The
pachinko machine has some interesting precursors. The
bagatelle was a popular pastime in France and England starting around 1819. In fact it was so popular in the 19th century, that an 1864 political cartoon by Currier and Ives shows Abraham Lincoln playing bagatelle with General McClellan satirizing the presidential election of that year.
There are even earlier versions such as the
Galton Box, invented by
Sir Francis Galton to demonstrate a mathematical theorem, but that’s another story.
At some time, billiards, bagatelle and pinball diverged to create completely different games
Pachinko remained closer to the spirit of bagatelle and those popular 19th century shooter games that used pins to deflect the ball. By the late 1920s the first pachinko machines appeared in
Nagoya and spread out from there. All of Japan's pachinko parlors were closed down during World War II but re-emerged in the late 1940s. Pachinko has remained popular since; the first commercial parlor was opened in Nagoya in 1948 establishments, spreading to
Ginza and far beyond.
From the 1930s until the early 1980s, pachinko machines were mechanical devices, using bells to indicate different states of the machine. Electricity, if available, was used only to flash lights and to indicate problems, such as a machine emptied of its balls. Polished steel balls were launched using a flipper; their speed was controlled by pulling the flipper down to different levels. The balls are then shot into the machine from a ball tray with the purpose of attempting to win more balls. When shot, the balls drop through an array of pins; some of them will fall into the center gate and start up the slot machine in the center screen. Every ball that goes into the center gate results in one spin of the slot machine, but there is a limit on the number of spins at one time because of the possibility of balls passing through the center gate while a spin is still in progress. Each spin pays out a small number of balls, but the objective is to hit the jackpot. Older pachinko machines had a spring-loaded lever for shooting the balls individually, but newer ones use a round knob that controls the strength of an electrically fired plunger that shoots the balls onto the playing field.
Most of these machines available today date to the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, pachinko machines began to incorporate more and more electrical features rather than being mechanical. When in Ocean Springs stop by and see one of our recently acquired vintage Pachinko machines that we have for sale!
