacturer to be solid-state exclusive and not feature any electromechanical version. Eight Ball would go on to sell 20,230 units, a record for flipper pinball that would stand for more than fifteen years.
December 1977: Gottlieb releases Cleopatra, their first solid state game, but they will continue to focus primarily on electromechanical pinball for the next year-plus. Gottlieb chose to prioritize the opinion of operators who did not want pinball to start looking and sounding like video games over the opinion of players who were excited by all the new things solid state machines could offer.
1978: Atari releases Video Pinball, the first arcade game with simulated physics and the first ever virtual recreation of pinball.
June 1978: Williams releases Disco Fever, the first game with curved "banana" flippers instead of the conventional flipper bats. Their original purpose was to appear and be in-theme on a scrapped 1977 pinball game about the sport of jai alai, where players use curved hooks to throw and catch balls. Williams had already bought and obtained the supply when that game was scrapped, so they forced banana flippers onto Disco Fever and 1979's Time Warp to use the supply, even though those games were not designed with the curved flippers in mind.
October 1978: Williams releases Flash, the first game with constant background sound during gameplay and the first game with purely decorative flashing lights.
March 1979: Gottlieb releases Solar Ride, T.K.O., and Space Walk, their last three electromechanical games. None of the three sold more than 400 units. They would be the final purely electromechanical games released by any major American manufacturer.
May 1979: Atari releases Hercules, their final game to reach full production and the physically largest pinball ever invented. It is over 3 feet wide, 8 feet deep, and 7 feet tall, with pinballs the size of pool balls. It didn't sell well and didn't make nearly enough income to offset the production costs, so the new format was never really seen again.
December 1979: Williams releases Gorgar, the first game to feature synthesized speech. The title monster Gorgar can form rudimentary sentences by rearranging seven words. Bally and Williams had previously experimented with speech in prototypes of Kiss and Disco Fever respectively, but the feature did not make it to market until Gorgar.
January 1980: Stern Electronics releases Galaxy, the first pinball with computer-controlled general illumination, which allowed for much more extreme and attractive light shows.
February 1980: Williams releases Firepower, the first solid state game with a multiball feature and the first game of any kind with Lane Change, allowing players to change which features are lit with the flipper buttons to make it easier to light all of them.
November 1980: Williams releases Black Knight. In addition to being the first solid state game with a multi-level playfield, Black Knight also introduced the concepts of magna-save and bonus balls.
November 1980: Bally releases Xenon, the first game to include speech recorded by a woman.
December 1980: Gottlieb releases Asteroid Annie and the Aliens, the final pinball game from a major American manufacturer to be single player only.
October 1981: Gottlieb releases Black Hole, the first game with a manufacturer recommendation of 50 cents per play.
February 1982: Stern Electronics releases Orbitor-1. This is a very odd game with many magnets under the playfield and an uneven playfield shape designed to recall the craters of a moon or alien planet. It is looked back on only as a novelty, and a very difficult-to-play game. Orbitor-1 was the final game from Stern Electronics to reach full production; they designed several video games and pinball prototypes over the ensuing months before the company ultimately failed in 1984.
September 1982: Gottlieb releases Caveman, a pinball game with a television screen mounted into the playfield that is considered to be the first game ever to feature a video mode.
Late 1982: Bally formally consolidates Midway into their pinball division, forming Bally Midway. This was done to protect their assets against the looming video game crash of 1983, while also making it easier to incorporate more high-powered electronics into pinball, including some early video modes. The first game released by the new Bally Midway was Grand Slam in March 1983.
1983: The Coca-Cola Company acquires Columbia Pictures and renames the Gottlieb pinball division to Mylstar. After no fewer than half a dozen games that did not survive the prototype or planning phases, the first Mylstar game to reach full production is Rack 'Em Up! in November 1983.
January 1983: Bally releases BMX, the first game with flex-save lanes. These are lanes at the bottom of the playfield that are originally out lanes, but can be turned into in lanes if a player presses a second button on each side of the cabinet with good timing. This feature was only used on two other tables: Dungeons & Dragons and Hardbody, both from 1987.
September-October 1984: Columbia Pictures closes down Mylstar Games. A new management group called Premier Technology purchased the assets and revived the company as Premier Gottlieb, a name they would use for the next decade-plus. The first game released by Premier Gottlieb was El Dorado: City of Gold in September 1984.
December 1984: As their first and only commercially produced pinball game, Wico Corporation releases Af-Tor, the first game from any manufacturer to use alphanumeric displays capable of showing letters and words in addition to scores.
May 1985: Premier Gottlieb releases Chicago Cubs Triple Play, the second alphanumeric game from any manufacturer and the first to include the now-iconic ability for highest scoring players to enter their initials alongside their scores.
June 1985: Williams releases Comet, their last pre-alphanumeric game, which was heavily marketed as being the first pinball game ever that allows players to score 1,000,000 points with a single shot. This is a landmark moment in score inflation, which has also seen pinball score displays grow from 3 digits in the early 1960s, to 5 digits by the early 1970s, to 7 digits in 1980 in an attempt to make new games feel bigger and grander than older ones. The Million Point Shot on Comet requires completing a series of events at a specific time, but with the incoming invention of the jackpot, earning a million points at a time would become easier and easier.
1986: With the remains of the assets from Stern Electronics and the funding and naming rights of Data East Japan, Gary Stern re-enters the pinball industry by founding Data East Pinball. The modern Stern Pinball considers this event to be the establishment of the current iteration of their company, but a ship-of-Theseus argument can be made that their roots extend all the way back through the Stern Electronics era and back to the founding of Chicago Coin in 1932.
January 1986: Williams, who is now formally known as WMS Industries but still uses the marketing name Williams, releases High Speed. High Speed is Williams' first alphanumeric pinball, as well as the first game by anyone with a multiball-exclusive jackpot, a progressive carryover jackpot, compensation programming for broken switches, auto-percentaging for flexing replay scores, operator reports, and the ability to play a complete song during gameplay. High Speed sold over 17,000 copies, and the sound and light show very much revitalized the pinball industry for the second half of the 1980s.
March 1987: Williams releases F-14 Tomcat, the first game with a ball save feature, allowing players to continue their turn if they drain the ball very quickly or if the Yagov Kicker in the left side of the playfield inadvertently fires the ball directly between the flippers.
May 1987: Data East releases Laser War, their first game and the first game by any manufacturer to use stereo sound. "Digital Stereo" would become a major marketing point in most of Data East's games up through the invention of the dot-matrix display.
July-August 1987: Zaccaria releases Star's Phoenix and New Star's Phoenix, their only multiball games and their final production games at all. Zaccaria's exit from the industry means only INDER from Spain is left as a major European pinball manufacturer. Zaccaria would briefly re-emerge in 1989 as Mr Game releasing a combination video game/pinball called Motor Show, but to very little success.
May 1988: Williams releases Banzai Run, a game made famous by having a second, entirely vertical playfield in the back of the game. It was the first game designed by Pat Lawlor, who would become one of the premier and highest-selling pinball designers of the 1990s.
Mid 1988: Bally sells their amusement games divisions, including the Bally Midway pinball division, to WMS Industries, forming what is now commonly known as Bally Williams. The Bally and Williams names will be used alternately on pinball games, while the Midway name is used for future arcade and video games such as Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam. The first pinball released after the Bally Williams merger was Truck Stop in November 1988.
February 1991: Data East releases Checkpoint, the first game with a dot-matrix display of any kind. It is 128x16 pixels, half the height of the now-conventional DMD, but it can still display player scores, fonts, and basic animations. This was revolutionary, and pinball manufacturers of all sizes would pivot to DMDs across 1991 and 1992. The DMD was intended to debut with Data East's previous game, The Simpsons from September 1990, but it was delayed by one game out of concerns that the technology was not ready yet and that the company might fail if incomplete or faulty technology was attached to a game with such a popular licensed theme as The Simpsons.
February 1991: Williams releases The Machine: Bride of PinBot, which breaks new score inflation boundaries by offering the Billionaires Club, a single shot worth 1,000,000,000 points. While for now it is largely a novelty that can be easily disabled and forces players onto a separate high score board, the billion point shot would also become mainstream as score inflation reaches a fever pitch.
May 1991: Bally Williams releases Gilligan's Island, their first game with a dot-matrix display. The first Bally Williams game designed with a DMD was Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but a longer development cycle and desire to release that game alongside the film meant that Gilligan's Island preceded it by two months. Both games uses a display with the now-standard resolution of 128x32 pixels.
Late 1991: Alvin G. & Co. is founded by Michael Gottlieb in an attempt to get the Gottlieb family back into the pinball industry after his grandfather David sold the family company off in the late 1970s. Their first game is a two-player head-to-head game called A.G. Soccer-Ball, a pinball where two players stand on opposite ends of the table and flip the ball at each other. Their first conventional pinball, Al's Garage Band Goes On a World Tour, would come out in December 1992.
March 1992: Bally Williams releases The Addams Family, designed by Pat Lawlor, which becomes the best-selling flipper pinball game of all time. The original run sold 20,270 units, barely edging past Bally's Eight Ball from 1977; a 1994 celebratory re-release added another 1,000 copies. The Addams Family is known for popularizing mode-based pinball, including a computer-controlled autoflipper, and having what are widely considered to be some of the best callouts in pinball history performed by Anjelica Huston, the late Raul Julia, and the rest of the cast of the 1991 Addams Family film.
October 1992: Bally Williams releases Fish Tales, the first game with lightning flippers. These flippers have a lightning bolt design on them and are 1/8 inch shorter than a standard 3-inch flipper, being 2-7/8" long. The request for smaller flippers was made by European operators who felt that ball times on recent pinball games had been getting too long. Lightning flippers were largely disliked by American audiences due to the added likelihood of center drains and the fact that shot locations were not designed with the shorter flippers in mind. By 1994, Bally Williams was back to putting 3-inch flippers ine very machine. Lightning flippers live on today, both in preservations of the games they came in and as a popular modification for tables that did not originally have them to make those games harder and shorter for tournament play.
1993: INDER releases their final game, Bushido, after over 20 years in the industry, marking the end of the last large European pinball manufacturer. Interestingly, Bushido was INDER's only game to feature a dot matrix display.
November 1993: Alvin G. & Co. releases their final game, Pistol Poker. They shut down in 1994 having released only 6 unique games, none of which sold more than 1,000 copies.
September 1994: Data East releases Maverick: The Movie, their final game. Maverick was the first game to include a mega dot matrix display with resolution of 192x64 instead of the typical 128x32. Data East sold their pinball division to Sega during development of this game, and Sega took over production halfway through.
October 1995: Noted video game team Capcom opens Capcom Coin-Op, a pinball division, with the release of their first game, Pinball Magic.
1996: Score inflation reaches its peak. Bally Williams games like Johnny Mnemonic, JackBot, and Attack from Mars as well as Sega games like Batman Forever and Goldeneye become infamous for handing out hundreds of millions or even billions of points at any opportunity. By the end of 1996, most pinball companies will cut down their scores by two or three orders of magnitude so players can calculate score more easily and programmers can save processing power or DMD space. Williams specifically went from a default replay score of 3,800,000,000 on JackBot to a default replay of 8,000,000 on Tales of the Arabian Nights barely half a year later.
Score inflation does still exist in the 21st century, but to a much lesser extent; rather than simply being based on the year of their release, differences in scoring on pinball games of the last decade or so tend to be due to one of the following four reasons.
August 1996: Premier Gottlieb closes its doors. Their final game, Barb Wire, was released in April; a Brooks & Dunn table was in development when the company folded, with a completed playfield, mostly complete plastics orders, and only somewhat complete software.
December 1996: After 4 production games and 2 limited run prototypes, Capcom shuts down their Coin-Op division after just over a year. The only major pinball manufacturers left are now Bally Williams and Sega. Capcom's final production game, Flipper Football, is the first game ever to have its score display located entirely under the playfield glass.
June 1997: Bally Williams, who is still going strong for now, releases Medieval Madness. While not particularly innovative in any specific ways, Medieval Madness will end up being considered as one of the best pinball games ever made due to its shot design and flow, theming, and easy-to-understand rules.
January 1999: Bally Williams releases Revenge from Mars, a direct sequel to 1995's Attack from Mars and the first game to use their new Pinball2000 platform. Pinball2000 uses reflections to display a computer generated image as a sort of hologram over the back of the playfield. The game sells well, with more copies produced of Revenge from Mars than Attack from Mars.
June 1999: Bally Williams releases Star Wars Episode I, their second Pinball2000 game but also their last pinball game. In October, WMS Industries announces their exit from the pinball industry, citing declining profits in pinball and rising profits in the slot machine industry. Two further Pinball2000 games, Playboy and Wizard Blocks, have their work abandoned with little more than whitewood playfields and very incomplete software to show.
September 1999: Sega releases Harley-Davidson, their final game (not to be confused with the Bally Williams Harley-Davidson from 1991). Shortly after the game reaches production, Gary Stern buys out Sega's stake in pinball, pulling production over to his own new company, Stern Pinball. Stern will end up having a near-monopoly on the pinball industry for the next 15 years, and they are still present and releasing games as of 2024.
2000s: Stern remains the only major pinball company for the entire decade, focusing on tables with popular contemporary licenses including Austin Powers, The Lord of the Rings, Nascar, Family Guy, and Wheel of Fortune. The Great Recession of 2008 leads to some layoffs and tight financial times, but the company ultimately recovers.
December 2000: Visual Pinball is initially released to the public for the first time, allowing users to create their own pinball games (and other similar types of games) for free on their computer. Over the next years and decades, dedicated groups of people will recreate hundreds of machines from all eras for virtual play.
June 2010: MarsaPlay, a new but ultimately short-lived manufacturer from Spain, releases New Canasta. It is a remake of INDER's game Canasta 86 (1986), but is notable for being the first pinball game by any company to use a full LCD screen for scorekeeping.
August-December 2010: Stern Pinball releases James Cameron's Avatar, their first game to include multiple "editions" with slightly different artwork, layouts, and features. This would evolve into the Pro/Premium/Limited Edition model structure that Stern continues to use as of 2024.
April 2013: Jersey Jack releases The Wizard of Oz, their first pinball game and the first game from an American manufacturer to use an LCD screen. Jersey Jack's incorporation ends the near-monopoly held by Stern on the pinball industry for well over a decade while simultaneously helping start a new wave of pinball companies and popularity.
March 2014: Spooky Pinball joins the scene with their first game, America's Most Haunted. They will later become known for games such as Total Nuclear Annihilation and Rick and Morty. Somewhat infamously, Spooky releases all of their games in rather limited runs to ensure steady sales and lower expenses in what can be a very volatile industry.
March 2015: Chicago Gaming Company, which was founded in 2001 but initially focused on arcade video and redemption games, releases a remake of Medieval Madness. They would go on to revive other 1990s Bally Williams hits, such as Cactus Canyon, Attack from Mars, and Monster Bash over the next six years.
December 2015: Visual Pinball X, also known as Visual Pinball 10 and abbreviated as VP10 or VPX, is released. VPX is open source and provides some of the most advanced and comprehensive physics and graphics ever seen in virtual pinball. VPX is still used and updated in 2024, with the most recent version being Visual Pinball 10.8.
December 2016: Stern releases Batman (2016), better known as Batman 66 since it uses the 1966 Batman animated series as its source material. It's their first game with an LCD screen, confirming that that will be the new norm for pinball.
2017: Multimorphic Pinball unveils their P3 platform, which consists of a "shell" table with a handful of flippers and shots in default positions as well as interchangeable "modules" that can be swapped in or out so the same table can play many different games.
June 2017: Jersey Jack releases Dialed In!, the first pinball game with Bluetooth connectivity as well as the first game to include a camera for taking pictures of players.
2021: Stern Pinball launches Insider Connected. This program allows players to sign in to any LCD Stern machine with their smartphone to earn achievements and track and compare scores.
October 2023: Brand-new company Barrels of Fun releases their first game, Jim Henson's Labyrinth.
Summer 2024: Chicago Gaming Company is scheduled to release Pulp Fiction, their first commercial pinball game to be completely original rather than a remake of a previous game.
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